The Queen, page 22
The queen, who was riding sidesaddle, continued the ceremony without demur, smiling at the crowd and occasionally patting Burmese with her left hand. Lady Diana Spencer, who was attending her first Trooping as Charles’s fiancée, recalled that everyone around the queen marveled at her sang froid. She seemed utterly unruffled by the experience, the sovereign airily dismissing the danger she had just faced. Prince Charles later commented that his mother was “made of strong stuff.”22 It took a lot to unsettle her equilibrium.
There was, too, a sense of fatalism about her behavior. Unlike other heads of state, she always made it clear that she wanted security kept to a minimum. Her personal protection officer knew to keep a discreet, unobtrusive presence. It was many years into her reign, for example, that she accepted the need for police outriders to stop traffic, as she didn’t want to inconvenience fellow road users. She was backed to the hilt by Prince Philip, who had little time for the cocoon of security. There is, too, a streak of obduracy in her makeup. She is the queen and she will, for example, decide whether or not she will wear a hard hat while out riding. Well into her nineties, she insisted on an Hermès scarf as her only protection.23 Safety campaigners were concerned, but as far as the monarch was concerned she didn’t want to have to mess her hair in case she had to be on public parade shortly after her morning ride.
After the engagement was announced, the queen went out of her way to make Diana feel welcome. She had deputed several courtiers, notably her lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey and Charles’s assistant private secretary Oliver Everett, to show her the ropes. When Charles was away on overseas visits, the queen took the future princess under her wing. She installed her in the principal guest room at Windsor Castle, and the couple dined together frequently and walked her pack of dogs around the grounds. By now Diana was suffering from the eating disorder bulimia nervosa, a condition of bingeing and forced vomiting. Though her wedding dress makers David and Elizabeth Emanuel and her close friends, particularly Carolyn Bartholomew, noticed her rapid weight loss, the queen seemed not to have seen the warning signs. At the time eating disorders were surrounded by ignorance; it would have been remarkable if the queen had even been aware of this condition. Even if she had noticed Diana’s weight loss she would have instinctively put it down to the nerves felt by many brides, particularly one whose wedding day was about to be broadcast worldwide. Although she was busy, the queen did set aside time to, as a former courtier recalled, “make a big fuss over Diana.”24 In the run-up to the wedding Diana was based at Buckingham Palace, where the queen frequently invited her future daughter-in-law to join her for lunch or dinner. Diana, however, made endless excuses to avoid her company. She did not wish to alert the queen to her condition. The queen found her behavior perplexing and put it down to nerves. For her part, Diana found the queen friendly but intimidating. “I kept myself to myself,” she recalled. “I didn’t knock on her door and ask her advice because I knew the answers myself.”25
In the weeks before the wedding, Diana would often visit the kitchens to while away a few minutes in idle conversation. Barefoot, wearing jeans and a sweater, she helped with the washing up and on one occasion buttered the toast of a junior footman. Her excursions behind the green baize door irritated several chefs who felt she was spying. Eventually the queen tactfully asked her to stop these visits as it was upsetting the equilibrium between Upstairs and Downstairs. What she didn’t realize was that Diana visited the kitchens so that she could gorge on packets of cereal and cream. Then she would make herself sick afterward.
At the time the queen was fully and enthusiastically invested in her son’s marriage. Not only did she pay £28,000 ($135,000 in 2021) for Diana’s oval sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring, she footed the bill for the opulent wedding ball at Buckingham Palace where the extensive guest list included First Lady Nancy Reagan together with all the crowned heads of Europe. The splendid, extravagant affair was a personal triumph for the queen. It was certainly a night to remember, though the grand affair was set against a backdrop of high, and mounting, unemployment, riots in deprived areas of London and Liverpool, and a government, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that preached and practiced austerity and low taxes. She saw the queen for an audience every week for eleven years, but the two women, though cordial, were never close. Thatcher’s official biographer Charles Moore described the prime minister as “too nervous” during these meetings for them to be productive.26
While the juxtaposition of the two Britains was striking—particularly to foreign television crews—on the wedding day itself, July 21, 1981, the focus was on Diana’s meringue of a dress with its record-breaking twenty-five-foot train, the romantic contention of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Robert Runcie that this was “the stuff of fairy tales,” and the enthusiastic crowds that lined the route from St. Paul’s Cathedral to Buckingham Palace to watch the horse-drawn parade.27 It was only later that the head of the Church of England admitted to doubts, the prelate believing that the couple were ill suited and that the marriage would not last. Inside the cathedral, there were others who were equally concerned about the marriage’s foundation, including the bride herself. One of her abiding memories was spotting Camilla Parker Bowles, who was wearing a gray outfit with a matching pillbox hat, and hoping that that relationship was now at an end. It was a sentiment that would have found an echo with the queen, who had edged toward tackling her son on the subject only to be told by the Prince of Wales, according to a rumor recorded in historian Hugo Vickers’s diary, “My marriage and my sex life have nothing to do with each other.”28
For all the doubts, everything seemed well when they returned to Balmoral from their Mediterranean honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia. They were healthy, suntanned, and all smiles as they greeted family and staff who formed a guard of honor along the castle drive. “It was a glorious afternoon,” recalled a member of staff. “We cheered and we clapped and everything seemed so cheerful and bright.”29
It was an illusion, the truth about their honeymoon emerging over time in hints and whispers. The princess, who suffered from a combination of exhaustion, bulimia, and jealousy, worried that her husband’s heart still belonged to another. When photographs of Camilla fell out of his diary and he wore cufflinks with C intertwined with C—a gift from Mrs. Parker Bowles—it was the prelude to an out-and-out row.
They were all smiles for a media photo call by the banks of the river Dee, the princess, in a response to a question about married life, saying that she could “highly recommend” it.30 During their extended stay at the castle the couple would go for long walks together, or he would take out his easel and paints and Diana would practice her embroidery. On other occasions Charles read to her from the works of his friend, the South African philosopher Laurens van der Post, or from Carl Jung. To add to this scene of romantic tranquility, the prince would give his bride love notes or billets-doux.
Diana, though, was anything but content. She found her revised status and the family dynamic difficult to come to terms with. It was only years later that she expressed her true feelings. She told me: “All the guests at Balmoral just stared at me the whole time and treated me like glass. As far as I was concerned I was Diana, the only difference was people called me ‘Ma’am’ now, ‘Your Royal Highness’ and they curtsied.”31
For her part she felt an outsider, her husband always deferring to the queen or queen mother rather than taking her needs into account. An early sign that all was not well with the fairy tale was that Diana stayed in her room rather than joining the rest of the family for picnics or barbecues. Her resolute refusal to join in irritated the queen not only because of the discourtesy to her as host but also because it interrupted the smooth running of the castle as it meant changing staff rotas so that someone was available to attend Diana herself.
Princess Margaret came to her rescue, suggesting to the queen that Diana was having difficulties adjusting to her role and that she should cut her some slack. “Let her do what she likes,” said Margaret. “Leave her alone and she will be all right.”32
But the issues she faced involved much more than cutting Diana some slack. She had been overtaken by what she later called “the dark ages” of her life. Diana was consumed with jealousy, whether warranted or not, regarding Charles and Camilla, her bulimia was rampant, and she suffered wild mood swings. Nor did it help that it was one of the wettest and windiest Balmoral holidays on record. Diana agreed to seek professional counseling and advice. A doctor was summoned from London and, after a confidential consultation, concluded that she needed time and space to adjust to the drastic change in her circumstances. She had drawn a similar conclusion herself. Drugs were prescribed but she refused them. Instead she and Charles moved out of the big house to Craigowan, a small shooting lodge on the estate. She invited friends, including her former flat mate Carolyn Bartholomew, to stay. At the end of October she was able to announce that she was expecting her first child. The queen and the rest of the family were delighted, their happiness tempered by hope that motherhood would end Diana’s “little local difficulties.”
10
Marriages Under the Microscope
Everyone from the queen downward was taken aback by the intense and continuing interest in the Princess of Wales. The queen and her advisers thought that, once the excitement of the wedding had dissipated, the princess would fade into the background and Prince Charles would renew his position in the royal limelight. It just didn’t happen. Even newspaper and magazine editors were surprised by the public’s reaction to the latest addition to the royal family. No matter how flimsy the story or grainy the image of the future queen, Diana sold and kept on selling, the princess seen as the golden goose who laid the circulation eggs. As she succinctly put it: “One minute I was nobody, the next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of this family, you name it, and it was too much for one person at that time.”1
The consequences were ominous. Diana, suffering badly from bulimia and morning sickness, found herself followed every time she left Balmoral, Kensington Palace, or Highgrove. A visit to the shops or the gym became an unpleasant obstacle course as she navigated her way past the numerous photographers who harassed her.
By instinct and convention the queen held back from interfering in the marriages of her children. However, seeing the daily trial by media endured by the pregnant princess, the queen felt that she could address that particular problem. She tended to agree with her daughter-in-law, who emphasized that she needed “time and space” to come to terms with her new royal role. The queen’s press secretary Michael Shea was asked to organize a cocktail party for newspaper, TV, and wire services editors. Only Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun, the most aggressive of the tabloids, refused the invitation for the pre-Christmas gathering.
Shea told the assembled throng that Diana was “increasingly despondent” about the fact that she could not leave her front door without being followed by photographers.2 He asked for restraint and the queen, in an unusual show of support and concern for her daughter-in-law, appeared and spoke to various groups of editors to reinforce that message.
It was hardly a mutual appreciation society. Barry Askew, then editor of the now defunct News of the World, told the queen that if the princess wanted privacy she should send a servant to buy sweets from the shops instead of going herself. The queen tartly responded: “That was the most pompous remark I have ever heard, Mr. Askew.”3
The irony of the queen, who rarely visited shops, criticizing the Sunday editor’s insensitive remarks was lost in the general and gleeful condemnation of the hapless Askew, who shortly afterward was sacked.
Within a matter of weeks, the queen’s personal appeal to the media was in tatters. In February 1982, two tabloids, the Sun and the Daily Star, published pictures of Diana, then five months’ pregnant, running through the surf in a bikini on the island of Windermere in the Caribbean where she and her husband were enjoying a holiday in the sun. The prince and princess were livid while the queen described the intrusion as “one of the blackest days in the history of British journalism.”4 The honeymoon between the royal family and the media, such as it was, was very firmly over. Though both newspapers affected contrition, the plain facts were that photographs of the princess, especially the princess in a bikini, sold like hotcakes. The queen and her advisers were in direct conflict with the immutable laws of the market.
Thankfully the ever-eager media had not gotten wind of the real drama that was taking place beneath the queen’s roof. With every passing day, it became clearer that the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the future king and queen, was not working. A tearful confrontation between the two at Sandringham in January 1982, several weeks before they headed off for their holiday in the sun, exposed the growing divide.
They had a blazing row about Charles and his indifferent behavior toward his young wife. What took place next shocked the queen and those present. Diana, according to her account, threw herself down the stairs at the North End staircase that leads to the queen mother’s rooms. Even though she was in tears, Charles accused her of crying wolf and stalked out of the house to go riding. As she lay in a crumpled heap on the stairs, the queen was one of the first to arrive. Diana later told me: “The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking—she was so frightened.”5 Her concern was that Diana could possibly suffer a miscarriage.
Others who were present recall a less dramatic encounter. They remember that Diana seemed to trip as she was walking down the stairs and ended up by the corgi food bowls at the bottom of the staircase, which the queen mother was replenishing at the time. The queen and other members of the family were alerted to the incident by the queen’s page. When they arrived, Diana was dusting herself off, said that she was absolutely fine, and apologized for causing a fuss. As a precaution she was examined by a doctor to confirm that all was well with the princess and her unborn child.
Even if the queen had taken her at her word, and it was a trip rather than a deliberate self-inflicted fall, Charles’s indifference and Diana’s emotional behavior were cause for alarm. She was in a predicament. The queen couldn’t force the couple to love or even like each other. She had played that card with the calamitous marriage of her sister Princess Margaret and her husband Tony Snowdon. That had ended in the first divorce in the royal family since Henry VIII. The difference was that the Snowdons’ marriage went wrong after a few years, not a few months. Her watchwords for her son and daughter-in-law were to be patient and show understanding. This marriage could not conceivably end in the divorce courts.
In March 1982 the arrival of a group of Argentinian scrap metal workers on the isolated and inhospitable British island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic put an end to these concerns—at least for the time being. Ostensibly the party landed to demolish an old whaling station, though diplomatic sources suspected that they were a provocative advance party sent at the behest of the ruling Argentinian military junta, which had long claimed dominion of this remote territory and the larger Falkland Islands some miles west. Matters quickly escalated and the islands, which were guarded by a small contingent of Royal Marines, were overrun by massed Argentine forces. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vowed to retake the British colony and mustered a task force to reassert Britain’s dominion.
The hastily assembled naval armada included Sub-Lieutenant Prince Andrew, who was a Sea King helicopter pilot based aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible. On Thursday, April 1, Thatcher traveled to Windsor Castle to warn the queen about the potential conflict in the South Atlantic and the government’s intent to defend Britain’s sovereign territory. When the issue of Prince Andrew and his role in the conflict was raised, the queen, speaking on behalf of her son and her husband, who saw active service during World War Two, insisted that Andrew be treated like any other naval officer.
According to one report the prince threatened to resign his commission if the Invincible sailed without him. Shortly after the mini summit, Buckingham Palace released a short statement from the queen: “Prince Andrew is a serving officer and there is no question in her mind that he should go.” On April 5 the prince and his fellow officers sailed off to an uncertain and dangerous future in the South Atlantic.
What neither he, the queen, nor Mrs. Thatcher realized at the time was that the Argentinian junta considered the capture or death of Prince Andrew and the sinking of the Invincible as their primary war aim. At a meeting of the Argentinian chief of staffs in Buenos Aires, Admiral Jorge Anaya explained to his colleagues, “This is an easy war to win. All we have to do is sink one ship—the Invincible and Britain will crumble.” His plan was to launch an audacious air raid and concentrate the entire Argentinian air force on the British aircraft carrier.6
Prince Andrew’s role was already inherently dangerous. Not only was his unit, the 820 Naval Air Squadron, involved in search and rescue, submarine reconnaissance, and airborne supply, but his Sea King was assigned the role of an Exocet decoy. The Argentine air force was armed with French-made Exocet missiles, and the theory was that when one was launched at the Invincible from an enemy jet, the helicopter would attract the projectile away from the ship. Once it was spotted heading for the helicopter, the pilot would soar upward and the Exocet fly harmlessly underneath before falling into the water. At least that was the theory. In reality the Sea King was a sacrifice to save the aircraft carrier. It was such a terrifying assignment that years later when he gave an interview to the BBC regarding his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew admitted that the adrenaline rush he suffered while under fire in the Falklands conflict left him unable to sweat.
