William and Harry (19 page)

The run-up to the wedding was beset with problems. Charles and Camilla wanted a civil wedding at Windsor Castle, but when it was realised that if a licence was granted any other couple could also be married there, the plan was scrapped. Instead it was decided that Charles and Camilla would marry at Windsor Guildhall, followed by a blessing in St George’s Chapel in the castle given by the Archbishop of Canterbury for 700 guests, and finally a reception hosted by the Queen. Camilla was dubbed a ‘town hall bride’ in the papers, and even though over Christmas the Queen had privately given her blessing for Charles to remarry, there was speculation that she would not be attending the nuptials. Q
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. Charles was crestfallen that his wedding day was being labelled a ‘fiasco’, while Camilla was said to be so stressed she had taken up yoga. William and Harry assured their father that he was making the right decision. It was more than seven years since the death of their mother, and although not a day passed when they didn’t think about her, they wanted him to be happy. ‘We are both very happy for our father and Camilla and we wish them all the luck in the future,’ they said in a joint statement. While it had been difficult for them in the early years, the boys realised that their papa was happier with his
long-term mistress in his life, and they had warmed to Camilla. ‘We love her to bits,’ remarked Harry.

Against all the odds the wedding was a success, even though it was delayed for twenty-four hours because of the death of Pope John Paul II. ‘Can anything else possibly go wrong?’ asked the
Daily Mail
. It was the question on everyone’s lips at the Palace too, but when Camilla emerged from the shadows of the Guildhall into the spring sunshine to rapturous applause on Saturday 9 April, it seemed the worst really was finally behind them. Present was a tiny fraction of the number of people that had gathered in the Mall years before to watch Prince Charles kiss the virgin bride Diana, but the crowds that lined the streets of Windsor waved Union Jacks, smiled and wished the couple well. As William gave Camilla a kiss for the cameras, Harry and his cousins Beatrice and Eugenie walked up to St George’s Chapel. The impish prince gave a cheeky thumbs up and performed a merry jig for the waving crowds. The most moving tribute that day was from the Queen, who announced at Windsor Castle, ‘My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.’ For the first time she had given the couple her public blessing.

Camilla was now part of the family, and when William graduated on 23 June 2005 she was there along with Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen. William and Kate had dreaded and looked forward to the day in equal measure. They had enjoyed one last party before their finals and in keeping with tradition attended the annual May Ball, organised by the Kate Kennedy Club at Kinkell Farm. Uncharacteristically, Kate drank so much Fergus Boyd had to carry her out before the night ended. Now, as they walked into Younger Hall, which smelled of floor polish
and summer, they exchanged a smile and took their seats. Kate looked stunning in a simple short black skirt, white blouse and heels, and sat five rows in front of William, who was dressed in a suit beneath his black gown with cherry-coloured silk lining. He slipped from his seat ten minutes before his name was called, before re-emerging from a side room to join the other graduands. Not only was he anxious about the ceremony, which had attracted numbers of the town’s residents and hundreds of press, there had been an embarrassing to-do over the royals’ attendance.

The Queen, who had been ‘under the weather’ according to William, had asked her private secretary to request that the ninety-minute ceremony was moved from the morning to the afternoon to ensure that she had plenty of time to get to St Andrews. While the university was delighted to accommodate the royal party and provided the Queen with a potted history of every student graduating, they had been unprepared to alter the timetable. According to the university’s head of communications, St Andrews has two graduation ceremonies a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and it was simply not possible to change them around. ‘I’m not surprised the university wouldn’t move the ceremony,’ remarked Andrew Neil, who left St Andrews in 2002. ‘What we did from day one was treat William as normal, so why change it on the final day?’ If she was feeling unwell, the Queen did not let it show, and she smiled broadly as William knelt before the chancellor’s wooden pulpit to collect his parchment. The Duke of Edinburgh and the recently married Charles and Camilla looked proudly on as a burst of flash photography captured the moment when William Wales was awarded a 2.1 in geography.

Minutes later Kate was called to the stage as Catherine Middleton to receive her 2.1 in the history of art. When it came to the end of the ceremony, the words of vice-chancellor Dr Brian Lang must have seemed particularly poignant. ‘You will have made lifelong friends,’ he told the graduates. ‘You may have met your husband or wife. Our title as the top matchmaking university in Britain signifies so much that is good about St Andrews, so we rely on you to go forth and multiply.’

Harry had dreamed of joining the army since he was a little boy dressing up in military fatigues and playing toy soldiers. When he was accepted as an officer cadet at Sandhurst his dream came true. Harry would become the first senior royal to join the British army since 1960, when Prince Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousin and grandson of King George V, enrolled at the Royal Military Academy. Traditionally the Windsors have served in the Royal Navy. The Duke of Edinburgh joined in 1939 and commanded the frigate HMS
Magpie
, while Prince Andrew, Duke of York reached the rank of honorary captain in the Royal Navy. Charles also served in the Royal Navy after training as an RAF pilot. Harry had heard all about Sandhurst from Mark Dyer. The college was formed in 1947 by the amalgamation of two previous army training colleges and under its motto ‘Serve to Lead’ has trained officers from all over the world. At the end of their training Sir Winston Churchill and King Hussein of Jordan both passed out on the famous quadrangle in front of Old College, and now it was Harry’s chance to undertake the punishing forty-eight-week training course.

Following his somewhat controversial and unplanned double gap year, the prince was finally ready for some serious work. He had been warned that the first five weeks at the military academy would be the hardest of his life and that 15 per cent of all cadets drop out during this period, but he had already had a taste of what was to come during a four-day assessment in Westbury, Wiltshire. It had been tough, but he had passed the notoriously hard Regular Commissions Board entrance exams with flying colours. Due to enroll in January 2005, he sustained an injury to his left knee while coaching rugby to children in October 2004, and had to delay his entry by four months, but on the morning of 8 May 2005 Harry promised himself he would not fail. As he pulled up at Old College, the grand cream-fronted nineteenth-century building that looks on to the academy’s quadrangle, acres of greenery and a man-made lake, Harry took in his new surroundings. His father had driven him to Camberley and now looked proudly on as Harry, still tanned from a two-week safari in Botswana with Chelsy, enrolled as Cadet Wales.

For the first five weeks Harry was allowed to venture no further than the academy’s main buildings – Old College and New College – and the exercise fields. While Camberley town has little to offer in terms of nightlife and eating out, it is just thirty-four miles south of London, and the fact that Harry could not leave was a daunting prospect for the young prince. The idea is that by keeping the cadets within the academy, everyone is treated and assessed uniformly and has the chance to bond with their platoon. Harry had been sent a packing list, and after being shown to his room, a cell measuring nine by ten feet containing a sink, a chest of drawers, a cupboard and a desk, he started to
unpack. He had brought with him several jars of polish, which he would use daily to buff his army boots, and his own ironing board. For a boy who had never had to press a shirt or shine his shoes, it was a rude awakening.

Harry rose before dawn every morning, when the day started with room inspection by Colour Sergeant Glen Snazle from the Grenadier Guards. His bed, with its single plain blue duvet, was checked, as was his uniform, which had to be pressed in a certain and very particular way. His sink was to be clean, his military kit serviceable and his civilian clothes washed and put away. If his room was not up to standard, he would receive a ‘show parade’, where he would be inspected again that night. He was not allowed to listen to pop music; instead all radios were to be tuned to BBC Radio 4. Laptops and mobile phones were confiscated on day one, but would be returned after five weeks. Televisions were not allowed in bedrooms, nor were posters, plants or photographs. Harry was expected to report for duty every day, even Sundays, when he would have to attend chapel.

From the moment he was awake he was on his feet, carrying out drill, physical training and domestic chores which included polishing and re-polishing his army-issue black boots until his sergeant could see his reflection in them. Despite being the only cadet with round-the-clock protection, Harry had insisted he wanted to be treated the same as everyone else. It was something the commandant of Sandhurst, Major General Andrew Ritchie, had assured him would be the case. ‘I have removed certain cadets from Sandhurst as their behaviour is not up to the standards of an officer, and I would do so again,’ said General Ritchie. ‘We get used to people here who have worked four hours and
slept twenty. Here we reverse that. Some find it a struggle.’ The academy’s straight-talking Sergeant Major Vince Gaunt was equally direct. ‘Prince Harry will call me sir. And I will call him sir. But he will be the one who means it.’

The arrival of such a high-profile cadet inevitably put Sandhurst in the spotlight, and embarrassingly for the academy, which has armed guards at its fortified entrance gates and vehicle checks, there was a major security alert within weeks of Harry’s arrival. A British tabloid newspaper claimed one of its journalists had got into the college carrying a fake bomb. It was the latest in a series of security blunders around the royal family, who were still hugely embarrassed that an imposter had crashed William’s twenty-first-birthday celebrations while an undercover reporter had spent months working for the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Unperturbed, Harry immersed himself in the training. ‘It’s a bit of a struggle but I got through it,’ he later said of his five-week induction. ‘I do enjoy running down a ditch full of mud, firing bullets; it’s the way I am. I love it.’ He had discovered a new passion and inner confidence. For Harry the army was a chance to show that despite his past hiccups he could succeed. While he had struggled to keep up at Eton, he was top of the class at Sandhurst. He quickly mastered the basics of general drill and weapons handling but because of his knee he found the physical training a challenge. He was nicknamed ‘Sicknote’ after he was sent to the private Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey with infected blisters, the result of a five-day exercise in Ashdown Forest in Sussex. Unlike William he was messy, and his sergeant would put him on restricted privileges – confined to the academy
– when his room was not up to scratch. While he was occasion -ally in trouble with his seniors, he was popular among his peers in Alamein Company, who recalled that Harry would always keep a secret stash of cigarettes under his mattress, having failed to kick the habit.

A world away from Boujis, Sandhurst was the best thing to happen to Harry. He completed a punishing twenty-six-hour race across the Black Mountains in the Brecon Beacons in record time and scored top marks during a training exercise in Cyprus. On his twenty-first birthday, which was a low-key affair celebrated with his platoon in the academy bar, where pints cost £1.20, he made it clear that he had every intention of fighting on the front line. In an interview he gave around the same time he said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back at home while my boys are out fighting for their country.’ They were fighting words, and Harry meant every one. Showing a new maturity, he also apologised for his past mistakes and for the first time spoke about his ill-advised Nazi outfit: ‘It was a very stupid thing to do and I’ve learned my lesson.’

He could not resist a dig at William, who was set to follow him at Sandhurst. He adored his older brother, but until now he had always lived his life on William’s coat-tails. Now Harry was in the driving seat. ‘When I have left I’ll have to make a special effort to visit him for comedy value just so he can salute me,’ he joked. ‘Every year we get closer. It’s amazing how close we’ve become. We have even resorted to hugging each other,’ he revealed in the same interview. ‘Ever since our mother died, obviously we were close, but he is the one person on this earth
who I can talk [to] about anything. We understand each other and we give each other support.’ He also talked about his father’s recent wedding, commenting that Charles was ‘much more relaxed’ since the marriage. Speaking about Camilla for the first time he said, ‘She’s a wonderful woman, and she has made our father very happy, which is the most important thing.’ He dismissed any idea that she was a ‘wicked stepmother’ and insisted, ‘We are very grateful for her. We’re very happy to have her around.’

In the New Year, which William and Kate had seen in together at a cottage on the Sandringham estate, it was William’s turn to prove he could rise to the challenge of Sandhurst. The twenty-three-year-old prince arrived in driving rain on 8 January 2006 accompanied by his father and private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former SAS officer. After being introduced to Major General Ritchie, William signed into Blenheim Company, bade farewell to his father and was shown to his room overlooking Old College, which would be home for the next forty-eight weeks. Not prepared to risk the sort of security fiasco that had marred Harry’s arrival, the college worked closely with the prince’s team of personal protection officers, who accompanied him on every exercise in their blacked-out cars.