Elizabeth the Queen (45 page)

When Prince Charles finished his five years in the Royal Navy at the end of 1976, the tabloid press dedicated itself to chronicling his romantic pursuits, a campaign that intensified in November 1978 when he turned thirty, the benchmark he had set three years earlier as “a good age for a man to get married.” One of his passing fancies was Sarah Spencer, but Diana caught his eye during a pheasant shoot at Althorp, the thirteen-thousand-acre estate in Northamptonshire that Johnnie Spencer inherited when his father died in 1975. Charles was twelve years older, but Diana at age sixteen shamelessly flirted with her sister’s beau and developed a full-fledged crush on the heir to the throne. Over the next several years their paths crossed periodically, but it wasn’t until July 1980, when they were guests at a house party in Sussex, that their romance began. Diana was alluringly pretty, with big and expressive blue eyes and a becoming blush to her cheeks, an “easy and open manner,” and an apparent love of the country life Charles cherished. He was particularly moved by her compassion over his loss of Dickie Mountbatten the previous year.

A fast-paced courtship followed, with invitations to the Cowes races and Balmoral, where Diana had visited twice previously to stay with her sister Jane, who had married the Queen’s adviser Robert Fellowes in 1978. But this time she was a guest of Elizabeth II, and when a tabloid reporter spotted the “perfect English rose,”
The Sun
blared “LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL.” Over the following months, Charles vacillated about whether to propose, and two of his friends, Nicholas Soames and Penny Romsey, the wife of Mountbatten’s grandson Norton Knatchbull, expressed doubts about Diana. Penny Romsey worried that she had seemingly “fallen in love with an idea rather than an individual.” Soames bluntly dismissed her as “childish and very unformed” and said she and Charles were “too completely unalike.”

Meanwhile the tabloids and paparazzi pursued Diana so relentlessly that in January 1981 Philip wrote his son a letter saying that he would damage her reputation unless he either proposed or quietly cut off the relationship. In his role as paterfamilias, Philip was presumably also expressing his wife’s opinion, but she did not directly comment on Diana’s fitness to be wife of the heir to the throne. After returning from a ski holiday, thirty-one-year-old Charles proposed to nineteen-year-old Diana at Windsor Castle on February 6, and the engagement was announced on February 24.

Charles would later say that his father’s letter had wounded him and subjected him to undue pressure. “Prince Philip and the Queen felt responsible for Diana, particularly since Johnnie had been an equerry,” said Pamela Hicks. “Prince Philip wrote a very helpful letter, but Prince Charles read it differently. He saw it as saying he must make a sacrifice now, and make up his mind. He kept the letter on him and would bring it out and read it.”

In Charles’s headlong rush into marriage to a young woman who satisfied the prevailing requirements of noble birth and virginal innocence, he and his parents focused on Diana’s appealing traits—her charisma and humor, her warmth, her shy and winsome manner, her seemingly biddable nature. They knew that her parents had been divorced but they reckoned that she would welcome being part of the royal family. They also thought that since she had grown up in proximity to royal life, she would take to its demands effortlessly—a leap of faith, as it turned out. “There is a difference between being neighbors and being married and living in a palace, going to garden parties and banquets, knowing who the people are and what you say to them,” said one of Diana’s school friends in Norfolk.

If the royal family had taken the time to probe Diana’s friends and relatives, they would have come across elements of Diana’s character and background that would have given them pause: nagging insecurities that had been intensified by a troubled childhood, lack of discipline, shifting moods, signs of obsessive behavior, and difficulty telling the truth. Of these Ruth Fermoy was well aware, but as she later explained to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, she felt unable to voice her misgivings. “If I’d said to him, ‘You’re making a very great mistake,’ ” she said, “he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven.”

O
N
J
UNE
13, only weeks before her eldest son’s marriage, the Queen led her birthday parade up the Mall on Burmese, a nineteen-year-old black mare that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had given her in 1969. Every day for the previous two weeks she had practiced her sidesaddle technique in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, and early that June morning she had taken her favorite mount for a canter around the Palace gardens.

Riding on Burmese for the thirteenth time amid the cheering crowds on the Mall, she was dressed in the scarlet tunic of the Welsh Guards and her navy blue riding skirt. Her posture perfectly erect, she faced squarely ahead in the saddle, with both legs on the left side of Burmese as she held the reins lightly in her left hand and a crop in her right. She rode in front of Charles and Philip, in their red tunics and bearskins, as well as several members of the Household Cavalry.

Shortly before 11
A.M.
, as she turned right toward Horse Guards Parade for the start of Trooping the Colour, six shots rang out from the crowd. The Queen’s startled horse cantered forward, and she instinctively pulled the reins with both hands, focusing completely on settling him. Her husband and son watched as guardsmen and onlookers immediately tackled the man with the gun, policemen streaked across the parade route to assist, and one of the cavalrymen spurred his horse and cantered to the Queen’s side. She proceeded calmly at a walk, leaned down to pat Burmese with her left hand, smiled at the crowd, and continued with the ceremony. The shots were blanks, and the gunman, seventeen-year-old Marcus Sarjeant, was sentenced to five years in prison for “intent to alarm” the sovereign. The Queen later told friends and family that in a split-second glance she had seen Sarjeant in the crowd pointing the gun but couldn’t believe her eyes.

The Queen’s reaction was not only an impressive display of expert horsemanship, but the first time the public had witnessed so vividly the unflinching physical courage and equilibrium that friends and courtiers had seen privately: standing quietly while surrounded by “dive bombing” colts, or sitting calmly when a ball crashed into an adjacent chair at a cricket match and everyone else jumped to their feet. “I never saw her scared in any way,” recalled Sir Edward Ford, her assistant private secretary for fifteen years, even when a madman dropped a rock on her car during one of her early visits to Belfast and “she drove on as if nothing had happened.”

Elizabeth II always understood the risks of appearing on horseback or in an open carriage, and she refused to accept protection that would intrude on her ability to be seen by the public. Her fatalistic attitude about the possibility of assassination was reinforced by the reassuring knowledge that an orderly succession was in place. Nevertheless, in 1982 the army instituted new procedures requiring two members of the household to flank the Queen in her birthday parade. “You know why you’re there,” she cheerily announced to Malcolm Ross as he took position beside her one year. “You’re the one to get shot, not me.” Periodically as they rode down the Mall, she would look over and say, in the manner of a strict riding instructor, “Left leg straight! Left leg straight!” The Queen continued to ride until 1986, when Burmese had to retire at age twenty-four. Rather than train a new mount, she switched to her horse-drawn Ivory Phaeton.

The press and public praised the Queen’s handling of the shooting. “In every pub and club throughout the land the verdict is the same,” wrote the
Daily Express
. “Her Majesty showed guts, courage, pluck, bravery and bottle.” The admiration mingled with the growing excitement over Charles and Diana’s wedding to create a surge of pro-royalist sentiment. A poll in July 1981 showed 86 percent support for the monarchy, compared to the consistent 80 percent since polling on the royal family began twelve years earlier.

* * *

O
NE OF THE
prominent guests at the wedding festivities was Nancy Reagan. The first lady had met Charles years earlier through Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s envoy to Britain, and his wife, Lee, during a visit to California while the prince was serving in the Royal Navy. Nancy Reagan also endeared herself to the royal family by treating Charles to dinner in the private quarters of the White House the previous May, with a collection of guests that included Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, William F. Buckley, and Diana Vreeland. “I have fallen in love with Mrs. Reagan,” Charles told Mary Henderson, wife of British ambassador Nicholas Henderson. “I wanted to kiss her!”

While the Queen couldn’t entertain the new first lady herself, busy as she was with wedding preparations, she arranged for her cousin Jean Wills to host a luncheon in her honor on Tuesday, July 28, followed by coffee with the Queen Mother at Royal Lodge and a polo match at Smith’s Lawn. Nancy Reagan and Josephine Louis, the wife of John Louis, the newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, dressed “in our best bib and tucker,” as Josephine Louis recalled. “We were probably overdressed for polo.” They were also surrounded by swarms of security that had been stepped up after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan the previous March.

The match was already under way when a Land Rover appeared, and out popped the Queen from the driver’s side, informally dressed in a tweed skirt and brogues, making her way through the crowd to the royal box, her protection officers virtually invisible. “She was wonderful that day,” recalled Josephine Louis, “so warm and friendly.” Nancy Reagan also clicked with the Queen Mother, who sent her a cordial note later that afternoon with a box of Bittermints as a reminder of the visit to the “little house in Windsor Great Park!”

The wedding the next day at St. Paul’s Cathedral was yet another royal tonic at a time when Britain was plagued by urban race riots and rising unemployment. The atmosphere was exultant among the estimated 600,000 people who lined the London streets, and television viewership around the world exceeded 750 million. Diana looked dazzling in her voluminous silk taffeta wedding dress and twenty-five-foot train as Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie memorably proclaimed to the congregation, “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made.” Runcie later admitted he knew Charles and Diana were a misalliance, although he believed she would “grow into it.”

Family, close friends, and royal guests went to the wedding breakfast for 180 at Buckingham Palace, while nonroyal heads of state attended a luncheon hosted by Margaret Thatcher at the Bank of England. That evening after Charles and Diana had left for their honeymoon, the Queen’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson hosted a party at Claridge’s for five hundred guests, including the Queen and Prince Philip. It was a high-spirited occasion, with television screens playing video loops of the wedding. The Queen perched on an ottoman, martini in hand, to watch what she had participated in hours earlier. “Oh Philip, do look!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got my Miss Piggy face on!”

The Queen invited Nancy Reagan, escorted by John Louis, and Princess Grace of Monaco to sit at her table for the buffet supper, while Philip presided nearby and fifty-year-old Princess Margaret sat on the floor eating scrambled eggs. The ballroom was decked out with a canopy of multicolored ribbons tied at the ends with apples, one of which hit Philip in the eye. The royal couple frequently took to the dance floor, although the Queen looked slightly uncomfortable dancing with the American ambassador, who at six foot four towered over her. Everybody danced to Lester Lanin’s orchestra until nearly 1:30 in the morning, many of the revelers wearing Lanin’s signature party beanies in every conceivable color, as well as boaters and bowlers with hatbands saying “Charles and Diana.”

Finally the Queen regretfully prepared to leave, declaring, “I’d love to stay and dance all night!” John and Josephine Louis followed Elizabeth II and Prince Philip as they made for the exit, while Nancy Reagan ducked into a phone booth to call her husband at the White House and give him a full report on the evening. “The Queen was so mad at Philip because he wouldn’t take off his beanie,” Josephine Louis recalled. “She didn’t think it was proper. She kept asking him, and he finally took it off. But as soon as they got in the car he slapped the beanie back on.”

None of the guests at the party could have known that Charles and Diana’s marriage was already beginning to unravel. The problems had begun when she was living in Buckingham Palace during their engagement and feeling isolated while Charles went about his royal duties. Secretly afflicted by bulimia, she rapidly lost weight, causing designer Elizabeth Emanuel to take in her wedding gown several times. Charles was thrown by his fiancée’s mood swings, alarming dependence, and accusations about Camilla Parker Bowles, with whom he had broken off his affair. (She and her husband, Andrew, were among the 3,500 guests at the service but had been excluded from the reception by Diana.) By the time the newlyweds reached Balmoral for their honeymoon after a two-week cruise on
Britannia
, Diana was tearful and angry, down to a mere 110 pounds on her five foot, ten inch frame.

The princess made clear how much she hated Royal Deeside and all it represented—the rituals of life in the castle and on the grouse moors, especially the shooting. “It was just impossible,” Philip recalled. “She didn’t appear for breakfast. At lunch she sat with her headphones on, listening to music, and then she would disappear for a walk or a run.” Nobody had ever flouted protocol as Diana did, or shown such disrespect to the Queen. Charles tried to cajole his wife, to no avail. He was ill equipped to deal with her demands so he either lost his temper or withdrew, dismayed by the “other side” of the “jolly girl” who had enchanted him with her sweetness. Finally, with his mother’s agreement, Charles had Diana flown to London for psychiatric counseling, a gesture that she resented rather than welcomed.