Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (19 page)

What the Middletons did not see was the heavy drama being played out away from the cameras. From that moment in the early morning hours of August 31, 1997, when Sir Robert Fellowes
called Balmoral with news that Diana had died, Elizabeth II faced a crisis like none she had ever faced before—a crushing personal loss for the young princes and for untold millions around the world who loved Diana, but also a public relations calamity that quickly proved to be the monarchy’s worst nightmare.

CHARLES INSTINCTIVELY KNEW HOW DEEPLY
Diana’s death would be felt by the British people, and that the Royal Family must acknowledge the loss if it had any hope of surviving. But the Queen had other things on her mind. Her first call to the British Embassy in Paris was not to seek details about Diana’s injuries or the crash itself, but to ask if the major pieces of state jewelry Diana sometimes traveled with—tiaras, bracelets, rings, or necklaces that actually belonged to the crown—were anywhere in evidence.

Beatrice Humbert, chief nurse at Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, was standing by the bed where Diana’s body lay naked beneath a plain white sheet when the British Consul General burst into the room. “The Queen! The Queen,” he said. “Madame, the Queen is worried about the jewelry. We must find the jewelry, quickly. The Queen wants to know,
‘Where are the jewels?!’
”

“But there
isn’t
any jewelry,” replied Humbert, who was taken aback by the question. “No wedding band, of course. No rings, no necklace.” (The Queen had an encyclopedic knowledge of the jewels in the royal collection and guarded them jealously. Once, when told that the avant-garde artist Damien Hirst was using diamonds to make a jeweled skull, she smiled. “I prefer diamonds,” the Queen said, “around my neck.”)

Charles, meanwhile, had his hands full just convincing his mother to let him accompany Diana’s body home from Paris. “She is no longer a member of this family,” the Queen told him. “She gave that up when she divorced you.” It was inappropriate, she said, for the Windsors to step in at this point. “The Spencers are her family, Charles,” she said. “They should be the ones to bring Diana back.” She went so far as to say that it was not even acceptable for Charles to be at RAF Northhold to meet the plane bearing Diana’s body, much less be on it.

The Prince of Wales, a battle-scarred veteran of the media wars waged with Diana over the course of seventeen years, knew better. So did Prime Minister Tony Blair, who believed there would be an enormous public outcry if no member of the Royal Family made the trip to Paris. Charles overruled the Queen and took off with Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquedale and Lady Jane Fellowes, aboard an RAF transport with its distinctive red tail and the Union Jack emblazoned on the fuselage.

Charles spent much of the flight from London to Paris conferring with Camilla over the phone. At this point, Camilla had never officially met the Queen or, for that matter, William and Harry. Yet, in times like these, she was nothing less than a pillar of emotional support for Charles. Badly shaken by news of Diana’s death, he wept over the phone to the only woman he ever really loved. He was also weeping for what lay in store for Camilla. They both knew that, in an instant, any progress that had been made in selling Camilla to the public as a possible wife for Charles had gone up in smoke.

Only three months earlier, in late May 1997, Camilla had taken matters into her own hands. She approached Charles’s deputy
private secretary and principal media advisor, Mark Bolland, and asked for his help. Specifically, she informed Bolland that she wanted to brainstorm with Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s media spinmaster, about ways to win over the hearts and minds of the people. Over lunch at Highgrove, Charles, Camilla, Bolland, and Mandelson hammered out a top-secret scheme to make the Prince of Wales’s scorned mistress acceptable as Diana’s successor. The plan was to be called “Operation PB”—shorthand for Operation Parker Bowles.

EVEN BEFORE A CAR CRASH
in Paris changed the trajectory of British history, Camilla made it clear that she was no longer content to someday simply be the King’s mistress. Following the divorce of Charles and Diana, “Camilla started plotting to become the next queen,” Lady Bowker said. “She thought the most she could hope for was to someday be the King’s mistress, but now Diana was out of the way and Camilla wanted more.” The media summit at Highgrove kicked off what became, according to Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson, “a sustained political-style spin that hijacked Charles’s reputation to serve the needs of his true love’s ambition.”

Incredibly, less than two weeks after that critical meeting with Mark Bolland and Peter Mandelson—and only two months before Diana’s death—Camilla caused a car crash that left her injured and nearly killed another woman, then fled the scene. A notoriously fast and not necessarily cautious driver, Camilla was speeding toward Highgrove one evening when she plowed into a car driven by fifty-three-year-old interior designer Carolyn
Melville-Smith. “That car was going hellish fast,” Melville-Smith recalled. “The next thing I knew the other car was flying through the air and I was in a ditch.” Trapped inside, Melville-Smith cried for help, but to no avail.

Camilla called Prince Charles on her cellphone, then walked over to look at the other vehicle. From the road, she could make out that the car was tipped on its side and that someone was behind the wheel. Rather than doing anything to help, Camilla screamed, panicked, and ran away. The Royal Protection officers Charles dispatched to the scene found the Prince of Wales’s mistress sitting by her car at the side of the road, rocking back and forth, smoking a cigarette, and sobbing. Other passing motorists, meanwhile, stopped to help Melville-Smith and summoned police and an ambulance, which took her to a local hospital to be treated for minor scrapes and bruises. Camilla was given a breathalyzer test on the spot, which she passed, and was taken to Highgrove to be treated for a minor concussion and a badly twisted wrist. In the meantime, no one bothered to tell Melville-Smith who the other driver was.

St. James’s Palace was pleased to see the next day’s newspaper articles headlined
CAMILLA THE HEROINE
telling the story of how Mrs. Parker Bowles came upon a crash victim and pulled her to safety. Once Melville-Smith realized that the other driver was none other than Mrs. Parker Bowles, she hurried to set the record straight. Camilla was no hero, she angrily insisted. “I was trapped in my car, yelling for help, and she did not come,” Melville-Smith said. “I could have been badly hurt and she just left me there.” Authorities were still looking into the possibility of filing criminal reckless driving charges against Camilla when Diana was killed.
Out of deference to the Prince of Wales, prosecutors decided not to pursue legal action against his mistress in the immediate aftermath of the crash that took his ex-wife’s life.

ON LEARNING OF DIANA’S TRAGIC
death, Charles and Camilla could only believe that their dreams of marriage had been dashed forever. Yet the emotion of the moment—and the heartbreaking realization that William and Harry had lost the mother they loved so deeply—trumped all else. Walking into the Paris hospital room where Diana’s body had already been placed in an open coffin, Charles turned sheet-white and stumbled back, his head snapping “in one involuntary motion,” Humbert said, “as if he had actually been stricken. It was just too much to take in, too much, too much . . .” Another nurse, Jeanne Lecorcher, had always thought of all the Royals as “very cold and unfeeling, and like everyone else I knew that the Prince really loved Camilla.” She changed her mind about Charles on the spot. “I was very impressed by how emotional the Prince became.”

On the flight back to London, Charles took a call from Tony Blair, who warned the Prince that it would be a “fatal mistake” for Diana’s Spencer relatives to proceed with their original plans for a private funeral. The Princess’s funeral would have to be a national event unlike any other—the people, Blair told Charles, demanded it.

Once the Spencers agreed to a public funeral for Diana, the Prince and the Prime Minister turned their attention to convincing the one person who had the last word on the matter. Enlisting the help of Sir Robert Fellowes, Blair and Prince Charles tried
but failed to persuade the Queen that a large public funeral was in order. Anything less, they reasoned, would leave Her Majesty’s subjects feeling resentful of the monarchy.

Only monarchs were entitled to a full state funeral, although by order of the crown and a vote in Parliament this honor could be extended to someone like Winston Churchill. There was also the possibility of a private royal funeral attended only by members of the Royal Family, or perhaps a larger ceremonial funeral of the sort reserved for the heir to the throne or the consort of the monarch. Finally, Lord Airlie, who as Lord Chamberlain would handle the details of any public funeral, weighed in. He agreed with Charles and Tony Blair that what was needed was a “unique funeral for a unique person—a mixture of the traditional and modern.”

While Charles, Blair, Lord Airlie, and others grappled with the question of how best to pay tribute to Diana, the Queen and Prince Philip remained at Balmoral with their devastated grandsons. The night Diana died, William and Harry were not awakened to be told the news; the Queen felt that nothing would be gained by robbing them of these last few precious hours of sleep before their world collapsed around them. To spare them any further upset after they were told, she ordered a news blackout at Balmoral. No newspapers were to be brought inside the castle, and all television sets and radios were turned off.

Had the televisions at Balmoral been on, William and Harry would have seen one world leader after another expressing shock and sympathy. “A beacon of light has been extinguished,” declared former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. French President Jacques Chirac described Diana as “a woman of our times, warm, full of life and generosity. Her tragic death will be
deeply felt.” Vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, a solemn President Bill Clinton praised her for embracing AIDS patients and working to “end the scourge of land mines in the world.”

Standing outside the church he attended in his parliamentary district, Tony Blair struggled to maintain his composure as he talked to reporters. “I feel like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated. . . . Our thoughts and prayers are with Princess Diana’s family and in particular her two sons, the two boys. Our hearts go out to them. We are today a nation in a state of shock and in grief that is so deeply painful for us. . . . Princess Diana was the people’s Princess, and that’s how she will remain, in our hearts and in our memories forever.”

The Palace, however, felt a simple, fifteen-word statement would suffice: “
The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.”

The Queen also saw no reason to disrupt the Windsors’ summer routine at Balmoral. Just a few hours after learning their mother had been killed, the boys joined other members of the Royal Family at Crathie Church, just across the River Dee from the castle grounds. Asked earlier that morning if she wanted any change in the service to reflect what had happened, the Queen made it abundantly clear that she did not. Elizabeth was also asked if—just this once—Diana’s name might be included in the morning prayer for the Royal Family. Again, Her Majesty felt that, since Diana had been stripped of her royal status, there was no need. The entire service, then, was conducted without any mention of Diana being made. Confused, Harry turned to his father at one point and asked, “Are you sure Mummy is dead?”

Some 550 miles away in London, grief-stricken Britons demanded to know why the flag over Buckingham Palace was not
flying at half-mast when every other flag in the United Kingdom was. In keeping with royal protocol, the flag flew only when the monarch was in residence—and never at half-mast. The Queen, as with all matters, did not feel Diana’s death rose to the level of requiring any break in precedent.

If the flag over Buckingham Palace flew only when the Queen was in residence, then why
wasn’t
she there? And why, when tributes were pouring in from all over the world, had not only the Queen but the entire Royal Family remained totally silent on the subject of Diana’s death?

LET THE FLAG FLY AT HALF MAST
, insisted the
Daily Mail
. The
Mirror
pleaded
SPEAK TO US MA’AM—YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN?
The
Sun
asked,
WHERE IS HER FLAG?
Polls now showed that 66 percent of all Britons were convinced Diana’s death signaled the end of Britain’s monarchy.

“A stunning reversal has taken place,” observed constitutional expert Anthony Barrett. “The monarchy must bow its head, or it will be broken. We, the people, will henceforth define how they should represent us. . . . It’s as if the country is crying, ‘Diana is dead! Long live democracy!’ ” Agreed Harold Brooks-Baker of
Burke’s Peerage
: “They have blood on their hands. . . . Here was a victim of the monarchy. Diana died a martyr. We can only hope her death brings about another kind of palace rebellion. The House of Windsor is in desperate need of a major overhaul, and if it doesn’t get one soon, I fear for the very existence of the monarchy in Britain.”

Tony Blair, caught in “that storm, unpredictable and unnerving,” also saw a revolution in the making. “The outpouring of grief was turning into a mass movement for change,” he recalled. “It was a moment of supreme national articulation and it was
menacing for the royal family. . . . Public anger was turning towards the Queen.”

It was left to Charles, who had the full backing of the Prime Minister, to stand up to his mother. Grudgingly, she agreed to a public funeral that would turn out to be quite unlike any the world had ever seen. Charles also urged the Queen to return to London immediately, fly the flag over Buckingham Palace at half-staff, and address her people. Either that, or the Prince of Wales would take to the airwaves himself to apologize to the nation on behalf of the Royal Family.