Chapter Fourteen ‘Selfless Humanity’
Chapter Fourteen
‘Selfless humanity’
People often used to ask me if it was the prince or the person Diana fell in love with, and I have always been sure that it was the person first. I found, as we spoke over lunch on that day when she took me out from Eton, and at other times in the first months of her relationship, that Diana was clearly smitten with Prince Charles.
She had been unusually clear in her thoughts about marriage from a very early age.
As my nanny Mary Clarke would remember Diana saying, when she was just ten years old: ‘Her only ambition…was to fall in love, get married, and have lots of children…She would never marry unless she was really, really in love.’ To do otherwise, Diana felt, would be to risk divorce.
Diana shared all this as a young girl – but it is a reminder of her extraordinarily tender age when she entered public life, that she wed less than a decade after sharing this considered childhood ambition.
On the day when she sprang me from school for Sunday lunch, she was pining for her love. Prince Charles had recently set off on a three-week royal tour of India and Nepal. Coming to see me was a way of taking her mind off the ache of his absence for a few hours.
At this time, which predated her engagement by several months, Diana shared with me tales that showed deep and sincere affection for her man: how, as a boy of perhaps thirteen years of age, Prince Charles had dared – for maybe the first time – to defy his father, Prince Philip.
He did this when deciding not to wear a formal suit to a staff party on one of the royal estates.
Instead, he chose to don a sports jacket and corduroy trousers.
It was an adolescent’s age-appropriate, if mild, attempt to show a modicum of independence.
But, Diana told me, on spotting Charles’s choice of clothes, Philip forced the room to silence, then pointed at his son, before roaring in lengthy, mocking laughter. This was a public humiliation that had, as must have been the intention, left Charles mortified.
Another of Diana’s revelations I found even stranger.
Apparently, Prince Philip had learnt that the Queen was contemplating the possibility of having Prince Charles’s ears pinned back a little by a doctor: their protrusion had led to him being teased at school and mocked in the media.
Philip not only stopped the medical procedure from being considered further, but he also had one of the Queen’s corgis’ ears operated on.
This was to serve as some sort of lasting reminder of a plan that Prince Philip had decided was ridiculous for its softness and vanity.
While I have no idea if these disturbing tales were true, Diana believed them.
They evidently made her feel both desperately sad for, and fiercely protective of, Prince Charles, even though he was a dozen years her senior.
From the start, as her brother, I felt reassured that my sister’s love for the heir to the throne was not only true, but almost palpable.
Sometimes the public got their own glimpse of Diana’s feelings. When the prince’s favourite horse, Allibar, died under him on a routine ride a few weeks later, Diana was photographed looking distraught at his heartbreak.
She had watched him come second in a race at Ludlow on Allibar the previous year, cheering him on as she stood beside Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom she understood to be a former girlfriend.
This was the first occasion on which Diana and Prince Charles were to be seen publicly together as a couple.
*
On the Tuesday evening between Diana’s death and her funeral I retreated to my study to write my eulogy.
I worked chronologically backwards, thinking about the last occasion on which I had seen my sister and jotted down: ‘1 July – Tate’.
I had bumped into Diana at a dinner at London’s Tate Gallery just nine weeks earlier, on her thirty-sixth birthday. Neither of us had any idea that the other was going to be at the evening.
I asked Diana if she had had a happy birthday, checked my gift to her had been safely received, and gave her a hug before we returned to our respective tables to eat.
We had only that brief chat, never to see each other again.
I decided to include the poignancy of this final meeting in the eulogy as a reminder of how sudden and unexpected the death of a loved one can be.
Earlier that same day, one of my family sent Diana a bouquet as a birthday gift.
Diana wrote to thank them, with typically irreverent humour: ‘I’ve been so lucky!
My house is so full of gorgeous flowers that the place looks like a funeral parlour!
’ Now here I was, just two months later, trying to write something suitable for her funeral.
As I contemplated what else to cover in my speech, I realized at this very early point that I was never going to do Diana proud in one brief oration, so I wrote: ‘No spoken tribute can do you justice.’
I then laid out a long list of themes that might be included.
One of the first was: ‘Always beautiful’.
I then moved on to Diana’s many other qualities and foibles, those the world knew, and others that were clear to me.
I noted these down at different points on the page: ‘Joie de vivre’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘Ferocious’, ‘Childlike fragility’, ‘Perfectionism’, and ‘Irreplaceable’.
A stand-out heading on my page of notes was ‘The Boys’. From the outset, William and Harry were to be my focus when I spoke. I added two subheadings here: ‘Pledge ourselves’, and ‘No harassment’.
I also cast my nephews as the true ‘Loves of her life’ and thought about mentioning how Diana had left our mother and me as their ‘Guardians’.
Another point exercising me as I wrote was Diana’s fatal vulnerability at the time of her death: ‘Freedom – no protection’, as I termed it here.
In her final year or two Diana had gained her liberty, but at the cost of her safety.
‘My protecting her’ followed wistfully, as did relevant memories: ‘Car chases. Eton. C[ape] T[own]’.
I wanted to avoid self-indulgence – nobody wants a eulogy to be about the eulogist – but included: ‘Nurturing me’, ‘We take her home’, and also touched on her recent time with me in ‘Cape Town’.
I then wrote the jarring thought: ‘Glad my father dead’, for I was relieved that he had been spared the agony of his darling daughter’s loss.
I also put down topics connected to Diana’s impossible relationship with the media: ‘Manipulation versus survival’, ‘Anguish caused by paparazzi, in life’, ‘Threatened by goodness’, and: ‘Reached people over the head of politicians’.
I appreciated that royal matters needed to be addressed, but did not want to give this too much space, so merely included: ‘Title irrelevant’, and ‘HRH’.
‘Diana – goddess’ followed. I knew straight away that the coincidence of Diana being both the name of the goddess of hunting, and of my sister – something I had never thought of before I sat down that evening – was a theme ripe with possibility.
‘Half a life’ was another important phrase that came to me then. It captured the tragedy of Diana’s loss when so young, while also emphasizing the astonishing amount she had achieved in just over a decade and a half.
I squeezed in the initials ‘USA’ next, when looking to Diana’s possible future, as well as one of her positive mantras: ‘Hug – no side effects’.
The half-page on which I wrote all this was getting quite crowded by this stage.
My last entry, which I placed in a boxed square for added emphasis, reads: ‘Thank you, the people, on her behalf.’
It is interesting to me how short the journey was from these rough headings to my final text.
But that night I was too tired to write the speech, leaving the themes to jumble in my mind.
I have always written like that, trusting that my best thoughts will survive the night, and present themselves for inspection once more in the morning, hopefully in better order.
*
Diana called me at my mother’s London pied-à-terre and asked if I could come round to her flat in Coleherne Court. Her flatmates bounced around the place with boisterous excitement and then withdrew to leave me alone with my sister for a pre-agreed moment together.
Diana looked as excited as I had ever seen her, her face flushed with happiness as she curled her legs tightly beneath her on the sofa.
‘Carlos, I’ve got some rather big news!’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m getting married!’
‘Oh? To anyone I know?’ I teased.
Diana told me everything in a jumble of half-formed sentences, including how Prince Charles had proposed, how she had said yes, and when she hoped the marriage might take place.
The flatmates tumbled in, loyal, lovely, friends, who had shared the drama of Diana’s astonishing elevation from normality to a figure of international fascination.
They had matched Diana’s discretion, kept her safe and grounded, and listened to her progress towards royal engagement with unflinching solidarity.
I was delighted that Diana was so obviously thrilled by her decision to marry, and I left her after being told that the engagement would be announced at 11 a.m. on the coming Tuesday, 24 February.
‘It’ll be top secret till then,’ Diana added.
‘But of course.’
I was sitting in a history class given by John Peake, an Eton housemaster adored by his boarders, but whose bellowing self-confidence could intimidate.
The next time I was in his classroom, a day or two later, he asked, ‘But didn’t you know your sister’s engagement to the Prince of Wales was being announced while you were here last time?’
‘Yes, sir, I did.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, man, why on Earth didn’t you mention it then?’ He was shouting in astonishment at my failure to share such an important moment with him and my classmates.
When I replied, ‘Because my sister asked me to keep it secret, sir,’ he turned to ridicule.