CHAPTER 2
Diana was 36 years old when she died and still in her prime. Healthy, fit and beautiful, she seemed at last to be getting over what had been an extremely trying time for her. It all seemed so different sixteen years earlier when, at the tender age of 20, she almost floated up the steps of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, her long train following like the folded-back wings of a virgin queen bee. Her wedding, which took place on 29 July 1981, was watched on television by an estimated global audience of some 750 million people – a record for such an event. The build-up to the wedding had been pure Disney, with Diana playing her part to perfection. For although in looks her groom was hardly a Hollywood ‘Prince Charming’, she had, like Cinderella, spent much of her life in the shadows of two older sisters and a hated stepmother.
‘Lady Di’, as she was then referred to by the press, came from a broken home. Her mother and father, Lady Frances Shand Kydd and Lord John Spencer, Viscount Althorp (later the 8th Earl Spencer), divorced when she was only seven years old. It was an acrimonious split, and afterwards Diana and her younger brother, Charles Spencer, initially lived in London with their mother. Later, after their father was given custody of all the children, they went back to live with him at his stately home – Althorp in Northamptonshire.
While Diana missed her mother, she certainly enjoyed living in one of England’s greatest country houses. There, she could dance on the patio and go swimming in its famous Oval Pond: something she missed while living in central London. This idyll came to an abrupt end when, in July 1976, her father remarried. The Earl’s second wife, Raine McCorquodale, had herself just gone through a bitter divorce. The four Spencer children, including Diana, did not take to their new stepmother, referring to her as ‘Acid Raine’. This antipathy became much worse after the Earl suffered a stroke in 1978. With her husband largely incapacitated, Countess Raine took over the running of Althorp House and started a programme of renovations. To the horror of the Spencer children, she not only displayed extremely poor taste in her choice of décor for the old house, but also sold off many family heirlooms in order to pay for these unwanted changes. This was something for which she would never be forgiven.
Lady Raine – the wicked stepmother to Diana’s Cinderella – was the daughter of the colourful Dame Barbara Cartland, who would turn into Diana’s Fairy Godmother. Dame Barbara, something of a society belle herself in her youth, is best remembered today for wearing pink at all times and for her prodigious output of romantic fiction. She was a close friend of Prince Charles’ grandmother, the Queen Mother. She may have not had aristocratic heritage, but as the author of more than 720 novels that have sold more than a billion copies worldwide in 36 languages, she certainly earned the right to call herself the ‘Queen of Romance’.
Barbara Cartland was also a close friend of Charles’ favourite uncle and mentor: Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and second cousin to the Queen’s father, George VI. Like his father, Lord Louis joined the Royal Navy and, in 1940, led a fleet of destroyers in the Battle for Norway. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, liked him and promoted him to senior positions in the army and air force as well as the navy; eventually he appointed him head of SEAC (South East Asia Command). In conjunction with General William Slim, at the time probably Britain’s most able field marshal, Mountbatten oversaw the liberation of Singapore and Burma. In 1947, he was appointed Viceroy of India, the last person to occupy that office prior to that country’s independence. For his services to the Crown, he was rewarded with the hereditary title Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
Mountbatten was the brother of the Duke of Edinburgh’s rather eccentric mother, Princess Alice of Battenburg, who ended her life as a Greek Orthodox nun. Always close to his nephew Philip, there is little doubt that Mountbatten had a hand in organizing the latter’s courtship of the future Queen Elizabeth II. Then, as mentor to their eldest son, Prince Charles, he saw it as his duty to instruct the heir to the throne in the ways of sex and marriage. He advised Charles to sow plenty of wild oats while he was young and even provided him with a guestroom for the purpose in his own house, Broadlands.
Nevertheless, he was adamant that when he did marry, the Prince should choose a virgin for his wife. He explained it would be easier for a prospective Princess of Wales to settle into her eventual role as Queen if she had had no prior experience of sex with other men. In this he may have been influenced by his own experience. His wife, Countess Edwina Mountbatten, was a notorious bisexual (as he too may have been), and had a number of scandalous liaisons, including, it was rumoured, affairs with the singer Paul Robeson and with Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister. Keenly aware of how the marriage of Edward, Prince of Wales, and the American divorcée Mrs Wallis Simpson had very nearly destroyed the monarchy in the 1930s, he insisted that Charles should choose a wife without a colourful past.
Mountbatten discussed his matchmaking plans with his old friend Barbara Cartland. She, however, had ideas of her own on this subject and raised with him the possibility of the Prince marrying one of her step-granddaughters. The girl in question was one of Diana’s elder sisters, Lady Sarah Spencer; consequently she and Charles started dating. Unfortunately, any romance that there might have been came to an abrupt end when she told journalist Andrew Morton that she had had ‘thousands’ of previous boyfriends, suffered from anorexia and would never marry someone she didn’t love. She was probably exaggerating, but by her own admission it was evident that she was not the sort of blushing virgin that Mountbatten had advised the Prince of Wales to marry. Charles beat a hasty retreat.
The girl Mountbatten had in mind was his own granddaughter, Lady Amanda Knatchbull. Charles might indeed have married her had not fate, destiny, or whatever you want to call it, interfered once again in a most cruel way to put a stop to a potential marriage. In 1979, Lord Mountbatten was blown up by a terrorist bomb while on a boat off the northwest coast of Ireland. It was an ignominious end for a former First Sea Lord, admiral of the fleet and Viceroy of India, although he would have no doubt thought it fitting that he should die at sea. He, along with Lady Amanda’s brother Nicholas, was killed by the blast, while another brother and her parents were injured. Thus, although Charles proposed to Amanda the following year, she was in no mood to be a royal bride and turned him down.
By 1980, with Mountbatten dead and the heir to the throne still unmarried, things were starting to look a bit desperate. At this point, Barbara Cartland, who was still keen to play the role of fairy godmother to Charles’ Prince Charming, once again waved her magic wand and pointed in an unexpected direction. She reminded her old friend the Queen Mother that while Sarah had maybe proved unsuitable, her youngest sister, Diana, was only 18 and almost certainly a virgin. Available and lacking an embarrassing past, she might make a good wife for the Prince of Wales. By now under intense family pressure to hurry up and marry someone, Charles took her for a weekend’s sailing at Cowes, aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia. After formally introducing her to the Queen and Prince Philip, he proposed to her in early February the following year. To the huge relief of the entire Royal family, this Spencer girl did not spurn his advances, but immediately said ‘yes’.
The story of Charles and Diana’s courtship and wedding has a fairytale character that could itself have come out of a Barbara Cartland novel. Although not exactly dressed in rags, Diana was certainly the Cinderella of her family. Her education, such as it was, was minimal even by the standards of aristocratic girls expected to do no more in life than provide heirs; for even though she sat her exams twice, she left school at age 16 without so much as a single ‘O’ level. What she enjoyed – and indeed excelled in – were ballet and swimming. Unfortunately, her height (she grew to 5’ 10”) barred her from her desired career as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, while her swimming, though good, was not up to Olympic standards. Thus it was that by the time she was 17, she found herself back at her mother’s flat in London wondering about her uncertain future. For her 18th birthday she was given a flat of her own, in Earl’s Court, which she shared with two friends. Since she had an affinity for children, she took a part-time job as a kindergarten assistant, while, in true Cinderella style, she supplemented the meagre income this generated by doing cleaning and baby-sitting work for her sister Sarah and her friends. Given her lack of qualifications and the dead-end career in which she found herself, it is hardly surprising that she leapt at the opportunity offered by Charles. Instead of cleaning and child-minding, she would become Princess of Wales and, eventually, or so it was expected, Queen of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries and territories. It was a destiny she could not have even dreamed of even a few months previously.*
This fairytale marriage, however, was fated to have an unhappy ending. The wedding itself was a joyous occasion, but Diana’s life within the Royal household turned out to be anything but happy. Although she quickly produced the required ‘heir’ (Prince William) and ‘spare’ (Prince Harry), it was soon apparent that her husband was not – and perhaps never really had been – in love with her. Their interests too were worlds apart. She liked dancing and high fashion, while he was passionate about classical architecture, conservation and organic gardening. This lack of mutual interests denied them the cement that, in the absence of love, could yet have helped them to turn their marriage into a life-long commitment.
It turned out that Charles’ real love was a former girlfriend of his, Mrs Camilla Parker-Bowles, with whom he conducted a clandestine affair. Realizing that her marriage was a sham, Diana too began to have secret affairs. It was a situation that invited gossip and one that could not continue without risking severe damage to the reputation of the monarchy. As lack of love for one another turned into active dislike, it became clear that the only realistic solution to their marital problems would be a clean break. Thus, in 1996, and with the Queen’s blessing, they divorced. Diana would be dead a year later, but by then she had already fulfilled her destiny by changing the genetics of the British royal succession.
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* See Chart 1: Courtship, First Marriage and Progeny of Prince Charles, page 224