Diana’s coffin on its one-hour-and-forty-seven-minute journey from St James’s Palace. During an earlier discussion with Blair’s aides, Prince Philip, speaking on the phone from Balmoral, had exploded about the spin doctors’ insensitivity: ‘Fuck off. We are talking about two boys who have lost their mother.’ The question was finally resolved over the family dinner on the night before the funeral. To break the deadlock, Philip said to his grandsons, ‘Well, if you don’t go, I won’t.’ The boys decided to walk behind the coffin with their grandfather, their father, and Diana’s brother Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer.
While the Windsors debated, Charles Spencer visited the Abbey to rehearse the words he would deliver from the pulpit the next day. He had written an outspoken rebuke to the royal family, but after spotting a lurking palace official he decided to remain silent. His idea that Tony Blair rather than Prince Charles should read the lesson had been rejected, which made him only the more determined. At the funeral the following morning, his accusations against an astonished royal family divided the nation. Some were outraged at Spencer’s impudence, while others praised his courage. The art historian Roy Strong, taking his cue from the public’s loud applause which could be heard inside the Abbey, wrote that the people ‘want a monarchy but they want it human and compassionate. The present cast suddenly looked past its sell-by date.’
Spencer’s feelings of enmity towards Charles continued during Diana’s interment at Althorp, the Spencer family home, at the end of the day. Afterwards, according to Paul Burrell, the earl’s speech was being replayed on television in the room where the prince was offered tea. As the ex-brothers-in-law talked together, Charles volunteered that while Spencer had inherited his title as a young man, he himself had already had to wait decades before becoming king. When details of the conversation appeared in the press, Spencer was accused of leaking the exchange, and Burrell of fabrication because there was allegedly no television in the room.
By the following morning, Spencer’s denunciation of the Windsors was overshadowed by the testimony of those who recalled that Diana had accepted Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed’s invitation to holiday in France only after her brother, citing potential media intrusion, had withdrawn his agreement that she and her children could spend the summer on the Althorp estate. The desperate mother, according to her admirers, had been abandoned by both her families.
Charles was more melancholic than ever. His popularity rating was stuck at 4 per cent. Critics mocked him without appreciating his insight into the truth. He was receiving, he complained, no credit for carrying the intolerable burden of duty to serve the irredeemably ‘awful’ monarchy, and feared the public’s reaction when he finally emerged from his seclusion at Highgrove. Determined to believe that life without guilt was possible, he decided that his task was to resurrect himself and his lineage. Buoyed by the solid support he always received from the queen mother, he would never renounce the crown. While the queen offered continuity, dignity and traditional values, his fate depended on somehow using Diana’s death as a catalyst to overcome his unpopularity.
Disliking Blair’s announcement that the royal family intended to ‘change and modernise’, conjuring up visions of a Scandinavian bicycling monarch, Charles was seeking a formula for reinvention without abandoning the trappings and advantages of royalty. During discussions at Highgrove, he asked his staff, ‘How can we get the public to understand what we do? We need to be more accessible. But we must still keep our distance, and must not be like the public.’ In reply, Tom Shebbeare, the chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, suggested that Charles should speak publicly about Diana. Charles frowned. He shared his family’s anger that his ex-wife was being mythologised despite being, in his words, ‘a nutter’.
Dignity demanded that the battle of the Waleses should be buried. Other than uttering praise of Diana, Charles would remain silent. Simultaneously, any activity that risked him being portrayed as the ‘playboy prince’ was to end, and the campaign to have Camilla made more acceptable suspended. ‘Emphasise service, one’s duties and contribution,’ Charles told his staff. The media should be directed towards his various initiatives to do good for the country. ‘And please keep pushing them,’ he ordered. In parallel, Stephen Lamport was told to ask Peter Mandelson and Anji Hunter, the prime minister’s adviser in Downing Street, to arrange for Blair to make speeches in praise of Charles.
‘Nothing happens by chance,’ Mark Bolland concurred. ‘Everything has to be engineered.’
Mandelson duly briefed Jon Snow, the Channel 4 news presenter, that it was Charles’s initiative to fly the flags at half-mast, and that only after he had argued his case with the queen and Robert Fellowes was Charles allowed to organise ‘a full royal funeral at Westminster’. The resulting impression, said a satisfied Bolland after Snow’s ‘exclusive’ broadcast, was ‘Charles at the helm’. As requested, Tony Blair added his blessing during a television interview, stating that despite the Church’s disquiet about his divorce, Charles would not only be king, but also the supreme governor of the Anglican Church.
‘The world is run by some very nasty, powerful people,’ Charles had written to Jonathan Dimbleby. ‘Enemies of mine’, he warned, would become Dimbleby’s enemies. He had also consoled Camilla about the consequences of their relationship: ‘You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.’
Two broadcasts alone could not halt the opprobrium that was threatening Charles. On a personal level, one salvation was the spiritualism of the poet Kathleen Raine, who had been introduced to Charles by Laurens van der Post. Listening to the prince’s laments about his isolation under siege and his forlorn search for meaning, this unusual woman, who lived an unorthodox life in London and was forty years his senior, offered comfort over cups of tea in her Chelsea house. ‘She was always there for me because above all she understood what I was about,’ Charles explained, voicing his attachment to much older people, ‘and that was a profound comfort in an age of growing misunderstanding and almost deliberate ignorance.’
Raine urged Charles to disregard his critics: ‘Dear, dear Prince, don’t give that riff-raff an inch of ground, not a hair’s breadth; stand firm on the holy ground of the heart. The only way to deal with the evil forces of their world is from a higher level, not to meet them on their own.’
Raine’s spiritualism, based upon what she called ‘prayer in action’, the worship of the sacred nature of all life, art and wisdom, buttressed Charles’s sense of superiority. In his vision of himself as the protagonist in his own tragedy, and freed from any sense of shame, Charles adopted a formula for survival taught at the Temenos Academy, a charity of which Raine was one of the founders, that divided faith into metaphysics, mysticism and visionary imagination. Casting himself as the exceptional hero, Charles later explained his bravery in a eulogy he delivered at Raine’s memorial service: ‘I had put my head above the parapet and, yet again, the shells and bullets had been exploding all around me … The world seemed to be periodically madder and the powers of darkness – as Kathleen described them – closed in. She did her utmost to reawaken an Albion sunk in deadly sleep.’ Feeding his self-indulgence, Raine wrote: ‘How my heart rejoices that you have mounted that chariot. The chariot of fire between two armies. This is the great battle and where would you, our prince, rather be than in that chariot?’ Most sane fifty-year-old men would have ridiculed Raine’s inflated rhetoric, but Charles inhaled her words like oxygen.
To survive in the real world, he needed to ignore the risks and make himself visible. Four weeks after Diana’s death, he agreed with some trepidation to visit a Salvation Army centre in Manchester. He arrived with a speech drafted by Downing Street’s best spin masters, including Peter Mandelson, but then set it aside. Instead, he spoke with unscripted passion to a group of curious spectators. Repeatedly telling them how ‘enormously grateful and touched both the boys and myself have been’, he was at his best. The media coverage described a loving father of two adored sons speaking from the heart about their grief and grateful for the public’s support.
This sympathetic
