of Prince Charles
When Charles first met Diana she was a nondescript schoolgirl of sixteen – his girlfriend’s little sister. He was in the midst of a lengthy and enjoyable relationship with Sarah, and they met at Althorp, where he had been invited to a shoot. Diana was nothing more than a slightly plump, noisy teenager, but he made a profound impression on this particular teenager and Diana secretly set her heart on him then and there and determined that she would become Princess of Wales.
Sarah’s romance with Charles came to an end when she spoke candidly to the press about it, saying, ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’ But they remained friends, and the Prince invited Sarah and Diana to his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace a year later, and a few months after that, in January 1979, they were both invited as guests of the Queen to a shooting weekend at Sandringham. That very weekend, their father, Earl Spencer, had come out of hospital following a brain haemorrhage that very nearly killed him.
Later that year Diana was staying with her sister, Jane Fellowes, in her house at Balmoral to help with Jane’s new baby, while the Royal Family was in residence at the castle. But the first time Charles saw her as anything more than a jolly and bouncy young girl whom he enjoyed taking out from time to time as one of a group to make up numbers was in July 1980, when they were both invited to a weekend party with mutual friends in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic and humiliating bust up with his latest passion, Anna Wallace, and he and Diana were sitting side by side on a hay bale while their hosts prepared a barbecue, when the conversation turned to Mountbatten, who had died the previous August. What Diana said touched the Prince deeply – as she knew it would.
‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, “It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.”’
It is ironic that her sensitivity about Lord Mountbatten should have triggered Charles’s interest in Diana as a future bride, for Mountbatten would not have approved of the match. In losing his beloved great-uncle, his ‘Honorary Grandfather’, the Prince had lost his mentor; also, for a considerable time, he had lost his way in life. Mountbatten would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity; but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain them through fifty years of marriage. He might also have spotted her acute vulnerability and the damage sustained by her painful start in life, and known that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, was not the right man to cope with her needs.
Mountbatten’s murder had an unimaginable impact on the Prince’s life; it knocked him entirely off-balance. As he wrote in his journal on the evening he heard the news, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …
‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.’
Mountbatten had criticised the Prince of Wales, most notably for his selfishness, but he also made him feel he was loved and valued, which neither of his parents had ever been able to do. Where his father had cut the ground from under his feet, Mountbatten had built him up, listened to his doubts and his fears, rebuked him when he felt he had behaved badly, encouraged him, cajoled him, provided a sounding board for his wackier ideas, a shoulder to cry on, and given him some much needed confidence. There was no one else in his life at that time who could do this.
From the time when Charles was so touched by their exchange on the hay bale, to the announcement of their engagement, the romance was brief – less than seven months – and their moments alone were rare, but throughout the course of the relationship, Diana was in charge. She knew what she wanted and she went all out to get it. She had cherished her dream of marrying the Prince since their first meeting three years before, and with great cunning ensured her dream came true. She had always said since she was a small child that when she grew up she was going to be someone special. Her siblings called her ‘Duch’ – because she was determined to be a duchess at the very least. When the opportunity arose, she threw herself at the Prince, quite blatantly and brazenly. Yet it was only the more astute of Charles’s friends who realised what was going on. He didn’t appear to notice. Like most men he was easily flattered, particularly by a pretty young woman who professed great interest in everything he said and did, and manifested great sympathy and understanding for the trials and tribulations of his life. He found her quite intoxicating, and she was willing and amenable to do whatever might please him. She slotted neatly into whatever plans he already had, she talked about her love of the country and of shooting and her interest in taking up horse riding, and she liked his friends. And crucially, she made him laugh. She was fun.
But it was all a sham. Diana didn’t like any of these things. She hated the countryside, had no interest in shooting or horses, or dogs, and she didn’t even really like his friends. She found them old, boring and sycophantic. What she enjoyed was the city. She liked shopping in expensive Knightsbridge department stores, and lunching in smart London restaurants. She liked cinema and pop music.
Diana was a victim, who needed love and attention and constant reassurance – needs she carried to an exaggerated degree from her childhood. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had run away from a violent and unhappy marriage when Diana was six years old and the experience of that loss – her feeling of rejection that followed when her mother disappeared – left deep scars in Diana’s psyche.
Frances Shand Kydd has been unfairly maligned for deserting her children, not least by Mohamed al Fayed when they attended an investigative meeting in Paris in June 1998 about the crash that killed both their children. He lashed out at her, saying, ‘She didn’t give a damn about her daughter … If you leave a child when she’s six years old how can you call yourself a good mother?’
Whatever her qualities as a mother, Frances had every expectation when she left home for good just before Christmas in 1967 that it would be a temporary separation. She intended to sue her husband for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, and it was unthinkable for a mother in these circumstances not to be given custody of young children. Her husband, Johnnie Althorp, who later became the eighth Earl Spencer on his father’s death, was a well-respected, genial, if rather dim, member of the aristocracy. He had been an equerry to George VI, then to Queen Elizabeth II.
Abuse ran in the Spencer family marriages and their thirteen years together had not been happy. To compound her misery, Frances had lost a child, a baby boy called John, born after Jane and Sarah, in January 1960, who only lived for ten hours. Diana was born eighteen months later, and then in May 1964 Frances gave birth to another boy, Charles, the son and heir her husband so badly wanted.
Shortly afterwards she met and fell in love with Peter Shand Kydd, a wealthy married businessman. Their affair broke up both marriages, and Frances seized the opportunity to escape. In the autumn of 1967 she and Johnnie had a trial separation, and at Christmas it became permanent and she left the family home. But her plans to sue for cruelty went badly awry. Shand Kydd’s wife, Janet, sued him for divorce on the grounds of his adultery with Frances. With that proven, Frances had no defence when Johnnie also sued for divorce because of their adultery. The cruelty suit was thrown out, and in the custody proceedings that followed, he brought some of the most influential people in the land to speak up for him – including her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a considerable snob, who was said to have been appalled that her daughter had run off with a man ‘in trade’ – albeit a millionaire.
As a result, custody of Jane, Sarah, Diana and Charles was given to their father, who employed a string of itinerant nannies to take care of them. Frances was only allowed to have them on specified weekends and parts of the school holidays.
Diana said, ‘It was a very unhappy childhood … Always seeing my mother crying