Battle of Brothers

‘Anne works very hard,’ explained one palace insider, ‘and sees her sister-in-law picking up the glory. She’s sick to the back teeth with it all.’

The conflict came into the open when it was time to choose the godparents for William. In 1977 Anne had invited Charles to be the godfather of her firstborn, Peter Phillips, but the prince did not return the compliment when it came to William – or, rather, according to rumour, he had very much wanted to invite his sister, only to be blocked by his wife. Diana had sensed the disdain of her no-nonsense sister-in-law, who was reported to find Diana ‘gooey’, and even to have labelled her ‘the Dope’.

William’s godparents were certainly not headline-catchers: the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey, and cousin Alexandra of Kent; the Duchess of Westminster; Lord Romsey; the inevitable Laurens van der Post; and another of Charles’s friends – Constantine II, the Hampstead-dwelling ex-king of Greece.

Prince Philip shrugged his shoulders at the roll call, assuming that the omission of Anne would be corrected next time round. But when Prince Harry appeared in the autumn of 1984, Anne would once again be omitted from the list – and the princess took it personally when she discovered that her younger brother Andrew had been selected from her siblings as a godparent for Harry, rather than herself. There was a former flatmate of Diana’s, Carolyn Bartholomew; a wealthy polo-playing friend of Charles’s, Gerald Ward; Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones; a Gloucestershire neighbour, Celia Vestey; and the painter Bryan Organ, who had executed flattering portraits of both Diana and Charles – ‘Yawns all round’ was the press verdict on the list.

But Anne made her feelings obvious on the day. As the three-month-old Prince Henry Charles Albert David, third in line to the British throne, was being baptised at Windsor in the presence of the Queen, the Queen Mother, Philip and the rest of the royal family, there were two conspicuous absentees. His aunt Anne and her husband Captain Mark Phillips were out in the Gloucestershire countryside, eighty-five miles to the west, shooting rabbits. They had sent their children Peter, seven, and Zara, three, to the ceremony along with their apologies. But their shooting party, they explained, took precedence – it was a long-established date.

‘Don’t read a family row into it, for God’s sake,’ said Mark’s mother Anne. ‘The Princess and my son invited a party of 10 guns for a shoot three months ago. They decided it would be unfair to let these people down.’

Looking back three decades later from the twenty-first century, the 1984 row over Anne not being invited to become Harry’s godmother seems neither here nor there. But just imagine if Anne had been serving as the prince’s godmother in the years after the death of Diana in 1997. Would she not then have become the closest thing that Harry, twelve, had to a real mother?

In those tragic circumstances, Anne might well have operated alongside brother Charles as a more harmonious parental unit for Harry than anything the boy had previously known. The princess might be notorious for her prickly, shoulder-shrugging ‘bolshie’ mode, but this stemmed from an independence of mind that could see through the royal nonsense – harmonising with the reservations that Harry himself would come to feel about the values of royalty as he grew older.

Anne would certainly have been the one senior member of the royal family who was on the same wavelength as Harry as his disaffection with ‘royalness’ developed – and that disaffection was to grow so strong that he would take his own son across the Atlantic in order to escape the same fate. Would it have made any difference to this outcome if the prince had been under the godmotherly guidance of the ‘Great Stroppy One’ who successfully raised her own children, Peter and Zara, without titles and as non-royals?

Anne did manage to keep both of them living, for the most part, in Great Britain.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.