On her wedding day, Diana’s grace and beauty captivated the world. The 20-year-old bride was everybody’s dream of a fairytale princess. 700 million people watched her on her
wedding day, and they went on watching her. She became the most photographed and easily the most recognized woman in the world. She had no experience of royal life. Her future lay in the hands of her husband, Charles, the man destined to become king. 13 years later, the dream had shattered.
Diana is on the run, escaping the prying eyes of the press, trying to forget her past, and picking up the pieces to start a new independent life. It had all begun so well. Scenes of the newly engaged happy couple concealed the truth. During their engagement, Charles was having an affair with his long-time friend and confidant, Camilla Parker Bowles.
Shortly before the wedding, a blonde woman was seen leaving the royal train in the dark of the night. Naturally, everybody assumed it was Diana. When they saw that there was a blonde on the train and they discovered it, they had naturally assumed that it was Diana. Not a bit of it. It was Camilla Parker Bowles.
It must have alerted her even at 19. She must have realized something was quite wrong. Uh and she must have grown suspicious that that men don’t don’t conduct their courtships, not even a prince, with having these married women forever poking over her shoulder, forever watching every step she took, forever giving him advice.
The spectre of another woman in her husband’s life was to haunt Diana for the rest of her marriage. But at the end of their honeymoon in Scotland, the truth was concealed from the cameras, an art that Diana would learn to use to perfection. These romantic scenes hid the reality of the situation.
After his marriage to the young and beautiful Diana, Charles continued to see Camilla. The moment that he left Balmoral at the end of their 2-month honeymoon, he went hunting in Wiltshire. And hunting in that pack on the same day was Camilla Parker Bowles. Hunting was Camilla’s territory, meaning that she could have Charles all to herself.
She had sized up Diana a long time ago. I mean, Camilla Parker Bowles called her the mouse and and told Charles to marry her cuz she was dim. She was an uneducated, rather naive girl from a from a split home. She would do as she was told. She was very young. She would have to be molded. Of course, she would do as she was told.
Didn’t understand there was a bit of a spark in Diana. Diana used that spark to perfection. She brought her natural style and glamour to the royal family that even Camilla could not have envisaged. She used her femininity and sex appeal to grab the public’s attention. All the time that Charles had a relationship with Diana, uh Diana was so concerned about her own life and about her own problems and everything else like that that she was unable uh to think about the problems which Charles faced, which as a future king, he had immense pressures.
Charles and Camilla met at polo in 1971. Their attraction was mutual and continued beyond her marriage to Guards officer Andrew Parker Bowles. She was able to satisfy him in a way that no other woman ever has done. She was able to mother him in a way that no other woman was able to do, including, may I say, the Queen.
The Queen was no mother to Prince Charles, and Prince Charles needed somebody to whom he could put his he could put his head on their shoulder. And Camilla did all these things for him. She was both mother and lover in a most marvelous relationship. The Queen had an understanding ear for Diana’s troubles, but her distance and position didn’t provide the married couple with a natural shoulder to cry on.
I would think that the Queen was involved in in the marital difficulties purely as a as a mother would be. A mother and mother-in-law just in in uh being there to offer advice and and suggest things and try and make life a little easier. I would be very surprised if she actively interfered. Prince Philip dealt with family matters in a more offhand and down-to-earth way, dismissing human frailty as a character weakness.
He’s often accused of being uncaring as a father. He’s a man of uncertain temper, is he not? And while the Queen tries to spread oil on the waters and tried to broker between the warring couples and all the rest of it, I suspect that he just stamped his foot and told them to pull themselves together, which perhaps might not have been as helpful as it could have been in the circumstances.
The Queen’s marriage to Prince Philip spans more than 40 years. From the outset, he pulled on the leash. Now in his 70s, he has always found royal life rather boring and tedious. Charles doesn’t have to look too far back for an example of royal decorum. Obviously, men do tend to imitate their fathers to a large extent.
He’s a guy who seems rather striking and stern, but when a lady comes into the room, those eyes, even in his 70s, those eyes sparkle and the wit is turned on. He’s very much a ladies’ man. Princess Elizabeth was 21 when she married Prince Philip of Greece. They first met when she was 17 and according to historians, she fell in love with him immediately.
After Charles’s birth, it became apparent that Philip preferred life away from court circles. He returned to his old bachelor haunts around town. The Queen was kept in the picture by her ally and sister Margaret. It’s known that she suffered very bad depressions that were well helped from with help from the public.
Um The palace had to announce in the mid-50s that there was no rift in the royal couple. If you you think back the kind of coverage they had in in the 50s, that really was very very striking, very unusual to take such a step. It was rumored when Prince Philip was going on voyages on the Britannia around the world that something was very badly wrong.
A particular voyage took place early part of ’59. He did come back in April, which is fortunate because Prince Andrew was born the next February. So, uh that that tended to to make people think that the marriage was on a much more solid footing after that. Royal marriages need common ground and understanding. Diana found polo rather boring and often left Charles alone to enjoy his favorite sport.
This was Charles’ territory. Besides, there were other attractions. Camilla Parker Bowles came to watch. She and Charles have many interests in common, hunting, architecture, painting, and art. But, it is the strong animal attraction of polo which particularly binds them. Charles excels at polo and for once he is allowed to show off in public.
His father played as a young man and Charles inherited his love for the game. The sport encourages a definite sexual tension and a secret language develops between spectator and player. It’s the sport of kings, an aristocratic aphrodisiac. It’s the one thing that gets upper class English women really going more than anything else.
They see these men sweating on horses which themselves are sweating, pushing these animals around in violent exercise. The moment these guys get off, they are um flushed with excitement. Uh the women throw themselves at them. This is the upper class woman’s aphrodisiac. The royal family’s love affair with polo doesn’t stop with Camilla.
In his younger army days, her husband Andrew, himself an accomplished horseman, had an affair with Princess Anne. She found his charm too hard to resist. Well, they were young lovers, everybody knows that. Um I don’t think she should have bothered to hide it. And he just became one of one of her sort of support circle.
He’s somebody who takes her to to Ascot or or to the other races and so on. I don’t think there’s anything in it now. It was through her passion for horses that Anne eventually met and fell passionately in love with a young cavalry officer, Captain Mark Phillips. But, their marriage was destined to finish in divorce. Married to royalty clashed with his successful career as a show jumper.
He was threatening Princess Anne’s high profile. And he was never really accepted by Prince Philip, the royal family. Mark Phillips actually was a very much nicer man than the British public could ever been allowed to know. And he was worth 10 of Anne. A spouse with a spark will be crushed. If you marry, you must not try and get above your partner in public world.
Anne eventually married for the second time, but not before rumors circulated within court circles of another love affair. This time with her personal bodyguard, who some claim is the father of her second child, Zara. Of all the rumors that go around the British court, I think that’s the one that’s most likely to be true.
I heard it a very long time ago. It’s known that a bodyguard who worked for Princess Anne did make claims. And the claims were were not printed in Britain. But they are known about in the United States, for example. They have been discussed in in the media there. Um I think probably because Zara is still a child, that the feeling in Britain is very unfair to uh start raking this up now.
But I still feel there’s a very dark shadow over Anne. To the outside world, Anne appears aloof and frequently antisocial. Her relationship with Diana is cool. They don’t see each other much. I think that they’re perfectly formal. They have greetings when they see each other. But I just don’t think they mix very well.
They don’t They just don’t get together. In the beginning, Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson appeared happy. As the Queen’s second son, she was relieved when he married Sarah. After his many adventures with less suitable companions, she felt he had met his match. But their marriage, too, was destined to end in separation.
As a naval officer, Andrew was often away at sea, and during his long absences, his lonely wife turned to other men for support. Their breakup was finally sealed after photographs appeared in the tabloid press of Sarah cavorting on holiday with her lover in the South of France. For the Queen, it was the final blow.
She must really feel very sick at heart that now younger members of the family and their scandals are paraded over the front of the tabloids. I mean, it must be soul-destroying because she’s worked so hard to make the royal family what it is today. But hard work is not enough. For her part, the Queen has to face up to the fact that however perfect her public role, she’s failed to give her children the guidance they needed for stable marriages.
Reflecting on her own privileged background and sense of duty, she lacked natural motherly feelings. I don’t think actually she have ever had a great maternal instinct. I think she was a natural normal part of the upper class. The upper class have never really wanted to see much of their children. They’ve always been delighted the children having been brought in at 5:30.
They’ve always been delighted to hear the nanny at the door at 6:00. And then they could go back to their own lives. And I think the Queen was actually a typical example of that. Preoccupied with the affairs of state and her passion for horses, the Queen has been far too lenient with her children.
When duty called, they always took second place. The people who know her extremely well over a long period of years who are very fond of her will growl and say if she’d taken as much trouble over the raising of her children as she did over the raising and the breeding of her racehorses things would have been better. Surrounded by servants and sycophants, one of the great disadvantages of royal life is that it’s very unreal.
They’re less a family than a club. That they became independent at very early ages, were expected to stand on their own feet. That the Queen as the as the boss of the household, so to speak, and Prince Philip were both pretty tough. Don’t winge. Don’t complain about tough engagements. Um just get on with it. They weren’t really a family in the warmest possible sense.
Although they they could laugh together and joke together, but the deeper things there somehow wasn’t a kind of framework in which those things could be discussed. And I think that’s a tremendous weakness. There’s no doubt that the popularity of some of the young royals went to their heads.
Deaf to advice, they grew up with the sense that they could do no wrong. The temptation to become arrogant is tremendous. And they fell into that temptation. There’s no question about that at all. I mean, you had circumstances where uh you get somebody like Prince Andrew, for example, leaving a car uh near St. James’s Palace. Um the police say, “Who does that car belong to?” Nobody knew.
They’re about to carry out a controlled explosion on the car. Fortunately, it was discovered it was his in time. So, he rolls up at the palace later and says to those stupid policemen, The courtiers who were there on that particular occasion wish in retrospect that they’d said, “It’s not they, the police, who are the fools. You’re the You’re the fool, sir.
” But nobody said it. Andrew is never at a loss to express himself, particularly when bystanders get in his way. The obstacle’s that way. You want to see it? That way, somewhere over there. Come on, you’re better than this. Please move. Into this royal family came Diana, a beautiful English rose, daughter of an Earl more aristocratic than the German-born ancestors of the House of Windsor.
A sensitive, shy girl with a caring and understanding nature, good looks, and a sense of style and glamour, setting her apart from the rest of the royal family. As wife of the heir to the British throne, the Princess of Wales is expected to do her duty and tow the line. Diana was only 20 when she married Charles.
More than a century earlier, his ancestor Edward, Prince of Wales, had taken as his bride a young and beautiful Danish Princess Alexandra. But like his descendant Prince Charles, Edward’s eye turned quickly away from his beautiful wife. He needed a woman who would keep his intellect alive as well as being good-looking.
And although Alexandra was a joy to look at in the public eye, in private she never shone. King Edward VII continued to have mistresses while Alexandra embraced motherhood. Similarities between the plight of Princess Alexandra and Princess Diana do not stop there. King Edward’s mistresses included the actress Lillie Langtry and Daisy, Countess of Warwick.
But it was with a famous society beauty Alice Keppel that Edward had a passionate love affair lasting 12 years. Alice Keppel is the great-grandmother of Charles’s mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. Camilla Parker Bowles is the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, which, you know, Alexandra would probably find amazing that that woman was still causing trouble over 100 years later to the same family.
Please turn um Who is Harry? Four generations of royalty gather for the Queen Mother’s 94th birthday in London. Six of her great-grandchildren are the products of broken marriages. Princess Diana is missing and Prince Andrew’s wife, Sarah, is no longer welcome. For the Queen Mother, it is a poignant reminder of the shape of royalty she will leave behind.
She understands the pressure of royal marriages and in return for Diana’s hard work, she wants a fair and just settlement for her. She has been talking to Charles, trying to dissuade him from divorce, saying that Diana must be accorded a position of honor and respectability as mother of a future king.
And that to denigrate her is to is to help destroy the monarchy. Happy when her grandson married Diana, the Queen Mother recognized many of her own strengths in the character of his new bride. They were both strangers to royal life when they married into it. In the people’s affections, Diana was a natural successor to the Queen Mother.
In the beginning, everybody compared them and said these are two commoners who’ve got the same sort of charm and they’re both distant they would both destined to be queens of England and that they would have a similar effect in enchanting and charming the world. Diana brought to the image of royalty a unique and personal blend of style, dignity and glamour.
Within the strict confines of royalty, that was her power base. The moment she stepped off her plane, her image would find its way onto television screens and front pages around the world. Ultimately, this attention was to prove her undoing. Drawing the limelight off other members of the royal family created jealousy and intolerance.
But there were compensations. During a visit to Bonn, the The arrived at a dinner wearing for the first time in public a matching set of exquisite sapphire and diamond jewels, a gift from the Sultan of Oman. We saw the princess turn up wearing a magnificent sapphire and diamond necklace. And we asked a member of her touring party who foolishly told us so, that was a gift from the Sultan of Oman.
And jewelers quickly told us it was they estimated the worth to be about half a million pounds. And we were astonished because none of this had been revealed previously. The princess, she really did well. I remember in Kuwait she was given a chest of gold jewelry, you know, every kind of jewel, rings, bracelets, necklaces, all in and that gold in the Middle East is is 22 karat, the best, the purest gold.
Diana has been given a queen’s ransom in jewels. There’s the Queen Mary tiara from the Windsor family, originally worn by Queen Mary. The Spencer family tiara was a gift from Diana’s father. Her clothes reflect the customs of the country she visits. Well, she had to be much more modest in her dress, you know, ankle-length skirts, covered arms, covered shoulders, um which meant uh designers had to produce a whole range of of clothes that she could wear just for a week.
And later on they were adapted, she had them cut down and changed so that she could wear them on other occasions. And I remember Diana had a had a white dress. I think it was done designed by the Emanuels with a fan shape here on the on the neckline. It was very modest, came across here and long sleeves.
Well, in London she wouldn’t wear things like that with long sleeves much, she’d have daring necklines or backless dresses. Diana continued to catch people’s attention. Hats were a key part of her style. She had nearly a hundred and helped make them fashionable again. Fashion experts complimented her publicly saying she should be on the cover of Vogue magazine.
Her sense of style and good taste did an enormous amount to boost the British fashion industry. Her hair went up and down. But this got her into trouble with the royal family when she was accused of upstaging the Queen. She may have been cover girl all over the world. She may be on Time magazine. She may be on Newsweek.
She may be on every magazine you ever seen in your life. But the royal family took absolutely no notice of her whatsoever. And she got sick of this. She wanted to be able to show that she had some power within the royal family. And she learned how to upstage members of the royal family. In 1984 at the state opening of Parliament, Princess Diana arrived with the Queen at the Palace of Westminster.
An annual event, it’s one of the most important constitutional occasions in the royal year. On this occasion, there were gasps from the crowd as she stepped from the coach. She had changed her hairstyle. She turned her hair up at the back. Now, nobody had ever seen her bare neck before.
Now, a neck is not very exciting except when Diana exposes it. And on this occasion, she did it. It was front page everywhere. The Queen was beside herself with anger. Princess Margaret took her aside and told her that she was never ever upstage the Queen again. For Diana, the incident was a stark reminder of the forces at work within the royal family.
Later on an official tour of Australia, she was again accused of upstaging another member of the royal family. This time, it was her husband. During a visit to Charles’ old music school, he was invited by his professor to play a few notes on the cello. Obviously embarrassed, he’d forgotten how to play. He made his pathetic attempts with the cello to try and appease the audience.
He didn’t want to do it in the first place, but he was forced to do it. And she could not wait to stride across that room, to that piano, to sit down, and to start playing away, splashing chords. Her performance was greatly appreciated, particularly by the professor. [applause] Embarrassed, Diana exited in a hurry.
Yet again, she had stolen the limelight. [applause] Whatever she upstaged him, he was going to resent her presence at his side, and he couldn’t overcome that. So, therefore, he could never look upon her as a wife, and a companion, and a soulmate. He was just so upset by the fact that she was more popular than he was.
[cheering] Away from home, the endless round of public duties and official engagements took on a different style. In Australia, the warm and welcoming crowd provided Diana with a platform to show off her own brand of royalty, distinctive and infectious, it reflected positively on Charles and made him more relaxed.
Had he been able to fulfill his dream and settle in Australia, his marriage to Diana might have taken a very different course. The relaxed atmosphere on a building site in Canberra summed up their relationship. Left alone, Diana’s unique balance of dignity and relaxed charm gave her an edge over her husband.
This new found self-confidence put her on a collision course with Charles, something he didn’t anticipate when he married her. I think he probably thought this is a an inexperienced young lady who will learn to fit in, who will tow the line as the years go by. And I think he found that she was less pliable as time went on.
She didn’t have the taste he had. She wanted to indulge her own naturally indulge her own taste. She turned into a person who was going to fight back. This was the secure and reassuring public face of royalty on display. Younger members of the royal family acting out their roles. But beneath the show business facade, their marriage was a sham.
Diana made attempts to win back Charles. There was enormous pride at stake as she had been rejected by her husband and the royal system. The marriage was over, but no one was ready to admit it. Charles could remain married to Diana for the rest of his life. He had Camilla safely at his elbow and with her support, he was confident that he could withstand most of life’s knocks.
Pictures like these transmitted around the world and into millions of homes were the images of a marriage Charles wanted the world to think he enjoyed. Diana had achieved what she had set out to do, to become Princess of Wales. She had born two children in pursuit of her husband’s dynastic ambitions. She had become a world icon and a very important person in her own right.
She lacked love, but most other things were in place. On a visit to India, it was increasingly obvious that the couple was spending less time together. Diana claimed that the pressure of royal duties kept them apart. Outwardly, she remained calm and continued her duties under intense pressure. Her compensation was the world’s attention, keeping her firmly in the spotlight.
It made her the world’s number one cover girl. I think it made us all adore her. It brought the monarchy closer to the people. And it helped her to raise awareness of many deserving charities, like the AIDS charities that she’s involved with, and uh the um the British Leprosy Trust. Now, very few people interested in leprosy because it’s a third world problem.
And um it’s people thought that it went out with the ark, but uh it’s still very virulent in many countries, and she did so much for that. And so, if she hadn’t been a glamorous, good-looking woman, uh there’s no way that people would have used her picture and promoted the fact that she was doing this work.
If she’d been plain with with spectacles and, you know, plaits or something, or a bad perm, uh nobody would have followed her around the world. With their marriage problems still strictly speaking a private affair, they embarked on an official visit to Indonesia. There were occasions though when the heat of the moment was even too much for Diana’s natural coolness.
An opportunity to get back at representatives of the sniping press did not go amiss. Diana aimed at their feet and scored a bull’s-eye. [cheering] Monotonous world tours exposed their public life to the utmost scrutiny, but clues of their marriage difficulties were kept well hidden from their hosts and the cameras.
Occasionally though, Diana would be caught in another world, preoccupied with her own thoughts. Away from home, Charles would keep in constant touch by telephone with Camilla, always in need of his comfort cushion. Diana’s style always captivated her audience wherever she went. Dressed to honor local customs during a visit to the Gulf states, she put an enormous amount of thought and consideration into how she should be courteous to her hosts and suitably dressed for the occasion.
Diana’s personal appearance on royal tours did an enormous amount to promote Britain’s image abroad. She will be sadly missed now that she has disappeared from public life as royal visits go by almost totally unnoticed. Boosted by all the attention, Diana made sure there was no shortage of smiles all round.
No one wanted to believe that the royal marriage of the century was on the rocks, but as the cracks began to appear, Diana went on the defensive. And one of my colleagues actually said to the princess when we were in Spain with them in the spring of 1987, “What’s all this about your separate lives?” And she said, “Oh.
” She said it was all nonsense and she thought that these stories were so far-fetched the next story she’d read in the newspaper would be that she had a black lover. And we all joked about that. Um and she really convinced us that there was nothing in them at all, and it was inconceivable to us that this couple would ever separate.
We thought they wouldn’t be allowed to, that for the for the sake of the nation and their duty they would stick together no matter what. And we knew that all marriages have rough patches, and we figured that they would work things out. And we thought, “Well, she seems so devoted to him.” And of course she was then. She was battling to save her marriage desperately.
During a family holiday in Spain as guests of King Juan Carlos and his family, Charles appeared distant and preoccupied. These arranged pictures of happy family life told a different story. Charles left early from this holiday and returned to Balmoral to be with Camilla. I think she tried every trick in the book, everything that a normal woman wants to do to interest a man and to win him back.
Unfortunately, he he just didn’t respond. He He He is a sort of man that’s looking for an a soulmate, an intellectual soulmate especially. And although she shared his love of opera, and they had two children in common, it was too late. He was already too involved with Camilla, and and she provided him with the the understanding that that he needed.
The pressure was beginning to tell on Diana. She was suffering from the slimmers disease bulimia nervosa, and her friends were worried about her loss of weight. Only at ease with her friends and acquaintances, this was a low period in her life. She needed help and turned to many friends for support and understanding.
One of those people was her bodyguard and close friend Barry Mannakee, who later died tragically in a road accident. Diana was heartbroken. Mannakee had died in a in a car accident, uh quite tragically and suddenly. And Diana was given the news just as she was leaving to go on this official engagement where she had to smile and look happy.
And of course she was very upset. Now, there were stories afterwards that her friendship had been rather too close to this bodyguard. But, I’ve never believed that because at the time Diana was still very much in love with her husband trying to win him back. But, more than that, there were a lot of stories about Barry Mannakee’s involvement with other women.
Another close friend is the art expert and gallery owner Oliver Hoare, a married man with three children. Taped telephone conversations reveal Diana’s close relationship with James Gilbey, a successful second-hand car salesman. But, she’s had strange relationships with men. But, what she’s never been able to do is throw herself wholeheartedly into a love affair, which is what the world wants her to have.
They wanted to see her having a really great love affair with a wonderful man who looks really great and is going to carry her off in her arms. And this just hasn’t happened for her, and her life is a shambles. Alone with her children on a winter holiday in the Caribbean, Diana is now officially separated from Charles.
She’s a single mom sharing custody of the two young princes, determined to give them the kind of childhood Charles did not enjoy as a boy, and a better understanding of normal family values. Holidays are precious moments for her, and she grabs every opportunity she can to have her sons to herself. Winter holidays in the sea followed by winter sports in the snow.
Charles has the boys in the summer at Balmoral in Scotland followed by a Mediterranean holiday with friends. To compensate for their parents’ bad marriage, the young princes enjoy an endless round of good times. It just goes on endlessly, and I think that’s too much for any child. I think it it destroys their sense of proportion and their any kind of values they might have because normal children don’t get so much.
I think they’re getting too much too soon. Diana is determined that her boys are prepared for the outside world in a way unknown to previous royal generations. But in doing so, there is a danger that she’s bringing them up as little rich kids. I’m not so worried myself about them being brought up as rich men’s children. I think inevitably that’s the way the royal family are likely to be brought up in large part.
What I’m far more worried about is what the effect of their parents’ disagreements will have on them. Diana sees her children as her emotional anchor. To spend more time with them was her main reason for bowing out of public life. At school sports day, she’s always there to give her support.
Memories of her own disrupted childhood and parents’ divorce have made her more determined than ever to soften the blow of her own marriage problems on her children. She lavishes them with affection, cuddles, and love. Even Charles agrees that emotionally she’s a generous mother. I think he agrees that she’s a very good mother and she’s very devoted to them.
And I’m sure he likes the way they’ve grown up with beautiful manners and that they’re pretty normal children. I think he appreciates the fact that she takes them out to ordinary places where ordinary kids go. They queue up for hamburgers and go to the cinema or etc. Because that’s something he realizes is important to give your children a well-adjusted life in the future when they’re grown up and to to experience what ordinary members of the British public experience.
So I think he thinks that the Diana’s interesting the boys in the more frivolous aspects of life which are probably important for a future king but that he will give them the the grounding in the serious things and and be a supporter of the education they’re getting at school. Encourage them to take the intellectual bent that he himself enjoys.
In Charles’s absence the role of surrogate father is played by a personal bodyguard. A small price the royal children have to pay. They’re really affected by it I think especially William. He’s seen the unhappiness of his mother and he loves his father too much to blame him.
So he’s very confused about the rights and wrongs of the whole situation. Your royal highnesses, thank you very much indeed for being with us in Cardiff today to launch this new marketing initiative. I would invite Prince William, your royal highness, to unveil the new strap line for Cardiff marketing. [applause and cheering] Preparing William for his royal duties is a task he must endure against the background of his own parents’ separation and the tradition of monarchy.
His mother is aware of the problems facing her young son. Thrown into her marriage at 20, Diana had a crash course in royal role playing. William has a little longer to learn the technique of the royal walkabout. William seems to suffer a lot whenever he faces the media and he’s very sensitive boy. Perhaps because he’s the elder one and he’s taking it all more seriously than his brother because he’s the one who’s going to have to cope with it most in in life later on.
And we found that William will hang his head and shy away from the cameras, etc. And in 1994 when we were skiing with the princess at Lech, William seemed to perk up and be very different and I congratulated her on this and I said, “William’s a changed boy.” And she said, “Yes, I’ve sorted him out.” She said, “I gave him a talking to and he’s he’s okay now.
” Unfortunately, that didn’t last very long. And I noticed that later on he was once again trying to draw back from the cameras. It was very evident on the Queen Mother’s birthday, on her 94th birthday, when William hung to the back of the crowd and his father turned around and called him forward. And the Queen Mother heard him and said, “Come on, William.
” and dragged him out to the front. The poor William didn’t like it at all, but he put on a brave smile, but he would not look at the cameras. Harry was looking at everybody to see who was there, but William kept looking away all the time at his grandmother and wouldn’t face the cameras. In 1990, everything seemed like happy families at the palace.
The royal family appeared united for the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. It was business as usual for royal mothers with their restless children and marching bands. But this was the beginning of a new decade, the start of a traumatic period for the royal family. As the storm clouds gathered, Diana was spending more and more time away from Charles.
While she stayed in London, he preferred to be at Highgrove, the family home in Gloucestershire, and close to Camilla Parker Bowles. But this was Christmas time and all the royal family were guests of the Queen at Sandringham. It was a windy affair. Diana made her solitary way back from church to face the rest of Christmas with a family she felt increasingly isolated from.
Well, she doesn’t like Sandringham. She doesn’t like, particularly I think, mixing with the rest of the family because there are all kinds of of waves and feelings there. I mean, it can’t be very easy. Publicly, the royal marriages appeared to be still intact. Behind the palace walls, the warring factions were left to sort out their own problems.
Diana’s alleged 5-year relationship with James Hewitt, revealed in his book Princess in Love suggests that she responded to Charles’ infidelity with Camilla by having a love affair with the young guards officer. vision of being in the job for many years now. Certainly, the Queen, especially the Queen Mother, were prepared to go along with the charade that this was a happy marriage as long as nobody broke the rules.
But, the rules eventually were broken. We did discover that Charles was having his relationship with Camilla. We did discover that Diana had become besotted first by James Hewitt, then by James Gilbey, and then by others subsequently. And, the whole thing unraveled very badly indeed. And, what it does show is that the royal family of this present generation have less control over their destiny than any other generation in the past 10 centuries.
Control of their destiny is vested on the desire of people to have a royal family. The world’s media didn’t want to believe that the beautiful princess was about to walk out on her Prince Charming. Newspapers and magazines raved about Diana selling millions of copies saying how wonderful she looked. Nobody wanted to believe that the fairytale marriage was over.
The truth of the matter is that the British press was so in love with this wonderful fairy story, the prince and the princess, the two young princes living happily. They didn’t want to break this dream. They didn’t want to shatter this dream. And, nobody ever looked at it. And, for years and years, people would make arch remarks about Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, and the British press would just turn their heads like that.
They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They didn’t want to know. When the story of Diana and Charles’ marriage breakdown exploded in 1992, it was with cruel irony that the family home, winds the castle burst into flames. The fire was a symbol of a malaise within the very institution of the monarchy. In March, it was announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were to separate.
In April, the 18-year marriage of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips ended in a 4-minute quickie divorce. In June, Princess Diana broke down in tears days after the publication of a book revealed the truth of her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles. In August, intimate photographs were published of the Duchess of York cavorting topless on holiday in France with her lover and financial adviser.
In November, on a state visit to Korea, Diana and Charles’s relationship was so bad that they could hardly look at each other. Leaked tape recordings emerged confirming Charles’s long relationship with his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles. In December, an announcement by the Prime Minister to Parliament confirmed that the Prince and Princess of Wales were to separate.
Highnesses have no plans to divorce and that Finally, the Queen attended a banquet in London and summed up her feelings as a monarch, wife, and mother whose family and home have suffered immeasurable damage. 1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words [clears throat] of one of my more sympathetic correspondents it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.
A ghastly year for them, which I think really dented their authority quite badly. If Hollywood had actually tried to it spent a year trying to think up a script, they couldn’t conceivably have put such nutty things into it. The royal family is slowly recovering. The institution of monarchy won’t die overnight because of a few broken marriages.
It survived the constitutional crisis 60 years ago when King Edward the VIII abdicated to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. Whether Charles will ever marry Camilla after his divorce from Diana is an open question. Either way, his future is in the hands of the women who surround him. [applause] I think if he wanted to succeed to the throne, there’s no question that he could marry Camilla.
That is totally out. I think if he And I think he does want to succeed to the throne because he feels with all his qualifications about the things he would rather not be doing, I think he does feel a very strong sense of duty. I think he wants to be a good king. I think he wants to fulfill the quote role that he’s got in life.
I’d love to think that they could get married because I think they would be a wonderful husband and wife. Queen Camilla, well, I don’t know that the British public would wear that. I’m not even sure that the world would wear it. The world would probably laugh. What they want is they want the excitement, the style, the the panache, the joie de vivre of Diana.
Diana will be a hard act to follow. The perfect princess, but not the perfect wife. To her adoring public, she was the image of the fairy tale princess. To her uncaring husband, she was a disappointment. Marriage to Diana brought out the worst in Charles, but by some quirk of fate she could still take her place next to him on his throne.
It’s conceivable that they could both attend a coronation from different houses, sit in the same Abbey, and be crowned he crowned king, she crowned consort, although they not speak hardly speak to each other, they don’t live under the same roof, they can hardly bear each other. It’s technically possible.
The Queen died tomorrow, he would accede to the throne. He would be called King Charles the II. She would be Queen Diana de facto. Whatever the outcome, Diana has to watch over her sons. If her husband is denied the throne because of his relationship with Camilla, young William could become king sooner than he thinks.
I think she feels that she will make William a better king than his father could because she will bring him into closer contact with the public and that he won’t be an aloof man in an ivory tower living this sort of academic life that Charles might prefer. And I think she sees that the secret of success of the monarchy is not to be too elitist.
Since her separation from Charles, Diana has retired from public life. The world of royal duties is losing its prime performer. Diana’s ability to keep royalty in tune with the changing attitudes of society will be missed. It’s sad because she achieved so much for the nation as well as for the monarchy.
She filled an amazing gap in the ranks of the royal family that we didn’t realize was there until she came along. She was our golden girl. And what she did I think too helped to glamorize the last major monarchy on earth and and made it internationally renowned. She helped the status of Great Britain enormously because everybody was interested in our princess.
