Chapter 18
In This Chapter
● Finding out about a prince’s education
● Understanding the role of the Prince of Wales
● Revealing the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana
● Describing the prince’s fortunes after Diana’s death
Prince Charles is the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. He was born in 1948 and has therefore spent all his adult years as heir to the throne. His whole life has been shaped by this fact and by the fact that the heir has no clearly defined role.
Like several other members of the current British royal family, Prince Charles has developed his role in two ways: supporting the queen in her official duties and helping others, especially by carrying out an impressive list of charitable works.
The prince would certainly see these day-to-day activities as the most important part of his role in today’s royal family. But the media have been attracted more to the sensational side of Charles’s life - especially by the story of his marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, the breakdown of their relationship, and the princess’s tragic early death in a car accident in Paris. Charles’s second marriage has also attracted a lot of attention from reporters and broadcasters.
The Young Prince: Prince Charles
Prince Charles’s education and early life were shaped by the fact that he is heir to a crown that values tradition but is also moving into the modern world. His early life was dominated by public school, Cambridge University, and a spell in the armed forces - all unsurprising fare. His life also has some unusual twists - his boarding school was a very unusual one, and his later education included a spell learning Welsh.
Schooldays
In the past, royal children traditionally received their education at home. Queen Elizabeth II, for example, was taught by a governess, and, to begin with, so was her young son. Charles’s governess, Catherine Peebles, had already taught the offspring of George VI’s brother, the Duke of Kent. She taught Charles to read and write, introduced him to history and geography, and gave him the basics of French.
Miss Peebles was a success, but Charles’s parents realised that education at home, while nurturing their son, wasn’t bringing him out of his shell. They decided that he should be educated among other boys, and after three years with his governess, Charles started school.
Hill House
Charles’s first school was Hill House, a small day school in West London just a few minutes from Buckingham Palace. Previous royal children, if they had gone to school at all, had gone to boarding school. Charles was the first to attend a day school, arriving every day in a chauffeur-driven car, but otherwise being treated very much like the other pupils. The prince went to Hill House for a year and didn’t do badly. His teachers reported that the 8-year-old Charles was good at reading and writing, but below average in maths. He had started Latin and showed a strong interest in both music and art.
Cheam
Hill House wasn’t the main event in Charles’s education. He was expected to go to boarding school, and the first step on that road was prep school, the kind of English boarding school that prepares you for public school and that you attend between the ages of 8 and 13. Just before he was 9 years old, Charles was sent to Cheam, the prep school that his father had attended some 25 years earlier.
Cheam was very much the traditional English boarding school, which meant a lot of things that Charles didn’t much like - cold showers, runs in the rain, rugby, and corporal punishment, for example. But toward the end of his five years there, Charles made a success of it and was head boy in his final year.
Gordonstoun
When the time came, at age 13, for Charles to go to public school, he again followed his father’s footsteps, this time to Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun wasn’t a typical public school. Its founder, Kurt Hahn, who had been a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, believed that Spartan conditions were good for the young. As well as the usual public school diet of wet runs and cold showers, pupils at Gordonstoun were expected to sleep with the windows open, even in winter. Those with beds near the windows often woke up with damp or snowy sheets.
Charles didn’t enjoy Gordonstoun. He remembers it as a place where he was bullied. He was also lonely because other pupils shied away from befriending him because they were scared of being accused of ‘sucking up to royalty’.
The place had its good side, though. The prince was able to take part in activities that he liked, including sailing, music, and drama, and his interest in art was encouraged. At age 16, he received five O Levels (English Language, English Literature, French, History, and Latin) and at 18 two A Levels (Grade B in History and Grade C in French). Charles ended his career at Gordonstoun as school Guardian (the equivalent of head boy).
After school
The education of a prince involves far more than just school. The royal family has a tradition that its young male members should spend time in the armed services. In addition, Charles got an opportunity that was quite unusual for a member of the royal family - he went to university.
Trinity
After Gordonstoun, Charles went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he began three years as an undergraduate, initially reading Archaeology and Anthropology. The palace authorities insisted that he should be treated as a normal undergraduate - as normal, that is, as you can be when you’re constantly accompanied by a detective and your every public move is liable to be reported in the press.
On the whole, Charles responded well to the challenges of trying to read for a degree while the nation watched. At the end of his first year, he passed his Part One exams, and he also found time to take part in university drama and play polo.
Charles switched subjects to history after his first year and went on to get a Lower Second in his final exams - an average degree, in other words, but a good achievement for someone who was working under public scrutiny and had found school heavy weather.
Aberystwyth
Charles had one other experience of university life. In 1969, he spent three months at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. He was there as part of his preparation for his role as Prince of Wales, and one of his most important tasks was to learn Welsh - or at least to pick up enough of it to make the occasional speech.
Tension has existed between England and Wales for hundreds of years, as one English king after another tried to conquer and rule their western neighbour. By 1969, when Charles went to Aberystwyth, many people thought Wales should be independent once more. Most of these people were men and women who wanted peaceful change. However, a few extremists were prepared to use violence against the British.
The week Charles arrived in Wales, an explosion occurred outside the police headquarters in Cardiff. Would the extremists try to blow up Charles, too? They didn’t - partly thanks to an enormous security operation around the prince. Gradually, most Welsh people warmed to Charles. At the end of May 1969, he spoke at an Eisteddfod (a Welsh festival of the arts). Speaking in Welsh, he was well received. It was a good preparation for the ceremony in which Charles officially became Prince of Wales.
The investiture
Charles was made Prince of Wales in a special ceremony called an investiture at Caernarfon Castle in July 1969. The investiture, a kind of coronation, wasn’t an ancient ceremony. It was devised in 1911 when the son of George V, the future King Edward VIII, was made Prince of Wales.
Lord Snowdon, photographer, designer, and the husband of Princess Margaret, oversaw the 1969 ceremony. Snowdon specified the costumes, seating, and three thrones of Welsh slate beneath a canopy of Perspex (transparent so that the TV cameras could record what was going on). Snowdon’s visual flair and the stunning setting - the grandest of the castles built by Edward I - ensured that the ceremony looked good, both live and on television.
In July 1969, the royal family and various dignitaries assembled in Caernarfon Castle, together with the television cameras, to record the ritual in which Charles swore allegiance to his mother and was crowned Prince of Wales. Quite a few anxieties surrounded the ceremony:
● Would it work on television? No ceremony like this one had ever been televised before, but the broadcast was well received. Each stage of the proceedings was planned carefully to allow good camera angles. It worked.
● Would there be a terrorist attack? In spite of threats from extreme nationalists, the investiture was completed safely.
● How would the prince himself shape up? Prince Charles had had training in handling the media, but was inexperienced. Charles did well, though, even learning enough of the Welsh language to give a speech in the tongue of his new principality. The new prince was a success.
The investiture was a triumph. Millions watched it on television, and most people in Wales accepted their prince warmly. Charles topped the ceremony by setting off on a week’s tour of Wales. Again, officials were worried about the possibility of terrorism, but no attack came, and the young prince was welcomed widely. It was his first major media event, and he acquitted himself well.
In the services
Following tradition, Charles went into the armed services after university. He began in 1971 in the Royal Air Force, but after six months moved to the Royal Navy, beginning at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. Charles spent five years as a naval officer.
Charles became an accomplished officer in the Navy. He was praised for his leadership abilities, determination, physical courage, and his flair for handling a ship. He also learned to fly helicopters, overcame his problems with maths enough to navigate, and coped with seasickness.
In other areas of his life - such as his emotional outbursts and his complaints about his lot - Prince Charles has sometimes been accused of wimpishness. But he wasn’t a wimp in the Navy. Most of the men in his family had been soldiers or sailors at one time or another, and the services were in his blood. Charles could see the job he needed to do and got on with it. However, when he came out of the Navy in 1976, the prince faced a different challenge. He now had no defined job and had to find out for himself what his role was to be.
King-in-Waiting
There is no official role attached to the title of Prince of Wales. Each Prince knows he is heir to the throne and is, in one sense, waiting for his parent to die in order to be allowed to get on with his destined role - that of monarch. But Princes of Wales have rarely been allowed just to sit around and wait to be crowned king. In the Middle Ages, the first Prince of Wales won himself a notable reputation as a soldier. Today, a Prince of Wales is expected to make himself useful, too.
Each holder of the title Prince of Wales has to define his role for himself, and that was Prince Charles’s first task after he left the Navy. He carved out a role in three main areas - by carrying out the long list of public duties that a senior member of the royal family was expected to perform, by running the Duchy of Cornwall, and by supporting charities that reflected his wide-ranging interests.
This working life has continued from the mid-1970s until today, a 30-year period during which the personal fortunes of Prince Charles have varied, and his public popularity has plunged - and, latterly, made something of a recovery. The public duties, the charitable work, and the involvement in the Duchy of Cornwall have been constants in a changeable world.
Public duties
The Prince of Wales undertakes a bewildering array of public duties - visits, openings, inaugurations, celebrations, meetings, tours, and so on. These duties are designed to support the similar work of the queen, as well as reflecting the specific interests of the prince himself in fields from education to architecture, organic farming to healthcare. Altogether, the prince might attend some 500 events in a year, mostly in Britain but including a large number overseas.
Summarising this diverse work is tough, but in one month, May 2006, the prince:
● Hosted various events, including a dinner for supporters of the Prince’s Trust and a reception for the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust.
● Opened the restored royal palace at Kew, West London.
● Gave a number of speeches, including one on young people at the Scottish Parliament, one to the World Health Assembly, and another on preserving the buildings of Edinburgh.
● Led the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Prince’s Trust.
● Went on numerous visits across the United Kingdom.
● Attended celebrations of the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Other months saw receptions for war veterans, events relating to health charities, tree plantings, and conferences. The prince has a full diary and is a very active representative both of the monarchy and the numerous good causes he supports.
The Prince's Charities
During the 30-odd years he has been Prince of Wales, Prince Charles has given his name, and a large amount of his time, to a growing list of charities that work in the fields where he has a special interest.
Sixteen charities are currently grouped under the overall name The Prince’s Charities, and the Prince is President of all 16 and founder of 14. Together, the group makes up the UK’s largest multicharity enterprise, and it raises more than £100 million annually.
The charities are arranged in six main groups. Here’s the low-down on some of the best-known charities in each group and the work they do:
● Opportunity and enterprise: The Prince’s Trust is probably Charles’s best-known charity. It offers training, mentoring, financial assistance, and other help to young people, especially those who have struggled at school, have been in long-term care, or have had other social problems. In 30 years, the trust has helped over half a million young people.
● Education: The Prince S Drawing School was set up to provide a centre of excellence in observational drawing. The School runs life-drawing classes, as well as courses in painting, sculpture, calligraphy, and printmaking. Around 400 students attend each week.
● Health: The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health exists to encourage the development of integrated healthcare - in other words, enabling conventional and complementary health practitioners to work together.
● The built environment: The Prince s Regeneration Trust promotes the rescue and regeneration of historic buildings so that they become assets to their local area. Particular successes have involved the restoration of industrial buildings to provide places where people can live, work, or enjoy themselves. The aim is to make each restored building ‘work for its living’ and to encourage others to regenerate historic buildings in a similar way.
● Business: Business in the Community encourages businesses to improve their impact on society. It helps companies tackle social disadvantage, poverty, and crime, and to improve the impact they have on the environment. More than 750 companies work together as members of Business in the Community.
● The Arts: Arts and Business helps businesses support the arts and the arts to inspire business. It builds creative partnerships between companies and artists with the aim that these links are beneficial to both sides. Arts and Business has been in existence for almost 30 years, and the Prince became its President in 1988.
Prince Charles is the President of all these charities, and his role is more than just a figurehead. Many of the projects and schemes that they promote were originated by the prince himself, or during discussions in which he played a key part. He is passionate about these good causes, and his passion has sometimes led him into controversy. His views on architecture have resulted in some scathing attacks on the work of modern architects, including a famous remark about a proposal for a new wing on London’s National Gallery, which Charles described as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. His ideas about education have also led to some critical remarks about the quality of English teaching in the schools.
Prince Charles’s charitable involvement commits him to a lot of work, from hosting formal events to attending meetings and reading briefing papers. Much of this important work is done behind the scenes, beyond the glare of TV cameras and the lenses of press photographers. The public is used to seeing images of Prince Charles on the ski slopes or reports of his lavish dinners and receptions. It’s easy to forget that much of the prince’s life is taken up with the hard work that helps his charities function.
The Duchy of Cornwall
As heir to the throne, as well as being Prince of Wales, Prince Charles is also Duke of Cornwall. The Duchy of Cornwall is a vast private estate established in 1337 by Edward III for his son, Prince Edward. The idea behind the Duchy was - and still is - to provide the Prince with an income with which his public, charitable, and private activities can be funded. Prince Charles also funds the activities of his two sons and the Duchess of Cornwall from his Duchy income. The Duchy consists of some 54,000 hectares of land, mostly in southwestern England - in short, it is a big business.
The Duchy is the prince’s business - up to a point. Prince Charles is entitled to the large income (£13.2 million in 2005) from the estate. However, he isn’t allowed to take the proceeds from any of its assets that are sold. The proceeds from any sale are invested back in the Duchy to ensure that the estate is preserved to hand on to the next heir to the throne.
Most of the vast property holding of the Duchy of Cornwall is let to tenants. It is made up of a diverse collection of farms, houses, and commercial properties and includes a big chunk of the London district of Kennington, as well as vast tracts of countryside. A lot of the income comes from rents, but Prince Charles is not a hands-off landlord who takes his money and runs. He has used the Duchy estates to put his money where his mouth is and put into practice his views on many subjects, from agriculture to architecture. Here are a few examples:
● Poundbury, a new settlement in Dorset adjoining the town of Dorchester, was built on Duchy land. Its architecture and planning were based on the principles that Prince Charles has developed over the years, especially the use of traditional architectural styles and familiar local building materials.
● The home farm at Prince Charles’s house, Highgrove, was converted to organic farming around 20 years ago. It is now one of Britain’s premier organic farms.
● Building conservation projects throughout the Duchy estate pay testimony to the prince’s interest in the built environment, especially in respecting and learning from the architecture of the past.
● The Duchy’s woodlands are sustainably managed in line with the prince’s environmental views, and the quality of this management is recognised by the Forestry Stewardship Council.
The interest in conservation and the environment is typical of Prince Charles’s long view of the Duchy of Cornwall. The prince sees his role as one of enhancing the assets of the Duchy so that he can pass the estate on to his heir in a healthier state than he found it when he inherited it.
Charles and Diana
Prince Charles married in 1981, when he was 33. By this time, Charles had been linked with a number of different young women, but by late 1980, he was convinced that Lady Diana Spencer, daughter of Earl Spencer, the queen’s equerry (an officer of the royal household who attends a member of the royal family), was the woman he would marry. The wedding was lavish, and the media portrayed it as a ‘fairytale’ event. Diana quickly blossomed into a media star. But the marriage did not last, and as the royal relationship fell apart, the prince fell out of sympathy with media and public alike.
Charles before Diana
As Britain’s most eligible bachelor, Prince Charles found plenty of eager young female companions. In the 1970s, the prince’s girlfriends formed a favourite topic in the media, and photographers vied to get pictures of Charles with his latest conquest.
It’s now public knowledge that Charles was encouraged, by his favourite great-uncle and mentor Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Prince Philip’s uncle, to play the field. In 1974, Mountbatten wrote a now-famous letter to Charles, in which he said, ‘I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone she might fall for.’
Among the young women who were linked romantically with Prince Charles in his early years, a number stand out:
● Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the Chilean Ambassador to Britain, who got to know Charles when he was at Cambridge.
● Camilla Shand, later Camilla Parker Bowles, daughter of a former cavalry officer and great-granddaughter of one of Edward VII’s mistresses, who eventually became the woman in Charles’s life. (See the upcoming section ‘Charles and Camilla’.)
● Jane Ward, who worked at the Guards Polo Club.
● Sabrina Guinness, of the brewing family.
● Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington.
● Amanda Knatchbull, granddaughter of Earl Mountbatten.
These attachments weren’t all equally serious. Charles remained good friends with Lucia, for example, and proposed to - and was refused by - Amanda. Camilla, though, was different from them all, an attachment to whom Charles would return.
But, because of the values of the royal family at the time, Charles could not marry Camilla. Camilla had had affairs, and the view of both the royal family and palace officials during the 1960s and 1970s was that the heir to the throne should not marry a woman ‘with a past’. And in 1973, Camilla was ruled out as royal bride for another reason - she married army officer Andrew Parker Bowles.
Fairytale gone sour
Prince Charles had known Diana Spencer for some years before they became engaged. Diana belonged to a prominent upper-class British family, and it was inevitable that the pair should have crossed paths. For example, Diana was a guest at the ball held at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Charles’s 30th birthday in 1978.
Charles and Diana, though, first got to know each other in 1980, when she was just 19 and he was 31. Soon the couple were seen together often, Diana had been to stay at Balmoral, and the press were talking enthusiastically about the relationship. Diana appealed to the media as an ‘ideal’ princess in several ways:
● She came from a noble family and was the daughter of an earl.
● She had had no past relationships to sully her reputation.
● She was young.
● She was attractive.
By November 1980, Charles was 32. He’d previously said that he thought 30 was a good age to settle down and marry, and press speculation was increasing that Diana would be his chosen bride. Charles seemed to find it difficult to make up his mind, and his father wrote him a letter reminding him that it was unfair to subject Diana to media pressure - if he was serious, he should propose. In February 1981, Charles asked Diana to marry him, she accepted, and plans began for the wedding.
The big event
The royal family doesn’t go in for long engagements, so Charles and Diana were married on 29 July 1981, in full splendour, at St Paul’s Cathedral. The event combined tradition and glamour - the traditional splendour of a religious service in one of Europe’s biggest and most beautiful churches with the glamour of the couple, Charles in full-dress naval uniform, Diana in a taffeta and lace dress featuring a 25-foot-long train. Not surprisingly, the interest in the wedding was vast:
● A congregation of 3,500 were invited to attend in St Paul’s Cathedral.
● Some 600,000 lined the streets of London to try to get a glimpse of the couple.
● An international television audience of around 750 million people is said to have tuned in to view the event.
Few spectators were disappointed. The British royal family does ceremony very well, and at the centre of the ceremony was a young woman, both shy and beautiful, who the media were happy to portray as a fairytale princess. Everyone looked forward to a happily-ever-after ending to the story.
The promise of Charles and Diana’s wedding seemed fulfilled when, less than a year after the ceremony, Diana gave birth to a baby boy. Prince William was born on 21 June 1982. A couple of years later, on 15 September 1984, the couple’s second son, Prince Harry, arrived.
The fairytale couple had turned into the ideal family, and Charles and Diana had provided the monarchy with what it always wants - a secure succession or, ‘an heir and a spare’.
Splitting up
The fairytale marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana went wrong, however. The problems began very soon after the wedding. They sprang from the fact that the couple had very little in common and that both had emotional needs that the other could not satisfy. It was painful for Diana:
● She felt that she didn’t fit in with the royals’ way of life and disliked the ‘hunting and fishing’ lifestyle that Charles enjoyed so much.
● She didn’t get on with her husband’s friends.
● She developed the serious eating disorder bulimia nervosa and began to lose weight drastically.
● Charles seemed unable to comfort her.
● She began to be convinced that Charles was cheating on her.
Charles found it hard to cope with Diana and her problems or to help her out of them. He tried, but was repaid with suspicion and rebuff, with the result that he felt rejected, too. Meanwhile, Charles was also resentful that Diana was proving so popular with the public. No one seemed to care about the decades of work that he’d put in as Prince of Wales. Diana’s power over the media could throw all that into shadow. Frozen out, Charles turned to his old love, Camilla Shand, now Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles.
The media War
In past centuries, the British royal family had taken this kind of marital infidelity for granted. Kings and queens married for dynastic reasons, produced heirs, and then went their separate emotional ways. And for a while, for much of the 1980s, in fact, Charles and Diana tried to live in this way, keeping up a united front while Charles spent as much time as he could with Camilla, who had been married to Andrew Parker Bowles since 1973.
By the early 1990s, the mutual resentment developed into a virtual war between Charles and Diana, and it was a very public war, fought in the pages of books and in television interviews.
Diana's ‘True story'
The first big blow in the war came from Diana. In 1992, a book, Diana: Her True Story, by journalist Andrew Morton (published by Michael O’Mara) appeared. It described Diana’s plight as a woman who had been wronged, who could not escape from a loveless marriage, and whose husband was unfeeling and cold toward her. The book was a depressing story of a young woman who had thought she’d entered into the perfect marriage and was now suffering from depression and near despair.
According to Morton, the book was based on accounts supplied to him by ‘Diana’s friends’. It later emerged that things weren’t quite that simple. What actually happened was that Diana supplied the information herself - not through direct contact with Morton, but through her friend James Colthurst, a doctor who taped his conversations with the princess.
Diana: Her True Story was a bombshell. The marital breakdown of Charles and Diana was now public knowledge. Charles tried to patch things up by taking his wife on holiday on a friend’s yacht. But the couple spent most of the holiday apart, Diana waterskiing and Charles painting. It certainly wasn’t the second honeymoon that had been mentioned in some newspapers.
Separation - and Camillagate
In December 1992, Charles and Diana announced that they were to separate. This separation wasn’t a shock after the Morton revelations, but it instantly had people asking questions about the future of the monarchy:
What would happen to Diana if and when Charles became king?
Would Charles eventually want to remarry?
Could a self-confessed adulterer become king at all when the ruler was also head of the Church of England?
These questions were all difficult, but they were overshadowed by another media revelation early the following year. An Australian magazine published a transcript of a private telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
The Camillagate tape was seized on by the media - even those who wouldn’t print the pillow talk of the heir to the throne and his mistress were fascinated by it and talked about it. The event only served to emphasise the mess Charles was in. Every new report or revelation reduced his popularity further and seemed to enhance the reputation of Diana.
Charles retaliates
Charles’s response to the media onslaught from Diana came in 1994. The broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby approached Charles with a proposal to make a television documentary and to publish a book to mark the 25th anniversary of his becoming Prince of Wales. Charles responded with enthusiasm, opening up his papers, letters, and diaries to Dimbleby - and opening up emotionally, too.
In the resulting programme, Charles was brutally honest. He talked about the fact that he’d had a difficult childhood and frankly admitted his adultery with Camilla. If the prince thought that honesty would do him credit, he miscalculated badly. Most of the vast 15 million-strong viewership of the programme deplored his confession of adultery and his remark that Mrs Parker Bowles would remain his friend. Many people also looked down on the prince’s tendency to blame his difficult upbringing for his troubles, too.
The Dimbleby programme and book didn’t help Charles. The public revelations it brought to light also hastened the split of Camilla and her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles - their plans to divorce were announced in January 1995.
The crowded marriage
Diana made her own bid for media sympathy in 1995. Her interview with the broadcaster Martin Bashir was aired on BBC’s current-affairs programme Panorama and attracted even more viewers than the Dimbleby programme about Charles. Diana made it clear that she held Charles and Camilla completely to blame for the breakdown of the royal marriage. One of her most famous remarks was that the marriage contained three people and was ‘a bit crowded’.
During the course of the interview, Diana also made it clear that she thought Charles would never be king. She confessed to her own adultery, but managed to blame Charles and Camilla for it. Her status as victim or wronged woman gained her widespread sympathy. Diana had won another battle in the media war.
Death of a princess
After Diana’s devastating comments to Martin Bashir (see the preceding section) she and the Prince of Wales moved swiftly to a divorce. After some wrangling, Diana agreed to let go of the coveted title Her Royal Highness and to accept a financial settlement, made up of a payment of £17 million, as well as an annual allowance for her office and staff. The divorce became absolute on 28 August 1996.
Diana continued to fascinate the media after the divorce, and the press soon began to report her new romantic attachments. One was to a heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan. Another was with Dodi al-Fayed, son of the Egyptian owners of Harrods department store in London. Diana was with Dodi in Paris on the night of 30-31 August 1997, when their car, moving at speed to escape pursuing paparazzi, crashed into a concrete pillar in the Place de l’Alma tunnel. Both Diana and Dodi perished in the crash.
Since Diana’s death, some have speculated that the accident wasn’t all it seemed - or even wasn’t an accident at all. But the evidence, and the fact that the death took place under the noses of a group of press photographers, makes this conspiracy theory highly unlikely.
The period immediately after Diana’s death was a low-point for the royal family. They were widely attacked in the media for seeming distant and not grieving publicly for the princess. (For more about this topic, see Chapter 17.)
Prince Charles described himself as ‘numb with shock’ when he heard about Diana’s death. After a trip to Paris to bring back the princess’s body, he concentrated on being with his sons and trying to give them the feeling of security they acutely needed. Some commentators had previously accused Charles of being rather distant from his sons. However, this aloofness certainly wasn’t the case now, and those who know him say that they have always shared, and still do, a close bond.
Diana’s funeral saw Charles, his two sons, and the Duke of Edinburgh, together with Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, walking behind the gun carriage that carried her coffin to Westminster Abbey. It was a scene of dignified mourning and suggested that in the months to come, the royal family could leave behind the strife and start to rebuild the credibility of the monarchy. For now, they were part of a scene of national grief, during which thousands left floral tributes in memory of Diana or threw flowers at the hearse as it passed.
Charles and Camilla
In the years after Princess Diana’s death, Camilla Parker Bowles became an almost constant companion of the Prince of Wales. To begin with, a large part of the public, revering Diana’s memory, found this arrangement hard to take. But gradually, Camilla became more widely accepted, and she and Charles married. Charles finally achieved the personal happiness he wanted, and the couple have developed mutually supportive public roles.
Non-negotiable relationship
After the divorce of Charles and Diana, Charles went on record as saying that he would not give up Camilla, even though he could not marry her. His relationship with her was ‘non-negotiable’. After the divorce, Charles and Camilla were often seen together, and Camilla soon began to make public appearances. But there was a lot of public doubt about whether they could marry. For those who admired Diana deeply, Charles’s liaison with Camilla looked liked a betrayal of her memory. In addition, many people still felt that a man who would one day become Supreme Governor of the Church of England should not marry a divorced woman.
After the death of Diana, Charles and Camilla attended many of the same events, but did so separately, arriving and leaving at different times to make the point that they weren’t appearing as a couple, while also getting people used to seeing them together. But in January 1999, they made a point of going to a party together, and telling the press that they were doing so. Their relationship was headline news again - and it was clear that Camilla was a central and public part of Charles’s life.
The following year, the Queen, who did not approve of out-of-wedlock relationships like her son’s with Camilla, finally yielded to the inevitable and accepted the pair as a couple. The way was open for the couple to live together openly and to move toward becoming man and wife.
Marriage
In February 2005, the marriage of Charles and Camilla was announced. The marriage was to be a small civil ceremony in Windsor the following April, followed by a blessing in St George’s Chapel. In the event, the run-up to the wedding wasn’t easy. The newspapers portrayed several minor hitches as major disasters:
● Hitch No. 1 - The venue problem: The plan was for the civil marriage ceremony to be held in Windsor Castle. But the royal household realised too late that if the Castle was to be licensed for weddings, everyone would be queuing up to be married there - you can’t just licence a place for one wedding. The plans changed, and the ceremony was arranged for Windsor’s Guildhall, where civil weddings are normally held in the town.
● Hitch No. 2 - The Queen declines to attend: When it became clear that Charles and Camilla would have to get married in the Guildhall, the queen said she wouldn’t go, but would come to the blessing in the chapel afterwards. The press portrayed this refusal as a snub, but it wasn’t - she just didn’t want to go to a ‘public’ ceremony in the High Street. She was still going to the blessing, which for her, a religious woman and head of the Church of England, was the important thing.
● Hitch No. 3 - The Pope dies: Pope John Paul II died a few days before the wedding, and the funeral was arranged for Friday 8 April, the planned wedding day. To allow key participants to go to the funeral, the wedding had to be rescheduled for Saturday 9 April.
The wedding passed off successfully, and the press generally covered it with warmth. Even the Prince’s popularity rating, at an all-time low around the time of Diana’s death, was beginning to inch upwards.
Since the wedding, the Prince of Wales and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, have been able to ‘go public’ as a working royal couple who both love each other and get on with the work their role commits them to. The future of the Windsor monarchy seems more secure, and its main players seem more content than they have been for years.