Diana's Nightmare - The Family (37 page)

When Philip finally made a solo visit to Merle, she was living in an idyllic white marble palace called Villa Ghalal (a local word meaning Love) on a clifftop overlooking the Pacific at Acapulco. Her husband was 'working in Mexico City', so Merle went to meet the Duke's plane on her own. At the airport, she informed the British ambassador that she had come to collect her house guest. His Royal Highness, she was politely told, would make the journey in an official car. 'Then you can find him somewhere else to stay,' Ms Oberon declared haughtily. Protocol was waved aside and a triumphant Merle swept off with the Prince, leaving the ambassador speechless on the tarmac. 'The Queen knew all about Philip's friendship and she trusted him implicitly,' said a friend. Ms Oberon was quite specific on that point. 'I don't believe in extra-curricular activities in a marriage,' she said. Philip was feted at a dinner under a canopy of trees and he and Merle strolled along the villa's tropical terraces to the sound of a waterfall. He returned on more than one occasion and, in a romantic gesture, once fired a salute from
Britannia
as he was passing along the coast. Queenie Thompson had finally got the recognition she had craved all her life.

DIANA blamed not only his parents but Lord Mountbatten for Charles's inability to relate to her problems. Uncle Dickie was an ardent bridge player, but marriage wasn't his strong suit. Nor were women in general. Diana knew his reputation for seducing young men eager for advancement in the Royal Navy. 'So bright, so bent,' opined the informed peer. This filled her with misgivings. Her circle buzzed with stories about Dickie's marriage to Edwina.

I met Mountbatten on several occasions and he was singularly uninterested in women,' said a lady of letters, in his Navy days, he was a known homosexual. My relative, Dr Douglas Wright, was Surgeon Commander on one of Mountbatten's ships before World War II. He told me he was summoned to Mountbatten's cabin and found him taking a bath. He proceeded to make a pass at the doctor but was turned down.'

'What about your career?' asked Lord Louis.

'You don't understand,' replied Dr Wright. 'I'm planning to make a career outside the Navy.'

When Mountbatten persisted, he was told: 'Just remember, I'm the doctor - the man with the needle.'

'Sure enough,' said his relative, 'Mountbatten got a dose of the clap in the Far East and Dr Wright had to treat him.'

'Edwina had many lovers because Mountbatten was hopeless in bed, although they managed to have two children,' said the royal historian. 'She loved ritzy nightclubs like the Kit-Kat or the Embassy, but she also liked slumming it in the bohemian joints of Fitzrovia. Apart from Pandit Nehru, whom she met much later, she was very keen on Hutch, a black singer and pianist. People who heard the rumour thought she was having an affair with Paul Robeson and it became the subject of a libel case, which Edwina won. It was Hutch they had in mind.'

Mountbatten, the man born with a silver tongue in his mouth, had made powerful enemies during his sorties into the aristocracy. As he grew older and more eccentric, the rumours spread wildly. One of his quirks was to play golf blindfolded to make the game more difficult. This was fun, and harmless, as were many of his idiosyncrasies. But other gossip accused him of indulging in 'sado-masochistic activities'.

'He was said to have been seen furiously riding his horses in black leather, accompanied by similarly garbed women of the nobility, driving spurs into the horses' flanks until they bled, and whipping himself into an orgasmic frenzy as he did so,' wrote royal author Charles Higham. 'He would apparently subject his female partners to picturesque punishments, all of which at least one member of his staff diligently reported.'

Just six weeks before his assassination at the hands of the IRA, Mountbatten sat at the bureau in a small upstairs room of Broadlands and talked about Edwina. After her death, he had inherited the estate, which gave his enemies yet another reason to dislike him. This day, he looked far beyond the manicured lawns which sloped down to the River Test and into the generous chunk of Hampshire which was now his and through which he still rode every day.

'I came first to Broadlands on a glorious June day in 1922,' he told Chris Hutchins. it belonged to Edwina's family and I was calling on her father, Colonel Wilfred Ashley, later Lord Mount Temple, on my return from India where we had become engaged. I'd originally met Edwina in England when she called to see my parents. I had been greatly attracted to her - she was a very pretty and charming girl - but I'd done nothing about it.

'Her grandfather had died and he had turned out to be a multi-millionaire. I didn't feel like marrying a girl who was very much richer than me. I went off to India with my cousin, the Prince of Wales. We were living in a little house in Delhi when Edwina arrived to stay with the Viceroy, the old Marchioness of Reading. At a Viceregal ball on February 14, 1922, between dances four and six, I popped the question and she accepted me.

'There were all kinds of problems to overcome, arrangements to make. The Prince of Wales telegraphed his father George V to get his permission and I wrote to my mother. The Viceroy wrote to Edwina's aunt to this effect: "I'm worried about Edwina; I'm afraid there's nothing that can be done about it: she's very much in love with young Lord Louis. He's a good-looking young chap but I only wish she could marry someone with better career prospects." ' The Viceroy was not to know that the good-looking young chap was himself destined to be (by appointment) the last Viceroy of India and after independence (by invitation) the nation's first Head of State.

Despite his own noble birth - his great-grandmother and godmother was Queen Victoria and his mother's youngest sister was the last Tsarina of Russia - Lord Louis had no home to call his own when he met his wife-to-be.

'My father (Prince Louis of Battenburg) had a castle in Germany which he sold in 1920. I'd told him that I didn't want to live in Germany whatever happened, and I told my mother, who had Kent House on the Isle of Wight, that, being in the Navy, I had no intention of having to catch a boat every time I wanted to go home. When I got engaged to this girl, I discovered to my astonishment that she was heiress to the house called Broadlands and so I thought I'd better go and call on her father. Thankfully, he took a less dim view of me than the Viceroy of India! We got married on 18 July, 1922, and the Prince of Wales was my best man.' This blind spot was astonishing, considering Mountbatten's reputation as one of the most intrepid social mountaineers of his age.

Broadlands already had a history of its own. The Ashleys were descended from the Viscounts Palmerston, the third of whom was Prime Minister in Queen Victoria's time. But it was the second Lord Palmerston who left his mark on the now magnificent Georgian mansion, including the remarkable collection of Greek and Roman sculptures he collected during a grand tour of Europe more than two centuries ago. Strolling across the lawns outside, Lord Louis looked up at the east face with its towering pillars. 'The house was built well over 400 years ago; the first Palmerston got it with all the land - five-and-a-half thousand acres - for £26,500. But the second Palmerston was responsible for giving it this squared Palladian style.' Back in the house, Lord Louis walked through the dining room with its collection of Van Dycks, the Wedgwood room where the family took tea, and the library where a black and white photograph of Princess Anne looked incongruous among grand oil paintings of the three Viscounts Palmerston.

That was Mountbatten, incongruous. The Queen Mother had her own reasons for mistrusting him deeply. He had claimed after her husband's death that, as Elizabeth had married his nephew, the House of Mountbatten now occupied the throne of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Dominions. Churchill intervened angrily to reinstate the Windsors. But Tricky Dickie still claimed victory. In
The Mountbatten Lineage,
he wrote: 'The House of Mountbatten reigned for two months but historically it takes its place among the reigning houses of the United Kingdom.'

He had yearned to write those words most of his life.

'The more I see of her, the more I like her'

Prince Albert

MORE than anything, the death of Ruth, Lady Fermoy might have been expected to reunite Diana and the Queen Mother. The grand old lady passed away on the morning of Tuesday, 6 July, 1993, the day the nation was due to pay tribute to her royal friend. But Diana was missing from the excited throng that gathered in a garden party setting near the statue of Achilles at the entrance to Hyde Park, unaware of the sadness that clouded the summer sunshine.

Although Kensington Palace was only a mile away along Rotten Row, Diana was understandably in mourning for her grandmother. Besides, she and the Queen Mother had fallen out so long ago that her visits to Clarence House were just a memory.

It had already been a difficult day for the Queen when, a few minutes after midday, she pulled a lever to unveil the commemorative gates that marked the life of her mother, the extraordinary woman born ninety-three years ago as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

To drumbeats and a trumpet fanfare, giant cranes lifted the pink drapes that hid the two pairs of intricately woven metal gates from view. A steel cable, however, caught on a spike on top of one gate, ripped some of the material from its moorings and left it flapping like a tattered flag above Her Majesty's head.

'It's just like the Grand National,' said an American tourist, referring to the starting wire that had fouled the field at Aintree. Nothing, not even a simple unveiling ceremony, seemed to be going smoothly any more. Things had been even more chaotic at Buckingham Palace that bright summer's morning. At ten twenty-five a.m. while the Queen was still inside the Palace, fourteen women demonstrators had cut the wire protecting the outer walls and climbed into the gardens. After the break-in by Michael Fagan, who wandered into the Queen's bedroom unannounced eleven years earlier, every known security device had been installed to guard the Palace at a cost of millions a year. Alerted by jangling alarms, police located the intruders with the help of video cameras hidden in the grounds. Seven were quickly rounded up. But another group, armed with banners and placards protesting against British nuclear tests in the Nevada Desert, headed towards the Palace to see the Queen. They were at large for fifteen minutes before police grabbed them. Her Majesty was furious at yet another bungle in her midst on the very day the nation was honouring the woman she still called 'Mummy'.

Others, including Diana, found her a far more disconcerting character, regal but quite sharp, a Bowes-Lyoness, in fact. More than any other royal, the Queen Mother had the power to disturb her deeply, yet they were similar in two respects. The Queen Mother understood the workings of Diana's mind precisely because she was not only from the same stock, she was just as fiercely protective towards her own interests. Her antennae picked up Diana's distress signals soon after the marriage and she quickly realised that Diana was everything Lady Fermoy had said. Too young, self-centred and prone to exaggeration. 'She is very human, but saint she ain't,' opined the titled Chelsea lady of the Queen Mother.

Diana knew she had made a fatal mistake by discussing the Queen Mother with James Gilbey. 'His grandmother is always looking at me with a strange look in her eyes,' Diana said on the Squidgy tape, it's not hatred, it's sort of interest and pity mixed in one.' When the tape became public, Diana knew she had committed the unpardonable sin of revealing her true feelings not only about the Queen Mother but 'this f***ing family', as she had unwisely called the other royals. It was at this point that the Queen Mother knew Diana had to go.

Her method was to refuse to attend Princess Anne's wedding to Commander Tim Laurence, it was said that she did not approve of second marriage. It was said that she did not want to travel up to Scotland in the cold. Rubbish! She told the Queen and Prince Charles she would not sit in the same church as Diana,' said the Palace insider.

The situation was all the more awkward for Diana because Lady Fermoy had still been a lady-in-waiting at Clarence House. 'Diana is worried that the Queen Mother will pursue a vendetta against her to the end. She knows what happened to the Duchess of Windsor. You have to remember that long before the Queen Mother became the nation's favourite granny, she was a young woman who had to tackle some very serious problems,' said the friend. 'She was only thirty-one when Mrs Simpson first met Edward, the same age as Diana in 1992. There is absolutely nothing anyone can teach her about royals behaving badly.'

'The similarities between the Queen Mother and Princess Diana as young women are quite striking,' said the royal historian. 'The point of departure comes because Lady Elizabeth married Prince Albert, not his brother, the Prince of Wales, whom she would have preferred. To put it bluntly, he looked her over, but she wasn't his type. It was the other way round for Diana. She switched her sights from Prince Andrew to Charles once he became a better prospect. Like Diana, the young Elizabeth was extremely ambitious. All those protestations that she didn't want to marry into the Royal Family are poppycock. She was very keen to marry David and only accepted Bertie after he proposed for the third time. By then, it was obvious that the next king was out of reach.

'When he abdicated, she was appalled that her husband might be passed over for one of his two other brothers, George and Henry. This was a possibility because the Abdication affected the succession. I suspect that Edward's cronies put this about to upset Bertie. George, the Duke of Kent, was a bisexual drug addict and Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, an alcoholic. She was determined that Bertie should get the Crown.'

Many years later, the Queen Mother explained: 'It was my duty to marry Bertie, and I fell in love with him afterwards.' 'Call it duty if you like, but it confirms the belief that he wasn't her first choice,' commented the royal historian. 'Of course she wanted her husband to be King.'