William and Harry (2 page)

The prince was the first to arrive at the hospital the next morning, followed shortly by Diana’s sister Lady Jane Fellowes and her mother Frances Shand Kydd, who had travelled from her home in Scotland to see her daughter and new grandson. As world leaders sent congratulatory telegrams, landlords at pubs around the country served rounds on the house. Even football fans managed to prise themselves away from the World Cup to celebrate the joyous news. Britain had been on high alert following Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in April, but on 14 June the Argentinian forces on the islands had surrendered and within days the war was declared over. Now the people of Britain had another reason to celebrate: a future king had been born. It was a momentous occasion and the great British public planned to celebrate.

The spring sunshine had dispersed the rainclouds when Diana and Charles walked down the steps of the Lindo Wing holding their newborn son. Dressed in a green and white spotted maternity dress adorned with an oversized white collar, Diana blinked against the exploding flashbulbs. ‘Over here, Diana! Look this way! Show us his face!’ the press men shouted above the clicking of their shutters. The crowds, cordoned off behind police barriers, called out their congratulations and waved at the happy couple. It was less than a year since they had lined the streets of the Mall to watch the newly-weds kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral was the celebration of the decade and not since the Queen’s coronation had there been such a street party. The British public had their fairy-tale prince and princess and the royal succession was secured.

It was almost too much for Diana, still fragile and exhausted from the birth, to take in. Life had been a whirlwind ever since the Palace confirmed that the Prince of Wales was to marry Lady Diana Spencer. When she gave birth to William she was still navigating the maze of royal life and coming to terms with the fact that home was no longer a flat in west London but a grand palace. It was a steep learning curve and she had yet to master the confidence and sophistication she would acquire in later life. She was still painfully shy in public and turned to her husband, who was well practised in his public role, for support. While Diana had wanted to blend into the background, the British public positioned her centre stage, a role the baby prince would later also struggle with. The minutiae of her daily life was now public consumption. Every outfit she wore was pored over in
the pages of glossy magazines as Charles and Di mania gripped Britain. It had not escaped Charles’s notice, nor the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s, that around the world the princess was being referred to as a ‘breath of fresh air’ in the House of Windsor. It was Diana the papers seemed most interested in, and before long the retiring and camera-shy princess would eclipse her husband entirely.

The couple had embarked on a whistle-stop tour of Australia and New Zealand following their wedding and Diana had been an instant hit on the other side of the world. Women demanded a ‘Lady Di’ cut and blow dry at their local salons while her signature spotted frocks and frilly Victorian-style collars were copied on the high street. While it was all rather flattering and laughable at times, privately Diana struggled with her new fame. Married life was not everything she had expected, and, she later complained, in the transition from her uncomplicated life as the unknown Lady Diana Spencer to that of Princess of Wales she had been largely unaided. However, she should have been well prepared for royal life. The youngest daughter of Earl Spencer and Frances Shand Kydd, Diana came from an aristocratic family which had been linked to royalty for over three centuries. Her father had served as an equerry to King George VI and later the Queen, while her mother was the daughter of the fourth Baron Fermoy. Both her grandparents served the royal family: her paternal grandmother Countess Spencer was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, while her maternal grandmother Lady Ruth Fermoy had worked for the royal family for more than thirty years. As a child Diana and her siblings would play with Prince Andrew, who would visit the
Spencer family at their home Park House, an impressive mansion nestled amid great oak trees in the sprawling royal estate a short drive from Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk home.

As a teenager Diana dreaded trips to the royal residence, which she found ‘strange’, but she got along with Andrew, who was close to her in age, and they would spend hours watching films together in Sandringham’s home cinema. Charles had been paired off with Diana’s older sister Sarah and they had enjoyed a skiing trip to Klosters, but it was the lissome and gamine Diana who caught the prince’s eye at a friend’s barbecue in the autumn of 1980. At the time Diana was a nineteen-year-old nursery school teacher living with three girlfriends in Earl’s Court. The attentions of the prince, who had been linked with numerous aristocratic suitors known as ‘Charlie’s Angels’ in the British press, was a novel experience for Diana, who had not yet had a serious boyfriend. She immediately fell in love with Charles and was deemed the perfect virgin bride. For several months they managed to keep their courtship clandestine, but the newspapers eventually picked up on the romance. For the hitherto unknown Diana, life changed overnight. Her flat was suddenly besieged by reporters all desperate for nuggets of information about the beautiful aristocrat who had finally won the Prince of Wales. As she sped off in her battered Mini Metro, photographers clinging to the car, the strain showed on her beautiful face. ‘It’s been very difficult,’ her concerned father Earl Spencer remarked.

Incredibly, the couple managed to keep their engagement a secret for three weeks while Diana was in Australia for a holiday, but when she returned there was little option but to make it official. At 11 a.m. on 24 February 1981 Buckingham Palace
announced they were to wed. While the prince was largely protected by Palace mandarins, Diana was left to cope with her new celebrity status alone. Her dignified silence won the royal family’s approval and Diana moved out of her flat and into the nanny’s quarters at Buckingham Palace on the second floor. There Diana complained she felt cut off and isolated and started to have second thoughts. While those around her put her doubts and anxieties down to pre-wedding nerves, it was apparent from the start that Diana and Charles had entered into the marriage with polarised expectations. The princess had dreamed of a romantic escape following their wedding; instead they honeymooned at Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish retreat, together with the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Princess Anne and her children Peter and Zara Phillips. It was not the honeymoon Diana had hoped for, and she was flummoxed by the family’s strict timetable, which was meticulous even when on holiday.

The Queen’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson recalled that Diana found the rituals of royal life hard to grasp. By now the princess was suffering from bulimia and could not tolerate the heavy three-course meals which were served at lunch and supper, nor could she fathom having to change for every meal and occasion.

As Diana wrestled with the royal regime, Charles became increasingly perplexed by what he perceived as his wife’s strange behaviour. He could not understand why Diana would shut herself away in their bedroom for hours at a time. The Queen, more astute in such matters, was aware that the transition from carefree young woman to the goldfish bowl of royalty was taking its toll on the sensitive young princess. Amid growing concerns for her health she summoned a doctor to visit Diana, who was by then suffering from depression, but it did little good. The strain showed when the newly-weds posed for their first photo-call on the banks of the River Dee. Against a backdrop of rolling hills and wild heather, Diana said she ‘highly recommended’ married life as her husband tenderly kissed her hand, but she was unconvincing and looked uncomfortable in the presence of the assembled press pack. It was only many years later that she admitted she had found her wedding day, which was watched by 500 million people around the world, ‘terrifying’ and that the pressure of becoming the Princess of Wales was ‘enormous’. There had been little time to master the assorted ceremonies and rituals of state she was expected to carry out as consort to the Prince of Wales and she lacked confidence. As Diana struggled to retain her identity behind the mask of royal protocol, rumours of her misery seeped into the newspaper gossip columns, which were obsessed with every twist and turn of the royal marriage. For those watching closely, the strains and tensions were already
beginning to pull at this union of two fundamentally different people.

However, when she discovered she was pregnant less than a year into their marriage Diana was overjoyed and busily set about preparing the top-floor nursery in Kensington Palace. A former kindergarten teacher, she loved children and longed to start a family. Her parents’ marriage had broken down when she was just six years old, and Diana vividly recalled her parents fighting when her mother Frances produced three daughters but no heir to the Spencer estate. Eventually a son, Charles, was born, but it was not enough to hold the Spencers’ marriage together and eventually Frances left the earl for her lover Peter Shand Kydd. Diana recalled the awfulness of listening to her brother sob himself to sleep as her cuckolded father padded sleeplessly through the house. She did not want the same fate for her own children. ‘I want my children to have as normal a life as possible,’ she remarked, recognising that it was within her power to shape the future of the monarchy. Diana was determined to do things her way, even if it meant going against the grain, which it invariably did. ‘I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I feed them love and affection. It’s so important.’Like Charles, Diana had been raised by a governess, but for her security meant being hands on. She was determined that she alone would raise their firstborn and insisted on breastfeeding William. However, with a packed timetable of royal duties and engagements it was soon apparent that a nanny was required.

Diana immediately dismissed Charles’s suggestion that his former governess Mabel Anderson should take up the post. She
did not want an old-fashioned nanny with outdated ideas looking after her son. After many arguments it was decided that forty-two-year-old Barbara Barnes would join the royal nursery. Miss Barnes believed that children should be allowed to develop at their own pace, which immediately endeared her to Diana. She had come highly recommended by her former employer Lord Glenconner, a close friend of the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret, who lived next door to Charles and Diana at Kensington Palace, and during the early years the appointment was a success. It was made clear to Nanny Barnes that she was there to assist rather than take over. Diana was in charge of the nursery and she and Charles made all the important decisions. Nanny Barnes was told to dispense with her uniform and informed, as were all the staff, that she would be called Barbara. For a shy and demure young woman who had initially found the palace so daunting, Diana’s changes were fast taking effect in the royal household.

For the first time since their wedding Diana seemed happy, as did Charles, who wrote to his godmother Lady Mountbatten of his elation at becoming a father. ‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined.’ It was not just Diana who enjoyed spending time with William in the nursery. Charles loved being with her son, and at bath time he would jump into the tub and splash around with William’s favourite plastic whale toy. At bedtime he would often give William his bottle before retiring to his study to catch up on his paperwork.

On 4 August 1982, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday, William was christened in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace
by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was baptised in the same gown that Charles had worn as a baby. Diana, who kept William from crying with a soothing finger in his mouth during the ceremony, was still upset that Charles had chosen such mature godparents, among them his close friend and adviser Laurens van der Post. She had wanted younger guardians, but Charles refused to change his mind. Another source of friction was their state visit to Australia and New Zealand the following spring. Diana had been inconsolable at the prospect of leaving William behind for six weeks, and in a further breach of precedent it was agreed that they would take the nine-month-old William with them.

It was the first time a working member of the royal family had ever undertaken an official engagement with a baby and a far cry from Charles’s childhood, when he had been left in the care of his governess while the Queen and Prince Philip embarked on a tour of the Commonwealth. During Charles’s early years his parents were often overseas. Prince Philip was serving in the Royal Navy in Malta, which meant he barely saw his son for the first year of his life and missed Charles’s first two birthdays. Neither Charles nor Diana wanted such an upbringing for William. Times had changed, and with the speed and ease of air travel there was no reason to leave him behind. When Barbara Barnes descended the steps of the Queen’s Flight aircraft tightly cradling the baby prince there was no contest over who was the star of the show. William delighted the crowds and revelled in every second of his fame, happily crawling across the lawn in front of Government House in New Zealand for his first official photocall.

It was just two years before Diana discovered she was pregnant again, which was as surprising as it was joyful. Publicly the Waleses had put on a united front, but behind the wrought-iron gates of Kensington Palace the tears in the fabric of their marriage were beginning to show. The couple had not stopped crisscrossing the world, and eighteen months of tours and state visits on top of motherhood had left the vulnerable Diana tired and drained. She later admitted that Harry’s conception at Sandringham was ‘as if by a miracle’ but secretly hoped that the pregnancy would be the glue that would repair the fractures in their marriage. There was a glimmer of hope when she returned from a trip to Norway. On the desk in her study was a note from her husband. ‘We were so proud of you,’ he had written and signed it ‘Willie Wombat and I’. Her joy was to be short-lived, and on top of suffering from morning sickness Diana was convinced that Charles was seeing his ex-girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles.