Charles: Victim or villain?

Diana’s sisters spent most of the flight to Paris in tears. The Prince was controlled but clearly very shaken. Stephen Lamport took everyone through what would happen at the other end. There was a possibility, he warned Sarah and Jane, that Mohamed al Fayed might be at the hospital and if he was the Prince would have to speak to him; how did they feel about that? Both sisters were adamant they wanted nothing to do with Mr al Fayed; they didn’t even want to see him.

In the event he wasn’t there. By the time the Prince’s party arrived al Fayed had already taken his son’s body home for prayers in Regent’s Park Mosque, followed by a Muslim burial that night at a cemetery in Woking, Surrey. On arrival at the hospital the Prince was met by President Chirac, who had come in person to express his nation’s great sadness at the death of the Princess.

With protocol observed, the Prince and the two sisters were taken to see Diana’s body. A doctor accompanied them into the small room on the first floor of the hospital, as well as a priest, whom they had specifically asked for. It was a distressing sight for which none of them was adequately prepared. Diana’s body was laid out in a coffin which had been flown to Paris earlier that morning on a Hercules from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Levertons, the north London family firm of undertakers, were an integral part of Operation Overlord. The Princess had been embalmed and was wearing a dress that her butler, Paul Burrell, had flown out with earlier, but the body that lay so still and cold and empty looked nothing like the Diana they had known. Her head had been badly damaged in the crash and her face was distorted. The Prince told Diana’s sisters how glad he was that he had not taken William and Harry to Paris with him. It would have been much too distressing for them.

They stayed with Diana’s body for seven minutes. Sarah and Jane were sobbing helplessly when they left and were taken to a room for some privacy while they recovered. The Prince was not crying when he came back into the corridor, but it was obvious that he had been, and was visibly very distressed. His eyes were quite red, his face racked with pain. A small crowd was waiting in the corridor, most of them hospital staff, and also a number of men in dark suits. The Prince came out of the door, stopped, closed his eyes and bit his lip. Then after a moment’s pause, while he fought to regain his composure, he set off down the corridor, a private man no longer, to shake hands with the doctors and nurses and thank them for all they had done. As someone watching remarked, ‘He went from human being to Windsor’ – as nearly fifty years of training ensured he would. Duty above all else. When he heard that the parents of the Welsh bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, employed by the al Fayeds, who had been the sole survivor in the accident, were at the hospital, he immediately said he must talk to them.

Moments later the coffin, by now closed and draped with the maroon and yellow of the Royal Standard, was carried out of the room. It was suddenly obvious that the men in dark suits were the undertakers, and without a word needing to be said, everyone in the corridor spontaneously formed two lines and silently bowed their heads as the coffin passed between them and down the stairs into a waiting Renault Espace.

There were thousands of people in the streets outside. The whole of Paris seemed to know who was in the Espace and what was going on. To a man, woman and child they were silent. As the motorcade made its way slowly through the city and out on to the périphérique towards the airport, the people on the pavements bowed their heads in silence, people in street cafés stood up as the cars passed, each one flanked by two large motorbikes on either side, and no one made a sound. The Prince was deeply moved, and in the silence that enveloped the aircraft on the flight home, with everyone wrapped up in their own thoughts and emotions, he said, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that everybody stood up.’

But if the tribute paid to Diana by the Parisians had been moving, the arrangements that had been made unbeknownst to him for the next stage of her journey enraged him. While Sarah and Jane disappeared into another part of the cabin to have a cigarette, the Prince asked what arrangements had been made after they touched down at Northolt. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would be there, he knew, also the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie, who is the most senior member of the Queen’s household. He wanted to know how many RAF people would be there to carry the coffin, whether the flowers he had said he wanted had been sorted out, whether there would be a proper hearse to carry the coffin, and where they were planning to take Diana’s body. The answer to that final question was the mortuary in Fulham, commonly used by the Royal Coroner.

‘Who decided that? Nobody asked me. Diana is going to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Sort it. I don’t care who has made this decision. She is going to the Chapel Royal.’

Sandy Henney spent much of the remainder of the flight on the plane’s telephone ensuring that the Prince’s instructions were carried out to the last detail.

The decision had almost certainly been made by Robert Fellowes, doing what he imagined the Queen would have wanted, without actually asking her, but his second guessing was not far off the mark. There is no doubt that in the course of the days leading up to Diana’s funeral, the hostility that both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had felt towards their erstwhile daughter-in-law came dangerously close to the surface on several occasions. She had caused nothing but trouble and embarrassment over the years, and here she was, in death, still managing to cause mayhem.

The Prince’s relationship with Diana had been turbulent and troubled and they were no longer man and wife, but Diana was still the mother of his children and, in a way, he still loved her. He wanted her treated with the dignity she deserved. After Sandy’s hasty and heated phone calls from the plane, the plan about the mortuary was changed and it was agreed that the Princess of Wales would be taken to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, just yards from the office they shared so disastrously until their divorce. She was also to have outriders. And while he was at it, her sisters Sarah and Jane were to be given a plane to take them wherever they wanted to go, and if they wanted to go with the body into London first, then so be it. So at the Prince’s bidding, the plane which had brought the Prime Minister from his constituency to Northolt to meet the returning party was kept on hold, but in the end was not required. The sisters accompanied the body into London and chose to make their own ways home.

The plane carrying the coffin touched down at Northolt and taxied out of sight of the reception party, where it came to a halt. One of the crew climbed out and opened up the cargo hatch, and the group onboard listened in silence to the bolts holding the coffin in place being loosened beneath them. The plane then taxied on and came to a halt in front of the airport building where Tony Blair, David Airlie and 150 or so photographers and pressmen were waiting quietly on the tarmac. In silence the coffin was unloaded and carried to the waiting hearse. The only sound to be heard was the Royal Standard flapping in the breeze.

Wrapped in thought, his emotions in turmoil, the Prince of Wales climbed back aboard the aircraft, accompanied by Stephen Lamport, to fly back to Balmoral and be with his grieving sons, while the hearse made its way slowly down the A40 into west London.

It was only then that the real enormity of what had happened began to dawn on the Palace staff. The motorway, the bridges and embankments – and when they ran out, the roads and pavements – were full of cars and people who had come to watch and weep as Diana’s coffin passed by. Tributes had started pouring in from all over the world, and flowers were being laid at the gate of every building with which Diana was associated.

This, they realised, was going to be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

TWO

A Nation Mourns

‘A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’

Charles Spencer

In the days following Diana’s death, the future of the monarchy hung perilously in the balance. As the mountain of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home grew ever higher, spreading further and further into the park, the people of Britain, stunned, shocked and numb with grief, looked for someone to blame for their awesome sense of loss.

The national reaction to Diana’s death bordered on hysteria. Few of the people who mourned had ever met the Princess, yet her compassion and vulnerability had touched a chord deep in the public psyche. Everyone grieved for the stranger whom they felt they knew, with a depth of feeling never before shown for a public figure. Months later, counsellors were still treating people who had been unable to come to terms with their grief. In a rather studied tribute, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, called her ‘the people’s Princess’, and it was the perfect epithet: the people felt she cared and spoke for them, and in a curious way she probably took greater comfort from her relationship with strangers than with almost anyone else.

‘I feel like everyone else in this country,’ said Tony Blair. ‘I am utterly devastated. We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and through the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people’s Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.’

Whatever the psychological and sociological explanations for the nation’s reaction to her death might be, there was not only grief, but also anger on the streets of London – anger directed in very large part at the Royal Family. As Charles had instinctively feared would happen, some went so far as to suggest that he was responsible for her death. Had he loved her instead of his mistress, they said, this would never have happened. They would still have been married and she would never have been in a car racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. Yet at the same time others were leaving tributes to both of them outside Kensington and all the other palaces, ‘To Diana and Dodi, together for ever’, and paying eulogies to the man who had brought Diana true love and happiness.

There was also anger at the tabloid press, which encouraged the paparazzi by paying such huge sums of money for photographs and stories. In the weeks before her death, the red-top papers, and some of the broadsheets too, had been full of long-lens photographs of Diana and Dodi canoodling on his father’s yacht in the South of France. Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, had not held back when he heard the news at his home in South Africa. ‘I always believed the press would kill her in the end,’ he said. ‘But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.’ At that time it was thought the paparazzi were entirely responsible for the accident; and he said that the editors and proprietors of every newspaper which had paid money for intrusive pictures of his sister had ‘blood on their hands’. The public, of course, had not been slow to buy these newspapers, all of which argued a vicious circle of supply and demand. But this was not the time to draw too much attention to hypocrisy.

Strangely, no blame was ever levelled at Dodi, or even his father, who had provided the car they were travelling in, and who also employed the driver, Henri Paul. He had not been the regular driver and, it soon transpired, he had been several times over the drink-driving limit that night. The proper driver had been sent off in a decoy car. It was an elaborate attempt to try to foil the paparazzi, who were all waiting outside the Ritz Hotel, where they had had dinner that night, ready to follow them home. Yet Dodi failed to make the driver slow down, and he was doing well over 100 mph when he ploughed into the underpass. Almost overnight, the paparazzi ceased to be seen as the sole cause of the accident. Afraid that the tables might turn and that, as Henri Paul’s employer, he might find himself liable, Mohamed al Fayed shared his own private theory about the crash with the press. It was, he suggested, a conspiracy cooked up by the Queen and the security services to assassinate Diana so that she would not marry Dodi; such a marriage would have given William, second in line to the throne of England, a Muslim and Egyptian step-father. It was a ludicrous notion invented by a man who had spent the months since his son’s death telling lies about Diana’s last words, which medical evidence suggested could never have been uttered. Yet in the spring of 1998 he was given airtime on ITV to explain why he believed the Queen had murdered Diana and Dodi. His words were picked up not only in Britain but in Egypt, and as a result the Queen’s life is now at risk. Her security arrangements have necessarily been stepped up considerably, so much so that a friend whom she was visiting recently said over dinner, ‘Ma’am, I thought things were supposed to be better with the IRA these days.’

‘No,’ the Queen replied. ‘They think there’s a good chance I’m going to be killed by a Muslim.’

The Queen would no doubt have been horrified by a marriage between Diana and Dodi, and William and Harry no less appalled. And they would not have been alone. Millions of people were shocked by the overtly sexual nature of the relationship, which Diana seemed to be flaunting so brazenly to the press. No one was labouring under the illusion that she was still the shy, blushing innocent Princess. Her various well-documented affairs had put an end to that. Apart from the much publicised revelations about James Hewitt, she had been publicly blamed by the wife of rugby player Will Carling for destroying their marriage. In his autobiograpy, published in October 1998, Carling was coy about the relationship, saying, ‘I was attracted to her but I never made a pass at her. To be honest, if I had had a sexual relationship with her I wouldn’t say I had. I don’t think that would be right.’ At the time, however, he boasted quite openly to his friends about the sexual nature of his relationship with Diana.

The press was becoming increasingly critical of Diana’s conduct. She had subjected her boys to Dodi and, worse still, to his father, and she was paying the price.

‘The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William …’ wrote Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail on 27 August. ‘As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.’

‘Princess Diana’s press relations are now clearly established,’ wrote Bernard Ingham for the 31 August edition of the Express. ‘Any publicity is good publicity … I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.’

On the same day, Chris Hutchins wrote in the Sunday Mirror, ‘Just when Diana began to believe that her current romance with likeable playboy Dodi Fayed had wiped out her past liaisons, a new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! I must remember to take it up with Diana next time we find ourselves on adjacent running machines at our west London gym.’

But then, suddenly, the music stopped and, as in the party game, all those who were still moving were caught out. Overnight, Diana found instant beatification; pity those columnists who had committed their thoughts to print on the Saturday afternoon, little knowing that their target would be a saint by the time their words hit the streets on Sunday.

‘She was the butterfly who shone with the light of glamour which illuminated all our lives,’ wrote Ross Benson in the Express; ‘A beacon of light has been extinguished,’ said Lady Thatcher, the former Prime Minister; ‘A comet streaked across the sky of public life and entranced the world,’ wrote Simon Jenkins in The Times; and Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail called her ‘A gem of purest ray serene.’

Her love affair with Dodi was given new status: she had found ‘true love at last’, and the couple may very well have been on the brink of announcing their engagement. It was a week of instant judgements and media saturation, and while one pundit after another filled the airwaves or the column inches on the loss to the nation, the nation itself displayed its distress on the streets of every town and city. People of all ages and from all walks of life wept openly and clasped one another for comfort. They queued, in some places for hours, to sign books of condolence, and in many instances people sat down and wrote in the books for half an hour. In London, they pilgrimaged from one royal palace to another to lay flowers with messages to Diana and Dodi.

Meanwhile the Royal Family sat, stoic and silent, in Scotland, and the nation’s anger grew. It was assumed they didn’t care about the nation’s grief. If they had cared – the received wisdom went – they would have come to London to be with the people. There had been no statement about Diana’s death, so it was assumed they didn’t care about that either. Instead, it was business as usual. That the family had even gone to church on the morning of Diana’s death – just hours after hearing the news – and taken the boys with them, and that there was not so much as a quivering lower lip to be seen, provoked more outrage. What further proof could there be that everything the Princess had said about this cold, heartless family she had married into was absolutely true?

Yet in the privacy of their own home there had been plenty of tears. The Prince of Wales is an emotional man, and does cry, but he was brought up to keep emotion of all sorts to himself: a characteristic which, in a less touchy-feely, emotionally transparent society, was never questioned. Indeed, to keep one’s grief to oneself was a sign of strength. Yet in 1997 it was taken as a sign of insensitivity. It is not a cold heartless family, as close friends know, but it is rare for anyone outside that charmed inner circle to see a display of either emotion or affection.

In a more religious age, taking a grief-stricken family to church would have been seen as the natural thing to do. In the material nineties it was seen as insensitive and unfeeling. In fact, they had gone to church that Sunday before Charles set out for Paris because Prince William had specifically said that he would like to ‘talk to Mummy’. It was a week in which the children were given choices about everything, when their needs came before public relations. Church has always been a central part of the family routine and in the emotional turmoil of that Sunday, the familiarity, routine and permanence of a church service was comforting to them all.

God is very much a part of the Prince’s life and his thinking and philosophy. He doesn’t wear it on his sleeve, but he is a sincere believer that having a spiritual dimension to life, having faith of some sort or another – whether it is in God, Mohammed, Buddha or anyone else – is important to the human soul. He also believes that religious and cultural diversity is a real strength, and fears for Scotland and Wales breaking away from the rest of the UK for much the same reason.

His own choice of religion is Prayer Book Church of England, and he is a regular churchgoer no matter where he is. When he is at Highgrove on a Sunday, he will attend one of five village churches run by Chris Mulholland, vicar of the neighbouring village of Leighterton, who holds services in rotation. He has boycotted Tetbury Church ever since the vicar, John Hawthorne, denounced the Prince in the pages of most national newspapers for his adultery with Mrs Parker Bowles. It did not endear him to the Prince, particularly as Charles had given his support to a number of Tetbury Church fundraising initiatives.

Among the Prince’s great loves are old churches – an enthusiasm he discovered he shared with Matthew Butler, his assistant private secretary, who introduced him to one or two he had never seen before. Fitting an old church or two into the schedule at the end of a day was a great treat for the Prince and when, at the end of his secondment, Matthew returned to his career in business and was awarded an MVO, he chose to receive it in Cardiff Castle, which was unusual for someone used to working in London and who lived in Tetbury. ‘Matthew, what are you doing here?’ asked the Prince as he ceremoniously handed over the medal. He explained that having organised the Prince’s twenty-fifth anniversary tour of Wales it seemed more appropriate than Buckingham Palace. ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ said the Prince, then, suddenly lighting up, ‘Matthew, I saw this wonderful church the other day …’

Of the churches they visited together, there was one in Staunton Harold in Leicestershire which the Prince found particularly poignant. It had been built by Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, a Royalist, and ancestor of the present Earl Ferrers, during the Protectorate in 1653, after the turbulent reign of Charles I. He died of natural causes while imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1656. There was an inscription over the west door, which the Prince seemed to take to heart:

‘All things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished or profaned.’

With his religious conviction running deep, the Prince firmly believes in life after death. He talks about death being ‘the next great journey in our existence’, and is dismayed that as westerners we have become separated from the cycles of Nature, and what they have to teach us. Speaking at a Macmillan Fund anniversary a few years ago, he said, ‘The seasons of the year provided for our ancestors a lesson which could not be ignored; that life is surely followed by death, but also that death can be seen as a doorway to renewed life. In Christianity the message is seen in the mystery of resurrection, and in the picture of Christ as a seed dying in the ground in order to produce the new life that supplies bread, and sustenance.’

The subject of death has fascinated the Prince for a long time. He has suffered great personal loss on a number of occasions – most notably the death of his cousin Prince William of Gloucester in an air crash in 1972, and the brutal murder of Lord Mountbatten, Nicholas Knatchbull and others by the IRA in 1979. Despite the difference in age, his great-uncle Mountbatten was closer to him than anybody else, and the news that he had been suddenly and mercilessly blown to bits by a terrorist bomb while out fishing with his family in Ireland had been completely devastating. Charles was also with his friend Major Hugh Lindsay when he was killed in a horrifying skiing accident in Switzerland in 1988. He has watched friends die, and the children of friends, and visited hospices and hospitals and talked to strangers about their experiences of death, as Diana herself did so sympathetically.

For Charles, death is a mystery and a painful parting, but not something to fear, and Diana had much the same view. She too believed in life after death and frequently consulted mediums and clairvoyants. She was quite certain that her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, Lady Spencer, who had died in 1972 when Diana was a child, kept guard over her in the spirit world.

Balmoral is the Royal Family’s spiritual home, the place where they instinctively feel relaxed and at ease, where they adopt an informality that is not seen in any of the Queen’s other residences. They had stayed there because it was the most sensible place for the boys to be, and that week William and Harry were the top priority. They love Balmoral like the rest of the Royal Family. They love the freedom, the walking, the fishing, the stalking, riding, go-karting; and in that week when their entire world had been turned upside down, they needed the comfort and familiarity of home. Buckingham Palace is little more than the Royal Family’s institutional headquarters, and to have brought the boys to London would have been to imprison them within four walls. At Balmoral they could be certain of some privacy in which to begin to take in the enormity of what had happened, and to prepare for their mother’s funeral and the most traumatic ordeal of their young lives.