William and Harry (10 page)

It was not long before Harry was getting himself into just that. He was known as the classroom clown and during Latin would hide behind the floor-to-ceiling curtains giggling as his teacher repeatedly called out his name on the register. At the end of the class the mischievous prince would jump out just as his exasperated teacher Mr Andrew Maynard was preparing to report him absent. But Harry always had an excuse. ‘You can’t report me. I was here for the whole lesson, sir.’ Another favourite trick involved balancing a book on the top of a door so that it fell on the beak’s head when he entered the classroom. ‘It was never a big enough book to do any damage, but it gave the beak a hell of a fright,’ one of Harry’s classmates recalled. ‘Harry would be the one snorting with laughter, but he never got caught and no one ever ratted on him as we all liked him too much. The more invincible he realised he was, the more he played up.’ But Harry’s tomfoolery came with a price, and by the end of his second year he had slipped into the bottom group for nearly every subject.

It was Diana who had once remarked, ‘Harry’s the naughty one, just like me,’ but by the summer of 2001 Harry’s schoolboy
pranks had escalated into something far more serious than classroom jinks. With Charles frequently away on business trips or tucked away at Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s cottage on the edge of the Balmoral estate, with Camilla, Harry was left to his own devices. William had left Eton and was on his gap year, leaving Harry with the run of Highgrove. At the boys’ request, Charles had agreed for the downstairs cellar to be transformed into a den for them. The cavernous hideaway, which the boys named Club H, consisted of two adjoining rooms with arched ceilings, a state-of-the-art sound system which piped music through the entire cellar, and two large cream sofas. In keeping with William and Harry’s sense of humour, a portrait of their ancestor the Duke of Windsor, King Edward VIII, who abdicated from the throne in 1936, was hung in the loo.

The boys, who had asked for the walls to be painted black in one of the rooms so they could throw their own discos, would spend hours entertaining their friends, who were known as the Glosse Posse. This group comprised the young and privileged sons and daughters of wealthy landowners and aristocrats who lived close to Highgrove. Among the regulars were Tiggy’s younger brother Harry Legge-Bourke and Luke, Mark and Emma Tomlinson, the children of Charles’s close friends Simon and Claire, who ran the Beaufort Polo club. Harry Meade, son of Olympic gold medallist horseman Richard Meade, was also one of the gang.

William knew more girls than Harry, and his friend Davina Duckworth-Chad, whose mother Elizabeth was Diana’s cousin, was part of the gang along with Natalie Hicks-Lobbecke, a former Warminster schoolgirl and the daughter of an army officer. While Natalie was linked in the press with William, it was actually a
girl called Rose Farquhar who stole his heart during the summer after he left Eton. Part of the hunting and polo fraternity, Rose was the beautiful daughter of Captain Ian Farquhar, master of the Beaufort Hunt, and she and William had known each other since they were children. Rose was a pupil at the nearby Westonbirt School in Gloucestershire and was friends with Victoria Inskip, sister of one of William’s best friends, Tom. When it came to girls, the notoriously shy prince was quite the romantic and uncharacteristically confident. He had abandoned his rather crass chat-up line, ‘I’m a prince, wanna pull?’ and instead spent the summer of the Millennium courting Rose with romantic afternoon strolls and picnics in the Gloucestershire countryside. Rumour has it that on one occasion the couple were stealing a private moment in a field when they were rudely interrupted by a farmer who stumbled across the young lovers.

‘William and Rose had a summer romance and she still refers to him as her first true love,’ recalled one of the ‘Glosse Posse’. ‘It was a long hot summer and William spent a lot of time at Highgrove and Rose was always around. She is a country girl at heart and they shared the same interests and the same friends. That summer they realised that they both actually rather liked each other and it was William who made the first move. It was a very sweet and innocent love affair and Rose still laughs about the time they got caught by a farmer in a field. They are still good friends and speak all the time.’

As a teenager Charles had had little interaction with his busy parents and he was determined to have a frank and open relation -ship with his sons. As they had no mother, he was expected to fulfil both roles and was determined to do his best. He knew
his sons needed space but insisted on a no-smoking rule at Club H and alcohol was banned. It was, however, only a matter of time before Harry was discovering all sorts of illicit pleasures in the privacy of his very own underground club. He had his first puff of a cigarette on the sports fields at Eton, but the occasional smoke then become quite a habit and Harry was smoking Marlboro reds on a regular basis by the time he was sixteen. It was an aide who discovered his secret during the weekly clean-out at Club H, but an occasional cigarette was deemed normal enough, even though Charles abhorred the habit. More worryingly, Harry was also underage drinking, and had become a regular customer at the nearby Rattlebone Inn, a sixteenth-century pub in the village of Sherston six miles from Highgrove. While Harry would not be served – he was still only sixteen – his friends would buy him pints and chasers. At closing time they would return to Club H and continue the party. When the unmistakable smell of marijuana wafted from beneath the closed door, however, Charles was alerted.

Harry had no choice but to confess to his papa that he had spent much of the summer drinking and smoking pot. When Charles was fourteen he had got drunk on cherry brandy during a sailing trip to Stornoway with four friends, but he had never tried drugs. Both he and Diana had been staunchly against them and Charles could not believe that Harry was smoking marijuana. He questioned Harry’s circle of friends and asked him, ‘Are these really the right people to be hanging around with? Are these really the right things for you to be doing at sixteen in your position?’ The truth was Harry had been taken to the Rattlebone by William, who was a regular, before he left
for his gap-year trip to Africa. Unlike Harry he was old enough to drink the pub’s potent Pheasant Plucker cider, and he had spent an afternoon with his friend Tom ‘Skippy’ Inskip and Emma Tomlinson drinking pints of snakebite, a mixture of cider and beer, which they downed while enjoying a rather un-regal burping competition.

It was only a matter of time before rumours of the illicit goings-on at the Rattlebone and Club H reached Fleet Street. Although every national newspaper had agreed shortly after Diana’s death to protect William and Harry from unnecessary media intrusion, this was a story that warranted exposure. On 13 January 2002 the
News of the World
had gathered enough evidence to run the story and splashed H
ARRY’S
D
RUG
S
HAME
across the front page. According to the report Harry had spent the previous summer drinking at the pub under the ‘watchful’ eye of his protection officers, who had been present at the all-night lock-ins. Marijuana had reportedly been smoked in the pub’s run-down outhouse and in the backroom bar, which was known as the ‘magic room’. On one occasion Harry was asked to leave after drunkenly calling the French bar manager Franck Ortet a ‘fucking frog’, which led to him being barred. ‘Sometimes Harry would get drunk and say “Hey Froggie, get me a pint” and “Come here, Froggie”,’ Mr Ortet told the
Mail on Sunday
. ‘When he was drinking in the pub some of our regulars would call him a little brat under their breaths. They thought it was wrong that there was a prince sitting in their pub drinking underage and raising his voice.’

According to aides working for Charles at the time, there were several damage-limitation meetings between St James’s Palace
and executive editors from the
News of the World
before the story ran. Mark Dyer, Charles’s former equerry and a former Welsh Guards officer who had become close to the boys, was present together with Charles’s private secretary Sir Stephen Lamport, his press adviser Colleen Harris and Mark Bolland. Together they convinced the newspaper to run ‘the least damaging story possible’, and after issuing an apology it was decided that Harry would spend a day visiting Featherstone Lodge, a drugs rehabilitation centre in Peckham, south London.

The Palace tried its hardest to bury the story but inevitably Charles’s parenting was called into question. Diana’s death was still fresh in people’s minds, and if anyone was to blame it was Charles, who, the newspapers pointed out, had been away from Highgrove for most of the summer. Harry was behaving like any other teenager, and given the tragedy of his childhood it was quite remarkable that he had not come unhinged earlier. It was not just the newspapers who were critical; according to one aide the Queen and Prince Philip were ‘in despair’ when they were informed of the story.

Fortunately Harry escaped an official police warning but the incident sent shock waves through the royal family. It was also the catalyst for the first serious rift between William and Harry, who resented the fact that he had been blamed for everything while William had got away scot-free. It had after all been William who first introduced him to the Rattlebone, and he had hardly been a model of decorum during some of the locks-ins. William, as usual, had come out smelling of roses. The suggestion that the second-in-line to the throne should be caught up in such a scandal was unthinkable; instead it was Harry who took the flak
and had to suffer the indignity of being front-page news, together with William’s best friend Guy Pelly, the son of a landowning family in Kent and a student at the nearby Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, who was unfairly blamed by the newspapers for introducing Harry to cannabis. According to one former aide, ‘The Palace had to be seen to protect Charles and William, so it was Harry who took the stick. It was decided that Guy Pelly would shoulder the blame and Harry would be named but not William.’ No one reported the fact that the weekend the story broke, William, Harry and Guy Pelly were all together at Highgrove – although the princes were barely on speaking terms.

It was left to William to smooth the situation over, and several weeks later he went to see Harry at Eton with his protection officer and Mark Bolland. ‘William felt guilty that his brother had taken all the blame while he had come out as Mr Goody Two Shoes. For the first time their relationship really suffered and they barely spoke,’ recalled a former aide. ‘Harry resented the fact that William had got away so lightly. In the end he forgave William because it wasn’t really William’s fault, but it took some time. Harry was reeling for a while.’

It was once again the ever-faithful Tiggy and the Van Cutsem family who came to Charles’s rescue. From now on when Charles was away, it was agreed that Harry would stay at Anmer Hall, the Van Cutsems’ ten-bedroom home in Norfolk. Or sometimes Harry would go to his father’s friend Helen Asprey, who now works in the princes’ private office at St James’s Palace. Most of all he loved staying with Tiggy at the Legge-Bourkes’ eighteenth-century family home, Penmyarth House in south Wales. Charles adored Tiggy and her parents – Shan, a former lady-in-waiting
to the Princess Royal and her merchant banker husband William. With the Legge-Bourkes there was no time for trouble; they were too busy fishing in the River Usk and exploring the 4,000-acre estate. ‘Tiggy was an inspired choice,’ recalled Lady Elizabeth Anson, who knows the Legge-Bourke family well. ‘She was fantastic with William and Harry. She comes from an outstanding home and a really wonderful family. The boys would have huge amounts of fun when they stayed at her family house in Wales and they were always welcome.’ Indeed Harry and Tiggy were so fond of each other that years later when she married former army officer Charles Pettifer she asked him to be godfather to her son Fred.

It was not just to Tiggy that Charles turned to for guidance. Camilla Parker Bowles also had first-hand experience in such matters: her son Tom had been caught in possession of cannabis while reading English at Oxford and was trapped into offering cocaine to an undercover reporter in 1999 while working as a publicist at the Cannes Film Festival. Camilla was in an excellent position to offer Charles sound advice, according to Mark Bolland, who helped coordinate Harry’s trip to Featherstone Lodge. ‘Of course Camilla recognised the need for the boys to have a strong father figure in their life especially in the years after Diana’s death and she encouraged him to spend as much time on his own with them as he could. She was aware of the difficulties of raising teenagers and she was a big support for Charles during this period.’ By now Camilla had met William and Harry, which despite everyone’s nerves, had gone smoothly. It was Friday 12 June 1998 and just nine days before his sixteenth birthday when William first met his father’s mistress. He had returned to St James’s Palace after his final GCSE exam and was on his way to the cinema to meet some friends.
Camilla, who was by now a permanent fixture at the prince’s London residence, was also at the palace, and Charles, aware that a meeting had to happen at some point, asked William if he wanted to meet Camilla. It had not yet been a year since Diana’s death, and while he was still deeply protective of his mother’s memory, curiosity got the better of him. Camilla was so nervous that she needed a stiff vodka and tonic afterwards, according to the
Daily Mail
’s royal correspondent Richard Kay, but the thirty-minute meeting was so successful that William suggested that he and Camilla should meet again by themselves for afternoon tea.

While his mother had blamed Camilla for the breakdown of her marriage, William got along well with his father’s mistress. They kept to small talk but William discovered he had rather a lot in common with Camilla. She was down-to-earth, and her sense of humour appeared to have rubbed off on his father, who seemed happier than he had been in years. William and Camilla both loved the countryside and shared a passion for riding and fox-hunting – which they agreed should not be banned. William had also become friendly with Camilla’s children, who were several years older than him and Harry. Tom was a former Etonian and Oxford graduate while Laura had finished school and taken a gap year. William had been fascinated by her tales of travelling around South America when they were all at Birkhall that Easter. They had not always got along well, and William and Laura used to have terrible fights over who was to blame for their broken homes. According to one family friend of the Parker Bowleses, when Charles telephoned Camilla at the family home in Wiltshire, Laura would pick up an extension and shout down the receiver, ‘Why don’t you stop calling Mummy and leave our
family alone.’ She couldn’t care less that it was the Prince of Wales; she blamed him for breaking up her parents’ marriage and was not afraid to tell William so. ‘William would blame Camilla for all the hurt she had caused his mother, which would send Laura into a rage,’ revealed a family friend. ‘Laura was not having any of it. She would take a hard line and fire back at William, “Your father has ruined my life.”’ According to school-friends, Laura – like her brother Tom – was teased mercilessly when intimate conversations between Charles and Camilla ended up in the British press. But if anyone could relate to this it was William. He had suffered a similar humiliation, and when they stopped blaming one another’s parents and let go of their painful pasts, Laura and William got along well.