She said, “Horse. You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove, are you?” I said, “No.” She said, “I just wanted to know,” and I thought as far as she was concerned that was her communication route. Still too immature to understand all the messages coming my way.’
Camilla remembers the lunch as being entirely friendly. Diana was extremely excited, showed off her ring with glee.
Camilla had been one of the girlfriends the Prince of Wales had told Diana about, and Diana had made him give her a solemn promise that there was no longer anyone else in his life, and that there would never be any other women in his life. He had happily given his promise on both counts. His mistake was thinking this was all he needed to say. He was telling the truth – he intended to be entirely monogamous – and as a man of honour, he expected Diana to accept his word as the truth. Similarly, as a man of honour, when Diana asked him whether he still loved Camilla he said ‘yes’, which was also the truth. Camilla was very special to him, but so were a number of other women. He loved and still loves them all, and no doubt always will.
The Prince of Wales is a thinker and a philosopher, a spiritual and religious man, and love to him bears little relationship to the two-dimensional ‘love’ discussed on the pages of romantic novels and women’s magazines. This is why he used that dreadful phrase ‘whatever love means’ when asked by a television reporter about his feelings for Diana on the day of his engagement. He is too honest for his own good; he can’t give the simple answer that everyone is waiting for, because for him the matter is not simple.
It didn’t occur to him that a white lie would have been kinder. He didn’t put himself into Diana’s position, didn’t ask himself how this nineteen-year-old girl might be feeling or whether she might need greater reassurance. Most young people are intrinsically jealous, and the notion that someone can love more than one person without diminishing their feelings for another only comes with age and experience. For an intelligent man, there are astonishing gaps in his awareness.
What he didn’t realise at the time was that Diana was a particularly vulnerable nineteen-year-old, with an abnormally pronounced sense of suspicion and insecurity, and a strong feeling that people were conspiring against her. This had not been apparent during their courtship, but immediately after the engagement was announced the Prince sensed a change in Diana which he didn’t understand. Where before she had been so happy and easygoing, she became moody and wilful. She displayed a terrible temper, which he had never seen before; it came from nowhere, along with hysterical tears, and could be gone as quickly as it came. She suddenly turned against people she had appeared to like and said they were out to get her, to undermine her, or spy on her.
He was not the only one to notice the change and to be worried about her. But Charles put it down to nerves and the stress she had been under during the past few months, which he assumed would all disappear once the wedding was behind them.
Diana hated being left alone. She wanted the Prince to be with her all the time and couldn’t understand why his work had to take precedence over their being together. His days then, as now, were a relentless round of public engagements, meetings, paper work and sporting commitments from early in the morning until late at night, often taking him out of London. Almost immediately after the engagement was announced, he left on a tour of Australia, which had been fixed long before, and there was a very tearful and loving farewell at the airport.
During Charles’s various absences Diana was looked after by whichever members of his staff were not accompanying him. The Prince’s private secretary at that time was the Hon. Edward Adeane, a brilliant barrister, Eton and Cambridge educated, whose father and grandfather had been private secretaries before him. The Prince’s assistant private secretary, Francis Cornish, came from the Foreign Office. His predecessor, Oliver Everett, was also ex-Foreign Office and had returned there in 1980, but was invited back specifically to help Diana before the wedding, and afterwards became her official private secretary. It was an intellectually high-powered team, who were all at least twice her age. Sympathetic as they might have been, and flattered by her charm and giggly girlishness, they had no idea of how to handle someone so young, whose experience and education were so severely limited. They were astonished when, for example, she asked where Dorset was, or confessed she didn’t know the capital of Australia.
Diana had no inhibitions about her ignorance and laughed such moments off carelessly, but it was an awkward situation for them all. Socially, she had much in common with the private secretaries, but she found their intellect threatening. She was more comfortable with Michael Colborne, a former grammar school boy, whose office she shared. He could see how lost she was and would spend hours talking to her, which was all she wanted to do. The Prince’s staff were not prepared for this. They would never have expected to sit and idly chatter with the Prince, and found it hard to do so with Diana. He was the Boss, and the relationship between employer and employees was always strictly professional. They expected it to be the same with Lady Diana Spencer.
But Diana was scarcely more than a child. She had never employed anyone in her life. She had never had much of a job, never worked in an office. She had no idea what was expected of her and no idea of what she was taking on in marrying into the Royal Family. Her concept of what lay before her was little more than a romantic notion.
Like thousands of girls of a similar age, who devoured Barbara Cartland novels and soap operas on television, she had no interest in a career. All she wanted was to be loved, looked after, have babies and live happily ever after. She thought she had found a man who would provide all of this and more. In the excitement and thrill of the chase she had visualised none of the reality.
She could be forgiven. There had been no Princess of Wales for over seventy years – when the future George V was created Prince of Wales in 1901 and his wife, Princess May of Teck, became Princess – and there was no job specification to guide either Diana or her courtiers. There was no one she could consult who had experience of her predicament. No commoner had married into the Royal Family at such a senior level this century, not even the Queen Mother. Her husband became George VI, but at the time of their marriage he was Duke of York, and only second in line to the throne.
Several people did try to give Diana some help, Michael Colborne and Susan Hussey amongst them, but Diana was not altogether receptive. She didn’t want to be told what to do and when. In the past when she had not wanted to do something, with the indulgence of divorced parents, she had never been coerced. Accepting the discipline of royal life did not come easily.
The Family and their courtiers all took what they did so much for granted, they assumed that, being a Spencer, Diana would have no problems and would know what to expect. She was, after all, a member of one of the most aristocratic families in Britain and had lived from the age of thirteen in one of the most traditionally run stately homes in England. Her brother is the Queen’s godson, one of her sisters is the Duke of Kent’s goddaughter. Her father had been equerry to the Queen. Both her grandmothers had been ladies-in-waiting to the Queen Mother; and both the Spencers and the Fermoys had been close friends of the Royal Family for several generations. It was not an unreasonable assumption that Diana would know what royal life was all about. That was partly why she had seemed so tailor-made for the role. But she was lost, and no one realised.
When she went to spend the weekend at Royal Lodge at Windsor, for example, no one had thought to tell her that if she wanted to go out for a walk in the Great Park she had to tell someone where she was going. She returned to find the whole place in turmoil, alarms going and her policeman on the verge of heart failure. The following Monday morning she told Colborne what had happened and said she didn’t know how she was going to cope.
‘This is going to be your life,’ he said. ‘You’re never going to be on your own again. And you’re going to change. In four to five years you’re going to be an absolute bitch, not through any fault of your own, but because of the circumstances in which you live. If you want four boiled eggs for breakfast, you’ll have them. If you want the car brought round to the front door a minute ago, you’ll have it. It’s going to change you. Your life is going to be organised. You open your diary now and you can put down Trooping the Colour, the Cenotaph service, Cowes Week, the Ascots. You can write your diary for five years