Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (19 page)

These days the irrepressible Soames proves circumspect about the Princess and her state of mind. He says only that the failure of the marriage was “one of nature’s great tragedies,” adding, “Of course the press loved the fairy tale going wrong, the wicked man and another woman.”
33

*   *   *

As the marriage disintegrated, palace aides and the Prince himself began to realize the dangers of Diana unleashed, to the monarchy but especially to the Prince’s brand and the charitable empire he had painstakingly built. Diana did the traditional royal thing—the wordless symbolism—better than her husband ever could, and with a dimension the otherwise spotless Queen certainly never brought to the job. The Princess radiated empathy, or at least appeared to, and the sense that she was herself a victim deepened this aura. The Prince, for all he has endured hardships, is least attractive when he lets his own victimhood show, nor is he a type that photographs well sitting at a hospital bedside or stroking a hand.

The Princess won every test of strength too. When the Prince sent Mother Teresa flowers for her birthday, Diana caught a flight to Rome to visit her in person. Diana responded to rumors of her instability with displays of defiance. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are very lucky to have your patron here today,” she told an audience at an event for the charity Wellbeing of Women. “I am supposed to have my head down the loo for most of the day. I am supposed to be dragged off the minute I leave here by men in white coats. If it is all right with you, I thought I would postpone my nervous breakdown to a more appropriate moment.”
34
She warned the royals via
Panorama
that they shouldn’t underestimate her. “She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem.”
35

As she grew stronger, Charles declined. Those close to the Prince were alarmed. His emotions cycled rapidly; his mistrust and isolation increased, “the slough of despond somehow mixed up with the ‘people are out to get me’ bug,” says an insider. “I’ve seen him kicking paving stones in the belief that they jumped up and hit him.” The Prince felt under pressure from all directions—Diana, his parents, the press. Some in his retinue, far from helping him to regain perspective, played politics for their own advantage, says the source.

His friends did their best to buoy him. Emma Thompson wasn’t yet a household name when she got to know the Prince—they met through her then husband Kenneth Branagh when the Prince became a patron of Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company. She would send Charles entertaining bulletins about the “theatrical adventures [of the Renaissance Theatre Company]. I thought he’s patron of so many things, I wonder what kind of feedback he gets,” says Thompson. She became aware of his misery and isolation as the marriage disintegrated. “The Diana business was so difficult for both of them, so much expected and sort of arranged, so tremendously difficult,” she says. The Prince would be so downcast that “I would get periodic messages from the boys that look after him at Highgrove saying ‘You couldn’t drop him a note because he’s a bit low in the water’ so I’d pick up my pen and write as funny a letter as I could think of.”
36

Charles came away from the marriage with his reputation disfigured, his girlfriend vilified, his relationship with his sons bruised, his claim to the throne apparently weakened. Diana emerged a global icon in her glowing prime. To those who didn’t know the realities of her difficult existence—the constant press attention, the anguish at frequent separations from her sons, the obstacles to finding a new partner, and her own unresolved turbulences—her future looked bright. Financially she was sitting pretty too, entitled to the use of Kensington Palace and given a reported settlement of £17 million ($27.3 million).

The divorce provided a tantalizing peek into the Prince’s finances. Geoffrey Bignell, an adviser to the Prince, claimed Diana’s lump sum required the liquidation of “everything, all his investments, so that [the Prince] could give her the cash. He was very unhappy about that.… She took him to the cleaners.”
37
Palace sources dispute the idea that the settlement left the Prince strapped and say that he would never have been in danger of real penury anyway, thanks to his mother’s considerable wealth and his income from the Duchy of Cornwall.

The balance of public opinion at the time of the divorce, and most likely now, was that Diana deserved every penny she got. If the Prince hoped the split represented the possibility of a fresh start—and an end to the war of the Waleses—he was quickly disappointed. Editorials attacked him and his mother for their supposedly mean-spirited decision to “strip” Diana of the style “Her Royal Highness,” though the proposal emanated from Diana herself. As a plain Princess, the newly single Diana immediately cut back her charitable patronages from over one hundred to six and adopted a new cause, lobbying on behalf of the Red Cross for a global land-mine treaty. In so doing, she strayed beyond the skull-and-crossbones signs demarcating territory the Prince believed he had claimed for himself. Suddenly she appeared to be repositioning herself as an activist, and one at least as effective as the Prince, possibly more so.

Her January 1997 trip to Angola attracted the sort of criticism that until then had also been his sole privilege. A junior British defense minister, Earl Howe, described her trip as “ill advised … not helpful or realistic.” “We do not need a loose cannon like her,” he said.
38
She had landed in Luanda accompanied by a disoriented pack of royal reporters used to the sort of trips the Windsors usually take, preplanned to the finest detail, recce’d to the max. Instead they found themselves trailing the Princess to the desolation of Huambo, a town ripped apart by conflict, and thence to the yet riskier Cuito Cuanavale, where, in body armor and a visor—photogenic, but little protection against a blast—she twice picked her way through a minefield, in an area that had been at the center of a six-month battle during the country’s civil war. At the battle’s conclusion, both sides claimed victory. In the ongoing war of the Waleses, she seemed to have gained the upper hand.

In December of the same year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Ottawa Treaty, banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel mines. Diana did not live to witness a triumph that she had helped to secure. Her death in the Paris car crash, and the Queen’s muted reaction, deepened the crisis around the throne. Some conspiracy theorists blamed land-mine manufacturers or the Windsors—or an unholy alliance of the two. Others preferred to blame secret cults or giant lizards. The Prince, seized not only by grief but guilt about his failure as a husband, blamed himself. He focused on his sons’ obvious needs, worrying about their loss and never acknowledging his own.

That the accident freed the Prince from daily competition and conflict and removed the most obvious obstacle to his eventual marriage to Camilla intensified his discomfort. He appears to be sensitive to accusations that he benefitted from Diana’s death, perhaps not least because on some level he may fear that they are true. After the convulsive sorrow of her funeral and the scrappy years that followed, the royal scandals and inquests, the Prince has arrived on what Nicholas Soames calls “the broad sunlit uplands.… He’s a happy man now, Prince Charles. He’s got a rhythm to his life. He’s content.”
39

Would the Prince have reached this equilibrium if Diana still lived? The question is unanswerable, but there’s one factor that would certainly have played into any alternative outcome. The media rarely treats older women kindly and would likely have shredded a Princess past her tabloid prime. Instead Diana remains a presence, a threat too diffuse and gauzy to combat easily. She has come to represent the limitations of an old, crusty institution that seemingly couldn’t cope with her modernity, an unlikely champion for the republican cause. She has mutated into a symbol of female empowerment, the docile child bride transformed into a broad-shouldered amazon eternally striding through minefields. Another incarnation conflates her with Mother Teresa, who died just five days after the Princess, on September 5, 1997, and was beatified in 2003.

Dealing with his ex-wife would never have been easy for the Prince; combating an immaculate wraith is impossible. This Diana will never fade, never go quietly.

CHAPTER 5

Wolf Hall

The court of the heir to the throne crackles with tension. His strengths and fallibilities result in creative but combustible constellations. Avid for knowledge and always insecure about how much he already knows, the Prince is strangely unguarded as he hoovers up ideas, from books and articles and programs he hears on the radio and most often from the people he meets. In a room heaving with guests, he’ll suddenly freeze like a truffle hound scenting a delicious possibility. He co-opts new advisers on slight acquaintance because they talk a good talk or come recommended by one of his established sages. (Others might term members of his kitchen cabinet “gurus,” but this word has uncomfortable resonances for someone so often mocked as a hippy.)

Charles hasn’t always chosen his sages wisely. Fame, and especially his brand of relentless, lifelong fame, muddies signals. It’s hard to know whom to trust; soft soap is always in greater abundance than gritty truth telling. That factor, combined with his native insecurity, means he doesn’t always believe he’s earned the praise that comes his way, while criticism has the power to cast him into despair. Like many in the public eye, he is shaped by celebrity, resentful of press intrusion yet also dependent on the external validation it provides. Diana suffered from this syndrome more acutely than he; Camilla appears unusually resistant to it.

Some advisers arrive at his court already household names or prominent in their fields. Elites gravitate toward each other because they imagine they have less to fear from each other. Ad hoc consultants cohabit uneasily with Charles’s paid employees. Turf battles between these classes and especially within the ranks of those who call him “the Boss” are common and bloody. Life at court and its offshoots can be every bit as brutal as in the days when a twitching arras might signal a hidden assassin. One former householder refers to Clarence House as “Wolf Hall,” in reference to the treacherous and opportunistic world depicted by Hilary Mantel in her fictionalized account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell under Henry VIII.

Such impulses are intensified by the Prince’s habit of expanding his aides’ jurisdictions. Apart from his time in the Navy, he has never held a paying job and doesn’t understand the anxiety such moves can create; no student of management theory, he believes rivalries promote better performance, rather than recognizing the glitches and strains that territorial disputes can cause.

His mother’s courtiers tried to rein Charles in during his youth as he struggled to build the Prince’s Trust. He won’t let that happen now. “What he really doesn’t like people doing is fobbing him off. He’ll just ask five other people,” says Andrew Wright. He adds: “The Prince likes getting three or four opinions on a subject, so you know he isn’t just going to come to you and say ‘What about this?’ so that’s reality and you may as well enjoy it. Which most people do. It’s an extraordinary but stimulating environment.”
1

Wright appears to relish his job in its infinite variety. Appointed as Treasurer to the Prince and director of his charitable foundation, the chartered accountant and former senior banker unexpectedly found himself also immersed in the Prince’s Romanian interests. But some others within Charles’s court feel oppressed by their changing job descriptions or threatened as colleagues are instructed to undertake work on turf they consider their own. Moreover, efforts to rationalize and restructure the Prince’s charities, to future-proof them against a time when Charles can no longer do as much to sustain them because he has ascended to the throne or some other place, have been triggering bouts of infighting for years. One casualty was a plan to bring all the charities and initiatives under one roof in London’s King’s Cross redevelopment area, creating cost efficiencies and also higher awareness and better branding. Sources say internal conflicts scuppered the scheme after tens of millions of pounds had been spent, wasting money instead of saving it.

Changes to the charities and Clarence House reporting lines have been running in tandem—and not infrequently at cross-purposes—with Buckingham Palace’s drive to accommodate the Queen’s slowing pace and the eventual transition to a new head of state. When the “big house,” as Clarence House insiders call Buckingham Palace, embarked on reintegrating the devolved royal press operations under Sally Osman, originally hired in April 2013 to head up the Prince’s communications team, their efforts encountered unexpected resistance. Charles is increasingly looking for ways to build his activities into the head of state role rather than tapering them off as the big house envisages. His independence, asserted over many years, is also not something he will readily cede, a sentiment echoed at Kensington Palace, where the young Princes are unfurling their wings.

The culture of each court reflects its principals: Buckingham Palace is measured and stately; Kensington Palace is more relaxed in outlook, a little hipper but also inclined to make beginner’s errors. The Clarence House and St. James’s Palace complex is passionate, stocked with aides who, like the Boss, are more likely to attract censure for caring too much than caring too little. “New people would come into the office and I would say to them: ‘Number one, you’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life.’ They’ll say ‘I’ve always worked hard’ and I’d say ‘No you haven’t. You absolutely haven’t.’ Three weeks later they turn up—‘I’m so exhausted’—and I’ll say ‘I did tell you,’” says Elizabeth Buchanan, the Prince’s former Private Secretary. “In the ten years I worked for him, I would probably count ten weekends when I didn’t have conversations with him on the weekend.… He’s trying to save the world, dammit! If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
2