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The Real Diana
The Real Diana
The Real Diana
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The Real Diana

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"When I met Diana at a mutual friend's house in 1990, I was astonished by her conduct. Up to this point, the Diana I had encountered was a princess who had behaved very much in keeping with the forms and traditions of royalty. In social situations, she was as circumspect as the rest of them, as indeed all ladies are....

"Now, however, she was the antithesis of circumspect. Throwing caution and reserve to the wind, she said that she wanted me to write the truth about her life 'because I feel as if the whole fairy tale is crushing whatever's left of the real me.... If you'd just write about the real Diana, it would make all the difference.'" --Lady Colin Campbell

Who was the real Diana? What was it like to be so privileged yet so anguished, so beloved yet so self-loathing, so spoiled yet so despairing? The Princess of Wales was all these things--far more complicated, conflicted, and intriguing a person than the wildly disparate saint or lunatic she is frequently portrayed to be.

Royal insider Lady Colin Campbell sets the record straight on many of the most controversial aspects of Diana's turbulent life: how Charles and Diana's engagement came to pass, though it seemed ill-advised to those closest to both of them; what their honeymoon was really like; the truth behind Diana's bulimia, her widely reported suicide attempts, and her obsession with Camilla Parker Bowles; Diana's search for love and fulfillment with numerous men before, during, and after her marriage; her brilliant manipulations of the press; and her relationship with Dodi Fayed.

Lady Colin Campbell's New York Times bestselling biography Diana in Private was the first to expose the truth about Diana and her troubled marriage. In The Real Diana, she reveals that the reason she knew so much about what went on behind the palace gates was because Diana herself was the source. Drawing upon these confidences--as well as on conversations with countless people who knew Diana and with Diana herself in the final years of her life--Lady Colin Campbell combines true insight with true compassion to bring us the most intimate and revealing portrait of the Princess of Wales that we will ever have.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 6, 2013
ISBN9781466850781
The Real Diana
Author

Lady Colin Campbell

LADY COLIN CAMPBELL, who is connected to the royal family through mutual ancestors and marriage, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Diana in Private--which was the first book to reveal the truth behind the "fairytale" marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales--as well as The Royal Marriages: What Really Goes on in the Private World of the Queen and Her Family, and The Real Diana.

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Rating: 3.1923076769230767 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Full of lies. George Zadie (colin campbell's real name) is insane.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lady Colin Campbell explains that she began this biography with Diana’s help and approval. Diana subsequently abandoned the meetings when she realised Lady C’s aim was to give a realistic portrait rather than one where Diana was the innocent victim of everything that happened to her.The author undertook extensive research, naming contributors, and reveals Diana as being both needy and very manipulative. A woman who fell in love with a Prince rather than the man.A fascinating read (with an update following Diana’s death) revealing far more than the subsequent more higher profile Morton bio.

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The Real Diana - Lady Colin Campbell

Preface

Who was the real Diana? What was it about this woman that made her so fascinating to so many people? How is it that she became so popular that her death eclipsed the funeral of the contemporary world’s greatest saint, Mother Teresa?

Diana, Princess of Wales, was undoubtedly beloved by millions of people. Few of them, of course, had ever met her. Of those who had, even fewer knew her.

The real Diana, the Diana I knew and liked—and sometimes didn’t—was a woman of contradictions. On the one hand, she was sweet and loving. On the other, by her own admission she could be bitter and vengeful. She was intelligent without being intellectual, wily and naive, vulnerable and tough. She was not shy, as she and several friends such as Sophie Kimball took pains to say over the years, yet she lived the whole of her adult life with people believing—and reacting to—the press-imposed tag of shyness.

From the moment Diana burst upon the world stage in 1980, she possessed one of the most likable and sympathetic public images of all time. This image, while responsible for much of the adulation Diana received, became a trap. Diana herself tried to break out from its restrictive mold, to kill the fairy tale, as she put it to me in 1990 when trying to convince me to write the book which Andrew Morton subsequently produced.

The pre-fairy-tale Diana is worth recalling. I distinctly remember meeting her at a party when she was about seventeen. She was totally unmemorable, despite being tall and sweet. She did not yet possess the aura of beauty she later had in such measure. There were no indications of the sense of style she would subsequently develop, and which other teenagers with an interest in art or fashion have by that age. She was utterly traditional, a typical Sloane Ranger, and I would never have remembered her but for the fact that she was introduced to me as her unforgettable (and hated) stepmother Raine Spencer’s stepdaughter.

The butterfly who burst out of such a dull chrysalis in the early days of her marriage was more memorable. Once Diana became the Princess of Wales, our paths started crossing with greater regularity as she was launched upon the social and charity worlds. By then, of course, she was immensely famous, but she had not yet grown into the role of Princess of Wales in the way that she later did. Although no longer dull in style, she was still utterly traditional, with nothing individual about her. Moreover, there was an elusiveness to her personality, a not there quality that was both intriguing and disturbing.

Throughout the 1980s, I observed Diana growing into her public role with ever-increasing strength. Although I admired the way she conducted herself publicly, I cannot say I enjoyed every encounter with her. While I liked her, and thought her charming, I also sensed an underlying discomfort within herself which did not make one wish to prolong conversations with her. Only later, while we were working on Diana in Private together, did I discover that the feeling of discomfort was one which Diana carried around with her at all times. She did not live easily in her skin.

To my chagrin, considering the bitter regrets Diana later had about the Morton book, responsibility for planting the idea of a book in her head lies with me. Towards the end of the last decade, Britain was in the grips of a profound recession. I was desperately casting about for a means of raising funds for some of my charities when I hit upon the idea of writing an authorized biography of the Princess of Wales focusing on her charity work, with the proceeds to go to three of the charities we had in common. At first Diana was amenable, but by the time I went to Buckingham Palace in August 1990 for an appointment to discuss it with her Press Secretary, she had changed her mind. In a nutshell, she wanted me to write the book that Andrew Morton later published.

Had Diana told me that she wanted me to produce a panegyric, I would have turned her down cold. However, she did not. She led me to believe she wanted me to write the truth of my life, to quote her. The fairy tale is killing me, she said. If I don’t escape from it, I’ll die. I agreed to write what became Diana in Private on those conditions, thinking that I would have the liberty of producing a balanced account of her life. Only later, after contracts were signed and the book was well underway, did Diana and I appreciate that we had misunderstood one another’s positions. She did not want a truthful account of her life, but a heavily slanted version with which she could gain a separation from Prince Charles, whereas I told her, I’m not about to trash your husband [when he doesn’t deserve it].

Although this difference led to three years of non-speaks, to use the vernacular which Diana’s circle employs, we did kiss and make up, literally and publicly, at a reception at the Russian Ambassador’s residence in July 1995. Thereafter, we became what the English call chummy. We cleared up many of the misunderstandings which had arisen during the War of the Waleses, and grew to be on such cordial terms that I cried for hours on the day of her death.

Because so much of what I know about the Princess of Wales is not public knowledge, the Diana I knew and liked is a far more complicated, conflicted, intriguing and fascinating person than the wildly disparate saint or lunatic she is frequently portrayed to be. I hope that I have done her greater justice in the forthcoming pages than she often receives, and that I reconcile for the readers what onlookers have so far viewed as puzzling contradictions. I also hope that the picture I paint captures her essence as well as her spirit. Diana had both a great sense of fun and a great burden of pain. I hope I make intelligible for the reader what it was like to be so privileged yet so anguished, so beloved yet so self-loathing, so spoiled yet so deprived, so hopeful by nature and yet so often despairing. To the world, Diana, Princess of Wales, was a living myth, but to herself, she was just a human being trying to make some sense, and to gain some satisfaction, out of a life of extremes. It is the circumstances of that life, and the motives that drove her, which the succeeding pages will lay bare.

One

Diana, Princess of Wales, lived her life as she was born on 1 July 1961: amid intrigue, ambition, privilege, passion, pain and pleasure. Throughout it all, she would be pulled in many different directions, some of them diametrically opposed. She believed that this conflict started before her birth. I was a disappointment. My parents were hoping for a boy. They were so sure I’d be a boy they hadn’t even thought of a [girl’s] name for me. She was finally registered as the Honourable Diana Frances Spencer, named after the eighteenth-century Lady Diana Spencer, who nearly married Frederick, Prince of Wales, and after her own mother, Frances.

In yet another show of what she took to be her diminished status as a girl, Diana, who later developed a heightened interest in status as a result, was the only one of her siblings to be christened without a royal godparent. On 30 August 1961, unlike her eldest sister, Sarah, whose godmother was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, or her elder sister, Jane, whose godfather was the Duke of Kent, or her younger brother, who would boast the Queen as his godmother, Diana had to content herself with the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk’s wife, Lady Mary Colman; her cousin Alexander (Sandy) Gilmour, younger brother of Tory baronet and life peer Ian Gilmour; Christie’s chairman, John Floyd; and two neighbors, Sarah Pratt and Carol Fox.

If her parents stamped her with the mentality of a victim, Viscount and Viscountess Althorp had no intention of doing so. They were merely hoping for the heir to the Spencer earldom held by Johnnie Althorp’s father, Jack, the 7th Earl Spencer. Along with the earldom came a fortune of some $140,000,000 in present-day terms. This consisted of a portfolio of stocks and shares and Althorp House, which is one of the most beautiful stately homes in England. Built in 1508, it was modernized by Henry Holland, the Prince Regent’s architect, who added the white brick façade which gives the house its shimmering lightness. Set in its own 600-acre park and surrounded by a 13,000-acre estate, Althorp House was even more beautiful inside than out. It had vast rooms with magnificent moldings and high ceilings. Blindingly large chandeliers gave light to two of the finest collections in private hands: a houseful of eighteenth-century furniture made by the finest craftsmen of the day, and wall after wall of portraits and landscapes painted by such masters as Van Dyck, Rubens, Gainsborough, Kneller, Reynolds.

Under the English rule of primogeniture, titles passed from father to son, with the estates entailed upon (legally restricted to) the title. If Frances did not provide a son and heir, after Johnnie’s death the earldom and all the wealth accompanying it would therefore pass to his cousin Bobby Spencer. Johnnie’s daughters would not even have a right to stay in Althorp House any more, and their inheritance would be limited to the savings from the earldom’s income that their father had managed to accumulate in his lifetime. To Johnnie Spencer, it was unthinkable that he would leave his daughters in relative penury.

For that reason, Johnnie Althorp was preoccupied with having a son. Although he loved the seven-pound eleven-ounce baby Diana, and she would always remain his favorite child, he steered Frances to Harley Street as soon as she was on her feet. He wanted to find out what was wrong with her, Diana later said, while her brother, Charles, maintains that the stress of this quest for a son was what ruined his parents’ marriage.

Like most of the Spencers, Johnnie took great pride in his heritage. The Spencers were originally businessmen who made a fortune out of the quick transportation of sheep to the cities in the fifteenth century. Sheep farmers were the computer billionaires of their day, and by 1508 the ambitious John Spencer had managed to acquire the title Sir and to build Althorp House. Thereafter, there was no stopping the Spencers. They remained rich, married well, and gradually climbed up the peerage. One became Earl of Sunderland, another the Duke of Marlborough when his uncle, only son and heir to the great John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, died. The result was that the Churchill family are not really Churchills at all, but Spencers who added the surname Churchill to their own.

There was another, less fortunate, result of the marriage of the Churchill heiress to the Earl of Sunderland. The Churchills were so much more famous and eminent that the Spencers became the secondary branch of their own family, and even lost their earldom, which was absorbed in the dukedom of Marlborough and has subsequently been used by the eldest son of the duke’s heir, the Marquis of Blandford.

That loss notwithstanding, the Spencers flourished throughout the eighteenth century. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the great duke’s widow, had for many years been regarded as Queen Anne’s closest friend and lover. She was therefore used to wielding power, not only as a result of her husband’s position as the most famous general in the world, but also because of her own political influence. One of the richest women in England, she offered the cash-strapped King George II £100,000 (about $50 million today) for the hand of his son and heir Frederick, Prince of Wales, for her favorite granddaughter Diana Spencer. Although the Prime Minister forbade the marriage, thereafter the Spencers remained close to the throne, enabled in no small measure by the vast fortune Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, left to her favorite grandson, the second Spencer grandson who lost out on the titles of Sunderland and Marlborough.

Thereafter, generation after generation of Spencers were appointed equerries and ladies-in-waiting to royalty, culminating with Diana, Princess of Wales’s father being an equerry to King George VI and, later, to Queen Elizabeth II, and her grandmother Cynthia, Countess Spencer, being a Lady of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s Bedchamber as well as the love of the then Prince of Wales’s life before she accepted Diana’s grandfather Jack Spencer’s proposal of marriage in 1919.

When Diana’s brother, Charles, the present Earl Spencer, made his funeral oration lambasting the Royal Family and stating that his sister needed no royal title to weave her particular brand of magic, commentators decreed that his contempt for the throne was a Spencer tradition, in keeping with the indifference to royalty which the great Whig aristocrats had traditionally displayed. The evidence does not support that contention. For the two hundred and fifty years that separated the abortive and the successful Diana Spencers’ possible assumption of the position of Princess of Wales, the Spencer family was assiduous in cultivating any link that brought them closer to the throne. They understood that the fount of all honor and privilege was the Crown. And they did their utmost to garner as much of its prestige for themselves as possible. Nor did they fuss whether the connection was legitimate or illegitimate. They therefore took pride in the fact that Lady Georgiana Spencer, who became the most glamorous female of her day as the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, had a long affair with the Prince Regent, later King George IV, and gave birth to his child. They took greater pride in being descended five times from King Charles II, even though four of those lines of descent were illegitimate, and when the second Diana Spencer married Charles, Prince of Wales, in 1981, they were thrilled that it was through them that Stuart blood was being reintroduced into the royal line.

*   *   *

Yet it was not the Spencers at all who actually ensured that Lady Diana Spencer was placed upon the road to royalty. Credit for that rests with Frances’s parents, Lord and Lady Fermoy, whose proximity to the throne was based on personal, not courtly, relationships. And they were altogether a more interesting and accomplished couple than any of the Spencers.

Maurice Burke Roche, the 4th Baron Fermoy, was the son of an American heiress named Fanny (Frances) Work and the Honourable James Roche, later the 3rd Baron. The Roches were an exceedingly good-looking family, with two of the most beautiful ancestral homes in Ireland—Cahirguillamore and Kilshanning—but, through high-living and gambling, they had dissipated their fortune and would have been completely broke had the 2nd Baron’s heir not married Frank Work’s daughter in the late nineteenth century.

Frank Work was one of New York’s most successful stockbrokers of the day, with clients such as the Vanderbilts and Astors. Unfortunately for the Roches, he loathed foreigners and cut Fanny out of his will when she married one, reinstating her only after she left her husband in 1891 and returned home with her two young sons in tow. His proviso while doing so was that she cease using her titled married name and agree not to return to Europe for the remainder of her life. He then carried this interdict further, and left her twin sons, Maurice (the Princess of Wales’s grandfather, the 4th Baron Fermoy) and Francis, portions of his fortune only if they became American citizens and remained in the United States for the remainder of their lives.

When Frank Work died, however, his Harvard-educated grandsons overturned his will through the courts. Maurice, who became the 4th Lord Fermoy in 1921, then returned to live in England with the $3,000,000 which he had inherited from his indomitable but controlling grandfather. He avoided Ireland, which was on its way to full independence from Britain, settling in England, which was then at the pinnacle of its power and prestige. Only too soon, he struck up a friendship with King George V’s second son, Bertie, the Duke of York, who became King George VI in 1936. So close did they become that the King leased Maurice Park House, a ten-bedroomed-house on the Sandringham Estate which his father, King Edward VII, had built to accommodate the overflow of guests on shoots. Maurice was now literally living on royal property as a friend and neighbor of the King and his son. With his money and international panache, he fitted well into the upper echelons of British society, especially after becoming Conservative Member of Parliament for King’s Lynn, something that was possible because he was an Irish peer with no rights to sit in the House of Lords.

Maurice’s wife, Ruth, was the perfect foil for him. Although the product of a middle-class background—her father was a Colonel from Bieldside in bleek Aberdeen in the North of Scotland—the former Miss Gill was bright and beautiful. The famous flautist Richard Adeney knew her well and remembers her perfectly symmetrical face and huge eyes. She was awfully nice. Very, very nice. She was also a gifted musician. According to the Scots photographer and socialite Brodrick Haldane, I knew her before her marriage. In those days, she was far more free-wheeling than she later became. She was wonderfully talented, both as a singer and a pianist. She was at the Paris Conservatoire, and was very highly rated.

It was while Ruth was a student at the Paris Conservatoire of Music that she met Maurice Fermoy. She was more than twenty-five years his junior, but that did not prevent her from encouraging this rich and urbane nobleman with royal friends. In a day and age when women were reared to marry well, this ambitious young woman understood that marriage to Lord Fermoy would be a definite step up in the world. And so, at twenty, she married him and went on to have a wonderful life in the lap of luxury. She produced three children and had something no Spencer had managed for hundreds of years: a happy marriage. She also made a useful contribution to the world of music, founding the King’s Lynn Festival after the Second World War and importing musical friends such as Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Richard Adeney to perform. She continued living beside the Sovereign until she was widowed, at which point she turned over the lease of Park House to her son-in-law, Johnnie Althorp, so that he and Frances and their children could enjoy the advantage of genuine proximity to the Royal Family.

Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was more than just Diana’s grandmother. She played a pivotal role in raising Diana to royal status, and in sowing the seeds that would ultimately destroy this granddaughter who accomplished all the dreams and ambitions her Spencer forebears had held for themselves. She always had a strong character, Brodrick Haldane told me. She was never grand, but she became frightfully correct. She knew the rules and played by them. Richard Adeney remembers an instance which highlights that. She knew what was appropriate. She could be very relaxed, but she also knew when to stand on her dignity. I remember once I was in King’s Lynn eating an ice cream on the street. She came by with some royals. We agreed through eye contact that it would be more suitable for her to pass by without us acknowledging each other. To me, that summarized how impeccably mannered she was. It would just have been awkward for her, for the royals, and for me if she’d acknowledged me. She really did have the most exquisite manners.

Appointed a Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1956, Ruth functioned in a world where breeding and good behavior were all-important. While she could adopt the latter, there was no way she could invent the former. Her family was neither grand nor impressive. In fact, the only thing that put them beyond the ordinary was the secret they kept hidden. This was that her great-great grandmother Eliza Kewark was a dark-skinned native of Bombay who had lived, without benefit of matrimony, with her great-great-grandfather Theodore Forbes while he worked for the East India Company. Unsavory as the taint of illegitimacy was, even at that distance in time, it was nothing compared with the stigma of what was then known as colored blood. Had it been generally known that Ruth and her children were part-Indian, they might never have made good marriages. Eliza’s true race was therefore expunged from the family tree and she reemerged as an Armenian. This fiction was maintained even when Diana married the Prince of Wales.

Of all Diana’s grandparents, Ruth was the strongest and most resourceful. A good friend of the Queen Mother’s since her days as the Duchess of York, Diana’s grandmother was as status-conscious as her granddaughter would become. She appreciated that there was no better position to occupy in British society than that of an adjunct to the Royal Family. She and her socialite husband worked to maintain the royal link, never putting a foot wrong in their conduct. While Maurice was alive and their children young enough to be living at home, the Fermoys were rewarded with invitations from the King and Queen on a regular basis—especially during the shooting season, between the Glorious Twelfth of August and the end of February, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were in residence at Sandringham House. Then, invitations flowed from the Big House for shooting parties and to tea and dinner, for the children as well as Ruth and Maurice, who was such an integral member of the King’s circle that he was present on the shoot the day before George VI died in his sleep in February 1952. Although the Spencers were undoubtedly a grander family in terms of lineage and wealth, in terms of a close royal connection they were easily outstripped by the Fermoys: It was one thing to attend upon the Royal Family in an official capacity as an equerry or lady-in-waiting, but quite another to take part in their everyday lives as personal friends.

No one lives in an environment without absorbing its written and unwritten rules, and this was especially true of people in Court circles. It was heady stuff being around the royals. Whilst you were in their actual presence, you were waited on hand and foot and treated as if you were an extension of royalty yourself. And when you were away from them, everyone who knew of your connection courted you in the hope that some of the reflected glory of royalty would run off on them. This was, and is, the way of life in royal courts, and both Johnnie and Frances, who were reared in this atmosphere, knew the score. They understood that there was a lot more to the royal way than wearing formal attire to funerals, silk dresses for tea, and white tie and tiaras at state balls. Both before they were married and afterwards, they had to live lives that seemed to be above criticism. They must be invariably polite. They must never gossip about the Royal Family. Any problems they had, must be kept hidden away. Life in royal circles had to seem to be perfect.

Of course, both Johnnie and Frances grew up seeing what happens when even the mighty fall out of favor. They witnessed at first hand how ruthlessly the Royal Family and their courtiers closed ranks to cast Edward VIII out of the hallowed circle when he dared to try to swap the top job for the secondary one of royal duke upon abdication. They could not have remained ignorant of how quickly the disgraced King’s nemesis (and Private Secretary) Alex Hardinge followed him into the abyss when he managed to work his way onto the wrong side of Queen Elizabeth. The royal way was one of absolutes. You were absolutely in or absolutely out. You were absolutely spotless or absolutely sullied. There were no half-measures, and while people frequently failed to measure up to the standard in their private lives, fallibility was fine as long as no one saw any evidence of it.

Johnnie Spencer and Ruth Fermoy showed the extent of their ambition, and their courtiers’ mentalities, when the Prince of Wales displayed a romantic interest in Diana’s older sister Sarah in 1977. When Lady Sarah Spencer started going out with the Prince of Wales, you could see how elated her whole family was, a lady with senior connections at the Palace said. This was their chance finally to acquire a legitimate royal connection. Sarah, however, was in the midst of fighting a battle with anorexia nervosa, which left her without the emotional resources to cope with a prince who blew hot one day and cold the next. In an attempt to jerk his chain, she made the mistake of speaking to the press about her feelings, ending up by declaring that she would marry only a man she loved, whether he was a prince or a dustman. Charles, who had an abiding loathing of the tabloids and one inflexible rule—you’re out on your ear if you speak to the papers—promptly dumped her. Neither her father nor her grandfather let their loyalty to their flesh and blood get in the way of their relationship with the future King of England. Sarah must pay the price for her indiscretion.

Although Sarah blew her chance of an alliance with a royal, her twenty-one-year-old sister Jane—so plain even a mouse would look like Joan Collins beside her, said a relation—did the family proud the following year, in April 1978, when she married thirty-six-year-old Robert Fellowes. The son of the Queen’s Land Agent at Sandringham, Sir William Fellowes, he was Her Majesty’s Assistant Private Secretary. Although the most junior of the three Private Secretaries, he was nevertheless well placed in Court circles. The family was exultant. The marriage meant that invitations would be coming through two separate conduits: Ruth Fermoy in Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother]’s household and Robert Fellowes in the Queen’s, a royal private secretary said. It was no secret that Robert Fellowes was ambitious. Time has shown that assessment to be accurate. In 1986 he was appointed Deputy Private Secretary to the Queen, and in 1990 Private Secretary.

Robert Fellowes and Jane Spencer were married in splendor at the Guards Chapel opposite Buckingham Palace. Their wedding reception was held at St. James’s Palace. After the honeymoon, the newlyweds returned home to Kensington Palace, where they still live at the time of this writing. Diana was as happy as the rest of the family for Jane’s coup. Thanks to Jane’s new position as the wife of one of the most influential courtiers at Buckingham Palace, her—and their—ambitions were that much nearer being realized.

Up to that point, all of them harbored ambitions that Diana might one day marry Prince Andrew, whose photograph she had kept beside her bed throughout her years at West Heath School, as one of her schoolmates confirms. The prospect of a union between Andrew and Diana was more than mere idle fantasy, though there was no certainty that it would ever materialize. Marriages between the Royal Family and aristocrats were never arranged. They were simply encouraged. That meant that the courtiers had somehow to ignite the particular royal’s interest for matrimony to follow. The Spencer family was so convinced that Diana would end up as the consort of the Duke of York (the title customarily bestowed upon the Sovereign’s second son) that they nicknamed her Duchess, or Duch for short. For the rest of her life, Diana’s sisters and her closest friends, including Sarah, Duchess of York, called her Duch.

Diana and Andrew had a history which the Spencers found hopeful. Andrew, who was a year older than Diana, and his younger brother, Edward, had been friendly with Diana and her younger brother, Charles, when they were children and she was living at Park House, first with both her parents and, after their separation in 1967, with her father. Although the family vacated Park House upon Johnnie’s accession to the Spencer earldom in 1975, three years was not so large a gap that Andrew would have forgotten Diana. Yet it was big enough to lend a spark of excitement. They hoped that all she needed to do was visit her sister and be visible before her rangy attractiveness caught the eye of the girl-crazy second son of the Queen. Then she just might become the Duchess of York.

In the interim, Diana’s family issued invitations which put her in the royal line of vision and talked her up, as one courtier told me, so that the Royal Family, Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother] especially, would push her into Prince Andrew’s path when the time for marriage came.

The best-laid plans come a cropper, but seldom with such unexpected improvement. In July 1980, the Prince of Wales, who barely knew Diana when she was a little girl, became reacquainted with her at the Sussex house of a distant cousin of mine. Commander Robert de Pass is a member of the Royal Household and his wife, Philippa, is one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Diana was a friend of his son, Philip, whom she had met via that most exclusive of circles, the courtiers’ network. Diana, reared from birth to captivate any royal who might fly into her patch, acquitted herself in exemplary fashion. She moved me, Charles later confided to a friend.

Could it really be that Diana might be able to pull off the unimaginable and become the Princess of Wales? Like a well-trained army, Diana’s family closed ranks, a courtier told me at the time of the divorce. The Queen and the Prince of Wales still cannot believe that not one member of Diana’s family tipped them off about how unsuited she was to the life ahead of her. Ruth, Lady Fermoy, later told a friend, I had reservations about how Diana would cope. To my lasting regret, I kept them to myself.

This was not surprising. Had the Royal Family understood how ambitious both the Spencers and Ruth Fermoy were, they might well have listened less as Ruth encouraged Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to push the young lovers ever closer, and Diana’s own family talked Ruth out of the misgivings she had. The Prince feels that they let him fall into a trap, one of his cousins told me.

The trap, however, was not Charles’s alone, but Diana’s as well. And he at least has survived it, while Diana lies in isolation on a tiny island called The Oval near Althorp House.

Two

The popular myth is that Diana was born into an unhappy family and that her childhood was a misery from day one. That is untrue. Johnnie and Frances Althorp’s marriage started happily in 1954. There was a tremendous physical attraction between them, as there later was between him and Raine, a Spencer cousin told me.

The circumstances of Johnnie’s meeting with Frances certainly confirm that assessment. He was unofficially engaged to Lady Anne Coke, who subsequently married Princess Margaret’s old beau the Honourable Colin Tennant (now Lord Glenconner). He took one look at the tall, striking, statuesque blonde who was making her debut and promptly forgot about the equally statuesque and striking-looking but considerably less passionate Anne. Three weeks later he proposed, and Frances, who always had a tendency to run where her passions led, agreed to follow him for life.

The marriage began well. Held at the Guards Chapel, followed by a reception at St. James’s Palace, with the Queen and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in attendance, it was everything Ruth Fermoy wanted for her daughter. Viscount Althorp was titled, moneyed and well-connected. He had been an equerry to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. Gratifying though it was for Frances to please her mother, she was also pleasing herself. Johnnie was tall, strapping, and handsome, with a powerful sex drive. Twelve years older than his eighteen-year-old bride, he seemed worldly and interesting.

If Frances was a source of pride to her mother, Johnnie was the antithesis to his father. Jack Spencer was an intellectual who despised Johnnie as a dolt whose mindless interests went no further than hunting, fishing, shooting and socializing. For the newlyweds, who under normal aristocratic practice would have been expected to live in a large farmhouse on the Althorp Estate until Johnnie succeeded to his father’s title, living in close proximity to Earl Spencer was undesirable after a trial period proved disastrous. So Ruth turned over the lease on Park House to the newlyweds for Johnnie and Frances to use as their marital home.

A year after the wedding, Frances gave birth to a daughter, Sarah, followed two years later by another, Jane. Although two daughters in a row were mildly disappointing, the lack of a son was not yet a problem. In 1960, however, Frances gave birth to a deformed son, John, who died the same day. Hope began wearing thin when the replacement turned out to be yet another girl, but the seven-pound, twelve-ounce baby was pretty, with huge blue eyes and a captivating smile. Disappointed though her father was that she was not the cherished heir, Diana, who grew into an endearing little girl, became his lifelong favorite. Then on 20 May 1964 Frances gave birth to the long-awaited boy, Charles, at the London Clinic. The Althorps’ world now seemed perfect, even to those who were living as a part of it.

Lord and Lady Althorp were still very much in love, very affectionate with each other, Inga Crane, a nursery maid who arrived at Park House shortly after Charles’s birth, confirmed.

A member of staff, who was still living on the Sandringham Estate when I spoke to her, remembers, The family were not at all snooty. In fact, they seemed quite ordinary. Just happier than most. Diana would later say that her father taught her to treat all people as equals, but her mother is the parent whom everyone adored. Lady Althorp was a wonderful woman, this member of the staff says. Always laughing. She treated me and the others [there were six servants] like friends rather than staff and she spent a lot of time in the nursery. Unlike most upper-class households of the day, it wasn’t a case of children upstairs and adults downstairs at all. She would always be there in the evening for cuddles and bedtime stories and then she and Lord Althorp would have their dinner at 8 o’clock. They did a lot of entertaining and the house was always full of lights and warmth and people in the evenings. In the daytime it was full of noises the children made because of the little school there. Gertrude Allen, Frances’s former governess, came in from the village every morning to conduct classes for each of the Spencer children, who began their education along with a dozen or so other children from the surrounding farms, at the age of four. The doctor’s son was also a classmate of

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