Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (10 page)

In the wake of Mountbatten’s death, Charles struck up a romance with high-strung Scottish heiress Amanda (“Whiplash”) Wallace. Charles proposed to the cameo-perfect Wallace—twice. Wallace was still mulling over the second proposal when, during a birthday party for the Queen Mother, she became enraged over the fact that he never left the side of his former girlfriend Camilla.

Wallace had reason to be miffed. Charles had just purchased Highgrove, a country manor in Gloucestershire, from Member of Parliament Maurice Macmillan, son of former Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan. Located two hours west of London, Highgrove also happened to be a twenty-seven-minute drive from Bolehyde Manor in Chippenham, home to Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Parker Bowles.

Camilla realized, of course, that on his way to Highgrove Charles occasionally made a detour to the home of Lady Dale Tryon, stylish socialite and fashion designer and the only other woman who might justifiably lay claim to being the Prince of Wales’s mistress. Nicknamed “Kanga” by the future King for her Australian roots and her bouncy personality, Lady Tryon shared the Prince’s bed with Camilla off and on for a period stretching over twenty years. More important, Camilla knew that, with Lord Mountbatten gone, Kanga was the only other person in the world Charles trusted implicitly.

“He would ring out of the blue,” Tryon said later of the “comfort stops” Charles made at her estate, “and say he would be passing by and would I mind if he stopped in.” Tryon always greeted him with a glass of whisky, and then, she said, “we’d chat before making ourselves more ‘comfortable.’ ”

Neither woman had any illusions about marrying Prince Charles, but unlike Camilla, Lady Tryon was not about to remain in the shadows. “Kanga was Australian and much less uptight than the rest of that set,” veteran royals correspondent James Whitaker said. “She wanted everyone to know that she was the Prince of Wales’s mistress. It was hard for her to keep her mouth shut and play along. But it wasn’t easy—not even for her.”

SOME OF THE SAME FRUSTRATIONS
would be felt even more keenly by the next young woman to step into Charles’s life. Lady
Diana Spencer was just nineteen and a part-time kindergarten teacher (the employment agency she signed up with also sent Diana out on the odd housecleaning job) when she met Charles a second time at a barbecue in the summer of 1980. They were seated next to each other, and soon the conversation turned to Mountbatten’s funeral. “You looked so sad as you had to walk down the aisle,” Diana told the Prince. “I have never seen anything so sad before. My heart bled as I saw you so, and I thought; ‘That is not right, you are completely alone, you should have someone with you who you trust.’ ”

Charles was moved by the young woman’s spontaneous and clearly genuine expression of sympathy. Diana’s innate sense of compassion was rooted in her own desperately unhappy childhood. From the beginning, she felt unloved and unwanted. Following the births of her sisters Jane and Sarah and a son who lived only ten hours, Diana’s parents were so determined that their next child be a boy that they did not even bother to pick out a girl’s name. When a third daughter was born, it took them a week to arrive at the name Diana Frances. Another three years would pass before the birth of Diana’s brother Charles, the male heir they had so desperately desired.

Diana was only six when her mother walked out on the family. Left to be raised by a succession of sadistic nannies—one routinely struck Diana on the head with a wooden spoon, another banged Diana’s and her brother’s heads together whenever they misbehaved—Diana cried herself to sleep “every night. But in the end I think it helped me become a better person. I can appreciate other people’s pain because I’ve experienced it.”

Like so many British schoolgirls, Diana had had a serious crush on the Prince of Wales. A portrait of Charles hung over her bed.
“She had pictures of him everywhere,” remembered Diana’s piano teacher Penny Walker. “Diana
adored
him.”

Their casual encounter at the barbecue might well have amounted to nothing if Charles, now thirty-two, hadn’t been under pressure from his domineering father to find a bride. He turned to the two people he trusted most—Camilla and Kanga Tryon—to come up with a proper wife for England’s future sovereign.

Without hesitation, Camilla invited Kanga to meet with her at Bolehyde Manor, where the two royal mistresses were, claimed Tryon, “most civilized toward each other.” At Camilla’s suggestion, they each wrote down the names of women they thought would make suitable brides for Charles. They each came up with three names, but, Kanga said, “the only name Camilla and I both came up with was Diana Spencer, so she went to the top of the list.”

“She is just lovely—a true English rose,” Tryon told Camilla. “And she is going to look marvelous in a tiara.”

Camilla smiled in agreement. “Yes,” she added, mulling over their choice. “Of course, she’s very young. She’s very shy, too, and sweet. A little frightened I think. I don’t think she’ll be causing any trouble.” (“How wrong can you be?” Tryon laughed when she recounted the exchange years later.)

After the Prince’s two mistresses named Diana as their top pick for a royal bride, Diana’s name was added to the royal calendar. Charles and Diana’s first date was a performance of Verdi’s
Requiem
at the Royal Albert Hall followed by a cold buffet in Charles’s private quarters at Buckingham Palace. Later, Charles invited Diana to spend a weekend of sailing at Cowes, the picturesque seaport town on the Isle of Wight, followed by the most
prized invitation of all: the chance to join the Prince for fishing, hiking, and other country pursuits at the Royal Family’s favorite and decidedly most rustic venue, Balmoral Castle.

For all their considerable powers of persuasion, Charles’s mistresses at first could not convince him that the shy girl with the upward glance was the one. They got some assistance in the unlikely form of two key figures whom Diana would ultimately come to view as her mortal enemies: the Queen’s private secretary Robert Fellowes, who was married to Diana’s sister Jane, and the Queen Mother, whose most trusted lady-in-waiting was Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy.

Unlike nearly all other candidates for the position, Diana possessed what was regarded as the most important qualification. “All my friends had boyfriends but not me,” she later said, “because I knew that I had to keep myself tidy for whatever was coming my way.”

“First on the list was virginity,” Brooks-Baker said of three basic requirements a royal bride would have to possess. “Second was the ability to do the job. Third, she must be seen to have the potential to bear heirs to the throne.” Those heirs, descended from one of England’s oldest families, the Spencers, would turn out to be more authentically British than the Teutonic Windsors.

FOR MONTHS, CAMILLA HAD BEEN
worried about the psychological toll all the pressure to wed an heir was having on the man she loved. Philip routinely harangued his son about the immediate need to produce an heir, and after each tension-filled conversation with his father, Charles turned to Camilla for consolation. Camilla was the woman he loved, he told her, and she was the
woman he wanted to marry. Certainly Parker Bowles, who was now seventy-six hundred miles away in Rhodesia to assist in that country’s transition to full independence as the state of Zimbabwe, had given Camilla grounds for divorce. In his short time in Africa, Camilla’s faithless spouse had already cheated on his wife with two different women—affairs that were duly chronicled in Britain’s unslakable tabloid press.

Charles urged Camilla to leave her husband—the first step, perhaps, in a process that might somehow eventually lead to marriage for “Fred” and “Gladys.” They both knew, of course, that this was impossible. Camilla also had her own interests in mind. While she held no place at court—the Queen and her mother heartily disapproved of Charles’s “friendship” with Mrs. Parker Bowles—Camilla did not wish to be seen as another Wallis Simpson coming between a future king and his destiny.

Nevertheless, Charles continued to stall, leaving a bewildered Diana to wonder if he would ever pop the question. Hounded by reporters, Diana became increasingly desperate. “She came through the door one day and burst out weeping,” one of her roommates recalled.

“He won’t ask me,” she cried. “I don’t understand. Why won’t he ask me?”

Convinced by Camilla that Diana was too young and unaffected to suspect anything—and that if Diana did find out about their affair she would simply accept it as a fact of royal married life—Charles asked the Queen for her approval. Elizabeth, evidently unaware of all the behind-the-scenes intrigue, was delighted; she and the rest of the Royal Family were fond of Diana, and particularly impressed with how she had handled the press.

Charles was about to ask Diana to be his wife in late February
when his prized racehorse Alibar suddenly collapsed while being exercised and died. Diana immediately drove to the stables to commiserate with Charles, only to discover that he had already turned to Camilla for comfort.

Several days later, Charles summoned Diana to the Parker Bowles estate. There, in the gardens of Bolehyde Manor with Camilla peering from behind a curtain on the second floor, Charles asked Diana to marry him. “Yes, please,” she answered, and in a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm that left Charles taken aback, threw her arms around him.

The Queen threw a dinner party at Windsor to celebrate, and two days later the happy couple showed off her eighteen-carat sapphire and diamond engagement ring to the press.

“Are you in love?” a reporter asked them.

“Of course,” Diana replied indignantly. But even now, Camilla was never far from Charles’s mind, and he weighed his words carefully. “Whatever ‘in love’ is,” he snickered. Charles conceded to one friend that he was definitely not in love, but that he was going to marry Diana anyway because she had “all the right qualities.”

Soon Charles was preparing to depart on a five-week solo tour of Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela, and the United States. Camilla had offered to keep an eye on Diana while he was gone, and toward that end invited her to dinner at Bolehyde Manor. Diana noticed the invitation, written in longhand by Camilla and referencing the pending wedding. The invitation was dated prior to the day Charles proposed—clear evidence that Camilla was in on the planning.

Charles, unhappy that he was being forced into a marriage he clearly had no enthusiasm for, wasted no time whittling away at his fiancée’s self-confidence. Slipping his arm around her waist,
he pinched some skin and cracked, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?”—a remark that sent Diana into a downward spiral of depression and bulimia. Forcing herself to vomit five or six times a day, Diana’s waist eventually shrank from twenty-nine to twenty-two inches.

At one event, he chastised her for wearing a chic black dress to a charity event in London. “Only mourners wear black,” he sniffed. The remark was heard by Monaco’s Princess Grace, who ushered her into the ladies room, bolted the door, praised her fashion sense, and then listened patiently to Diana’s misgivings about becoming Princess of Wales. “Don’t worry,” Princess Grace said, laughing. “It will get a lot worse!”

Around the same time, before he left for Australia, a playful Diana was sitting on Charles’s lap in his Buckingham Palace office when a call came through from Camilla, who wanted to say goodbye. Diana instinctively left the room so that Charles and Camilla could have a private conversation. Later, Diana said that moment left her “heartbroken,” for it was then that she realized she had a serious rival in Camilla.

As the wedding drew near, Diana—who had always been “Duch” (short for “Duchess”) to family and friends—grew increasingly desperate. Two days before the wedding, she discovered a diamond bracelet Charles had made for Camilla with the intertwined initials F and G, for Fred and Gladys.

“I can’t marry him, I can’t do this,” she told her sisters on the eve of the wedding.

“Well, bad luck, Duch,” they said, pointing out that tens of millions of dollars’ worth of souvenirs bearing the likeness of the newlyweds had already been sold. “Your face is on the tea towels so you’re too late to chicken out.”

..........

THE WEDDING OF THE TWENTIETH
Century took place on July 29, 1981, at St. Paul’s Cathedral and was witnessed by a worldwide television audience of 750 million people. Feeling like “a lamb to the slaughter,” Diana walked down the aisle knowing all eyes were on her. But as she approached the altar, her eyes were trained on Camilla—“pale gray, veiled pillbox hat, saw it all, her son Tom standing on a chair . . .”

Another guest, Charles’s Canadian paramour Janet Jenkins, watched Camilla closely as well. For years, their shared lover had always talked to Jenkins about “how wonderful Camilla was—he never spoke of Diana.” Jenkins knew that Charles “was in love with only one woman and that was Camilla. She was pulling the strings and the levers, definitely.”

At the wedding, Jenkins was “fascinated to get a look at this woman he preferred to his gorgeous young bride. Camilla had this cool, Cheshire cat grin as she watched them march down the aisle. She just seemed so delighted with the whole arrangement.”

From the very start, Diana later said, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Yet when she looked at Camilla on her wedding day, something “clicked” inside her. “I desperately wanted it to work. I desperately loved my husband, and I wanted to share everything together. . . . Here was a fairy story that everyone wanted to work.”

As far as Camilla was concerned, the fairy story was working splendidly—just as she planned it. Both she and Kanga Tryon were convinced that in Diana they had a pretty, guileless, malleable child who would bend to the ways of her elders. “Diana is a very sweet girl,” Camilla told Harold Brooks-Baker, “and she will
give Charles beautiful children.” Diana’s friend Lady Elsa Bowker even recalled Camilla, whose passion for horses was surpassed only by the Queen’s, favorably comparing the Princess of Wales to a “beautiful brood mare.”