The Queen, page 28
“When I rang up,” said one ex-courtier who was out of the country, “there was genuine uncertainty about whether it [the funeral] was going to be public or private. If it had been private, guidance wouldn’t have been needed.”4
In the meantime, the circumstances surrounding the interment of Diana’s boyfriend Dodi Fayed were swift and straightforward, the businessman laid to rest in a private ceremony at a Muslim cemetery in Woking, south London, within hours of returning home from Paris.
Unlike Dodi, Diana was an internationally-known personality as the queen’s senior advisers, including the new prime minister Tony Blair, were quick to recognize.
The prime minister, who was at his Sedgefield constituency in the north of England, immediately appreciated the global implications. He told his press secretary Alastair Campbell: “This is going to unleash grief like no one has ever seen anywhere in the world.”5 After further discussion among the Spencers, the palace, and Downing Street, the family accepted that a private funeral was inappropriate for a much-loved public figure.
The queen’s private secretary Sir Robert Fellowes was pivotal. Because he was married to Diana’s sister Jane, he was able to steer the Spencer family toward accepting a more regal and public send-off for the princess.
Back at Balmoral, Charles readied himself to break the tragic news to his sons. At seven fifteen, Charles woke fifteen-year-old William and relayed the devastating story. “I knew something was wrong,” William later recalled, “I kept waking up all night.”6 His father explained that he had to fly to Paris and that the boys would stay with their grandparents at Balmoral. “Thank goodness we’re all together,” was the queen mother’s immediate response. “We can look after them.”7 Her mood, according to a courtier, was “steely.” Like the rest of the family she was trying to cope with the tragedy by sticking to routine. Fortunately Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips and the boys’ official companion, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, were guests at the castle so they could help keep the young princes occupied.
Before the queen left for church she spoke to the prime minister. By now the family had released a brief statement saying: “The Queen and Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news.”8 When she spoke to Blair she made it clear that no further statement would be made, but she had no objection to him making a public tribute that morning.
He later recalled: “She was most worried about the impact on the boys, obviously sad about Diana, and concerned about the monarchy itself because the Queen has a very strong instinct about public opinion and how it plays out, and, in that first conversation, we agreed to keep closely in touch with it.”9 He had only been prime minister for four months, and he now had to navigate treacherous social terrain that was essentially unknown to the Labour politician, namely the tensions between the Spencers and the Windsors and between the Prince of Wales and the queen.
In an emotional tribute on the Sunday morning, Blair captured the national mood of shock and bewilderment at losing such a radiant individual so young. In a telling sentence he said: “She was the people’s princess and that’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.”
Though his words were well intentioned, the phrase people’s princess would not be received favorably in certain quarters. As Archbishop Carey watched his tribute he felt that Diana’s alternative iconography would be set against the royal family. So it proved. As he recalled: “These fears were soon realized. There seemed to be mounting hysteria, fuelled by the media’s focus on this beautiful but essentially ordinary person.”10 Political observers believed that the prime minister’s phrase, people’s princess, was not entirely welcomed by the queen. It led initially to a degree of strain that was, as the week progressed, largely dissipated.
At the time Prince Harry, then twelve, was bewildered. He and his elder brother had attended the Sunday-morning church service at Crathie at the queen’s suggestion but there was no mention of his mother’s passing, in either prayers or the sermon. Instead visiting minister Reverend Adrian Varwell stuck to his prepared sermon about moving house and joked about Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. Little wonder that Harry asked: “Is it true that Mummy’s dead?”11 While the kirk’s minister Reverend Robert Sloan explained later that he did not mention the late princess for fear of further upsetting the boys, it played into an emerging narrative that the royal family was cool to indifferent about their mother’s death.
Certainly not every member of the family felt Diana’s death as keenly as others. Princess Margaret had fallen out badly with her after she appeared on the TV show Panorama questioning Charles’s fitness to be king and talking of her ambition to be a “queen of people’s hearts.” Not only did Margaret consider these sentiments a betrayal of the Prince of Wales but, as far as she was concerned, there was only one queen—and it was her sister. From then on Margaret would have nothing to do with Diana and expected her children David and Sarah to ignore her, too. As a result she was deeply irritated that she had to stay at Balmoral in court mourning instead of flying off to Tuscany where she was looking forward to her annual cultural holiday in the sun.
While she complained about the “fuss” Diana had caused, Margaret was, like her sister, concerned about the impact on William and Harry. “Terrible to lose your mother at that age, and with little Harry’s birthday only a few days away,” she said.12
Like Harry and William, millions of people worldwide were disbelieving of Diana’s death. It was only at the sight of the British Aerospace 146 of the queen’s flight, with the princess’s coffin aboard, making its final approach from Paris to RAF Northolt in west London that the enormity of her loss began to sink in. Her coffin, draped with her own Royal Standard, was borne in silence across the tarmac by six RAF pallbearers, watched by the prime minister and other government and military dignitaries. If the Spencer family needed any further convincing that a private ceremony was wholly inappropriate, then the drive into central London along the A40 dual carriageway was further proof. Thousands of people, some openly weeping, lined the roadside or watched from bridges and other vantage points as the cortege drove past, her body taken first to a private mortuary in west London and then to the Chapel Royal at St. James Palace where she lay in state.
The outpouring of grief took everyone, not just the royal family in their Scottish home, by surprise. Early on that fateful Sunday morning, Princess Margaret’s chauffeur Dave Griffin was at Kensington Palace discussing the tragic events with the duty police inspector. The officer predicted a handful of bouquets from a few well-wishers, not appreciating for a moment that the woman he waved through the gates every day had touched a nerve in the global psyche. By the late afternoon Kensington Palace was a floating moat of cellophane-wrapped floral tributes, poems, pictures, and lighted candles. As Carey predicted, the contrasting iconography of Diana and the royal family came into play, the perceived warmth, accessibility and normality of the princess conflicting with the cold, indifferent and aloof House of Windsor whose members used duty and tradition as a shield. Over the next few days Britain succumbed to flower power, the scent and sight of countless bouquets bearing witness to the love and respect that people felt for a woman who, they believed, had been scorned during her lifetime by the Establishment. Thousands of people, most of whom had never met the princess, made their way to Kensington Palace to pay homage. In a spontaneous outpouring of feeling, they expressed their grief, their sorrow, their guilt and regret. Total strangers hugged and comforted one another. Others prayed. Some mourned Diana with a greater intensity and feeling than they had done for their own lost family members. While the church service at Crathie, where Diana’s name was not mentioned, jarred with the public, resentment was beginning to build up as the palace seemed more interested in maintaining protocol than reaching out to the grieving population. At first the police would not allow the public to place bouquests outside the royal palaces while those wishing to pay written tribute were waiting many hours to sign one of the handful of books of condolence. The fact that the flagpole at Buckingham Palace was naked—traditionally only the Royal Standard is flown and then only when the sovereign is in residence—soon became a focal point, the absence of a raised flag or one flying at half-mast seen as a sign of the royal family’s invisibility.
The Sun newspaper was typically blunt: “Where is the Queen when the country needs her? She is 550 miles from London, the focal point of the nation’s grief.”
There was a bitter irony in this criticism of the queen. In the past she had been accused of putting duty above motherhood, particularly during the childhoods of Prince Charles and Princess Anne. Now she was being attacked for placing her compassion and concern for her grandchildren above her obligation to the nation. At Balmoral the queen’s priority was to keep the boys occupied just as she had in 1979 when she had shown Timothy Knatchbull “unstoppable mothering”13 as he recovered from the Mountbatten assassination. Prince Philip was a constant presence, reassuring and consoling. He set the boys to work preparing food for barbecue picnics, Princess Anne took Harry out exploring the Balmoral wildlife, while Peter and Zara Phillips and the boys went quad biking, horse riding, fishing, and shooting.
In between endless meetings, their father brought out the old family albums to take them on a trip down memory lane. Harry also took solace in the arms of Tiggy Legge-Bourke, the woman he called his “second mother.”14
During that fateful week William and Harry valiantly tried to absorb their family’s fortitude and stoicism: “I kept saying to myself that, you know, my mother would not want me to be upset,” William recalled years later. “She’d not want me to be down. She’d not want me to be like this. I kept myself busy as well—which is good and bad sometimes—but allows you to kind of get through that initial shock phase.”15
If they had returned to Kensington Palace they would have been kicking their heels and listening to the wailing and keening outside the gates. “Thankfully, we had the privacy to mourn and to try to collect our thoughts and have that space away from everybody,” William later recalled. “We had no idea the reaction to her death would be quite so huge.”16
At the business end of planning Diana’s funeral, the queen’s management team together with officials from the prime minister’s office in Downing Street and representatives from the Spencer family had worked into the early hours to come up with a proposal tailored to remember and celebrate a unique human being. Early on Monday morning her senior officials, Fellowes, Janvrin, and the lord chamberlain, the Earl of Airlie, outlined what they considered to be an appropriate commemoration of Diana’s life. Working, as Airlie put it, de novo as there were no precedents, the idea was to create a funeral that neatly meshed the ancient and modern with the traditional and innovative.
Diana’s coffin would be pulled on a horse-drawn gun carriage, flanked by twelve pallbearers from the Welsh Guards. The standard military procession would be replaced by five hundred workers from Diana’s charities.17 Airlie argued: “It was important to bring a cross-section of the public not normally invited to the Abbey—the people Diana associated with.” Everyone nervously awaited the sovereign’s verdict. Thankfully the queen agreed to the proposals and made it clear that the royal family was not detached from this major event. “She was very happy with the charity workers,” courtier Malcom Ross recalled.18 Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell was impressed by the queen’s flexibility, creativity, and even risk taking—hardly words normally associated with the head of state.
There were some elements she refused to move on, in particular her family’s wish to grieve in private in Scotland. She also objected to Earl Spencer’s demand that Diana be buried at Althorp rather than Frogmore.
This spikiness between the House of Spencer and the House of Windsor continued throughout the week, as the Archbishop of Canterbury recalled: “I had sent a first draft of the prayers I proposed to read at the service to the Dean of Westminster for comments from those directly involved. I was taken aback when the reaction revealed intense bitterness. It was reported to me that the Spencer family did not want any mention of the Royal Family in the prayers, and in retaliation Buckingham Palace had insisted that they must have a separate prayer for the Royal Family, and that the words ‘people’s Princess’ be removed. While I was saddened by this, I considered it essential to get the prayers right, for everyone’s sake. It was a time of exceptional bewilderment, and the strain was affecting everybody.”19 The archbishop was also concerned that Earl Spencer had been invited to give the address when traditionally only members of the clergy preach at funeral services. Though he contacted Diana’s brother and urged him to bring out the Christian message of hope and life evermore in God, he got the impression that the earl had other ideas about what he wanted to say.
There was another conflict brewing that had the potential to be far more damaging than Windsor versus Spencer, namely the disagreements between St. James Palace and Buckingham Palace. Or the advisers of the queen and of Prince Charles. In the early going the prince’s spin doctors attempted to portray Charles as decisive and democratic while all the queen’s men dithered, delayed, and hid behind precedent and tradition.
In their misleading narrative Elizabeth was depicted as initially opposed to the use of an aircraft of the queen’s flight to bring her body home. Such was the anger generated by this intransigence that her deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin is said to have told the queen: “What would you rather ma’am that she came back in a Harrods van?” (The department store Harrods was owned by Mr. Al-Fayed.) Again the original idea was for Diana to remain in a public mortuary in Fulham, west London, but Charles, on his own initiative, countermanded the order.
In reality both the queen and her private secretary Sir Robert Fellowes agreed from the beginning that a plane should be sent to Paris, that she lie in state at the Chapel Royal, and there should be a full ceremonial funeral.
As an official who was present during that week recalled: “One of the most dangerous things that took place during those fraught days was that the two palaces were totally at odds with each other.”20 In short Charles’s camp was prepared to throw anyone under the bus in order to protect their man—and that included the queen and other members of the royal family. This conflict continued long after Diana’s burial.
As well as the flag flying—or lack of it—at Buckingham Palace, the issue of the boys walking behind the funeral cortege was the most contentious. Earl Spencer said he should be the only one to walk while representatives of the royal family pointed out that traditionally all the close male relatives accompany the coffin. This tussle was not resolved until the evening before the funeral. The boys became something of a shuttlecock among the different parties.
As one Downing Street aide recalled: “There was an amazing moment when we were on speaker with who we thought was Janvrin alone and Prince Philip came booming over the squawk box. The Spencer side had been saying what the role of the children had to be and Philip suddenly blasted, ‘stop telling us what to do with those boys! You’re talking about them as if they are commodities, have you any idea what they are going through!’ It was rather wonderful. His voice was full of emotion, a real voice of the grandfather speaking.” Later in the week, the duke again made an impromptu contribution. “Our worry at the moment is William. He’s run away up the hill and we can’t find him. That’s the only thing we are concerned about at the moment.”21
Twenty years later William tried to explain his confused feelings during that terrible week. “There’s nothing like it in the world. There really isn’t. It’s like an earthquake has just run through the house and through your life and everything. Your mind is completely split. And it took me a while for it to actually sink in.”22 During this time he found consolation from his grandmother who, as he described later, “understood some of the more complex issues when you lose a loved one.”23
As the boys sought solace with their family and the senior royals and their officials tried to work out a unique funeral for a unique individual, on the streets of London the mood had turned genuinely nasty. The initial target was the tabloid media for hiring the paparazzi who apparently chased Diana to her death, and then the royal family, not only for their slow and muted response to the tragedy but for their indifference to her during her lifetime.
With the crowds swelling around the palaces at a rate of six thousand an hour, Downing Street officials feared that rioting could break out. It was taking ten hours standing in line to sign books of condolence. Still no flag. Where is the queen? asked mourners in the Mall. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? chanted the tabloids. SHOW US YOU CARE, they hysterically demanded in ninety-six-point type. Still the queen refused to budge and return to the capital.
Courtiers tried in vain to convince the queen and Prince Philip to recognize the increasingly precarious situation and fly back to the nation’s capital. Tony Blair, sensing matters were genuinely getting out of hand, called Prince Charles to make clear that tide of public opinion could not “be turned back, revisited or ignored.”24 In the end an alliance of the Prince of Wales, the prime minister, and every royal adviser came together and, over a conference call, managed to persuade the queen of the magnitude of the situation. Once she was convinced that inaction was harmful to the monarchy, everything changed. She agreed to return to London a day early, go for a walkabout outside the palace, broadcast to the nation, and, for the first time in history, allow the Union Flag to fly at half-mast at Buckingham Palace.
On that final evening at Balmoral, Prince Philip suggested the family attend the service at Crathie Kirk. This time Diana was mentioned in a prayer for the family. On their way back to the castle, the boys were photographed looking at the mounds of flowers and reading the notes outside the gates.25
In this highly charged atmosphere the queen’s return from Scotland and her decision to broadcast her own tribute to Diana from Buckingham Palace immediately helped to heal the evident dislocation between monarch and the people. The prime minister advised her to show that she was vulnerable. He told her: “I really do feel for you. There can be nothing more miserable than feeling as you do and having your motives questioned.”26
