The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor by Penny Junor
Authors: Penny Junor
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Royalty
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the Colour, the Cenotaph service, Cowes Week, the Ascots. You can write your diary for five years ahead, ten years, twenty years.
That was the reality. There would be no spontaneity, no last-minute plans, no ducking out of commitments. Her carefree life of being a nobody was over. For a nineteen-year-old that was a terrifying prospect.
Colborne is convinced that if Lord Mountbatten, murdered by the IRA in 1979, had still been alive a year later, Charles and Diana would never have married. He is probably right. Years later, Diana spoke about being the ‘sacrificial lamb’ on the day of her wedding, of how she had wanted to back out of it some weeks before but been told by her sister that it was too late: her face was on the tea towels. If she did have doubts, despite their frank and lengthy conversations she certainly never expressed them to Colborne.
Charles himself had serious doubts about whether he had made the right decision during their engagement, but he kept them to himself. He asked the advice of a number of people – official advisers, friends and family – before he proposed toDiana, aware that this was no ordinary marriage and that he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Most people counselled for the marriage, including, significantly, the Queen Mother. She was very keen on the match; Diana was the granddaughter of her friend and lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, and in every sense, on paper, the perfect match. Ruth Fermoy knew it wasn’t; but, socially ambitious for her granddaughter, she chose to keep quiet. Years later in 1993, only a month before she died, the old lady apologized to the Prince of Wales for failing to warn him. Diana, she knew, had been ‘a dishonest and difficult girl’. Her father, who died in 1991, also admitted he had been wrong not to say something.
And so, having taken soundings, Charles went ahead and proposed, knowing that despite the consensus among those he’d spoken to, in his heart of hearts he was still uncertain. ‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family,’ he said, ‘but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’ He was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’, he confessed to one friend. To another, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’
The fact that, when asked on television on the day of the engagement whether he was in love, he replied ‘Yes, whatever love is’, is irrelevant. It was a very tactless thing to say, hurtful to Diana and bad PR, and he should never have said it; but the truth is this was a marriage where being in love was not the most important ingredient. This was a marriage that had to last – look at the number of ordinary marriages that have fallen apart when the pair stopped being ‘in love’ and discovered that there was nothing else holding them together. Look at the number of innocent children who have sufferedas a result. The Prince’s own thoughts about this, articulated years earlier, have been quoted many times before but they cannot be bettered:
I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married. [Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.
Whatever your place in life, when you marry, you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman
That was the reality. There would be no spontaneity, no last-minute plans, no ducking out of commitments. Her carefree life of being a nobody was over. For a nineteen-year-old that was a terrifying prospect.
Colborne is convinced that if Lord Mountbatten, murdered by the IRA in 1979, had still been alive a year later, Charles and Diana would never have married. He is probably right. Years later, Diana spoke about being the ‘sacrificial lamb’ on the day of her wedding, of how she had wanted to back out of it some weeks before but been told by her sister that it was too late: her face was on the tea towels. If she did have doubts, despite their frank and lengthy conversations she certainly never expressed them to Colborne.
Charles himself had serious doubts about whether he had made the right decision during their engagement, but he kept them to himself. He asked the advice of a number of people – official advisers, friends and family – before he proposed toDiana, aware that this was no ordinary marriage and that he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Most people counselled for the marriage, including, significantly, the Queen Mother. She was very keen on the match; Diana was the granddaughter of her friend and lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, and in every sense, on paper, the perfect match. Ruth Fermoy knew it wasn’t; but, socially ambitious for her granddaughter, she chose to keep quiet. Years later in 1993, only a month before she died, the old lady apologized to the Prince of Wales for failing to warn him. Diana, she knew, had been ‘a dishonest and difficult girl’. Her father, who died in 1991, also admitted he had been wrong not to say something.
And so, having taken soundings, Charles went ahead and proposed, knowing that despite the consensus among those he’d spoken to, in his heart of hearts he was still uncertain. ‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family,’ he said, ‘but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’ He was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’, he confessed to one friend. To another, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’
The fact that, when asked on television on the day of the engagement whether he was in love, he replied ‘Yes, whatever love is’, is irrelevant. It was a very tactless thing to say, hurtful to Diana and bad PR, and he should never have said it; but the truth is this was a marriage where being in love was not the most important ingredient. This was a marriage that had to last – look at the number of ordinary marriages that have fallen apart when the pair stopped being ‘in love’ and discovered that there was nothing else holding them together. Look at the number of innocent children who have sufferedas a result. The Prince’s own thoughts about this, articulated years earlier, have been quoted many times before but they cannot be bettered:
I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married. [Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.
Whatever your place in life, when you marry, you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman
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