The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor by Penny Junor Page A

not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life – a job. She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, otherwise she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years – well, that’s the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.
    So what went wrong? Why did Charles allow himself to make what, by the time he walked up the aisle, he knew was the wrong decision? He took advice before he proposed, but once he had asked Diana to marry him the subject was no longer open for discussion. His old friend Nicholas Soames could see disaster ahead; what worried him was the intellectual gulf between them and the fact that they had so little in common. Penny Romsey, wife of his cousin Norton (Lord Romsey), Mountbatten’s grandson, had an additional fear. She thought that Diana was in love with the idea of being a princess and hadvery little understanding of what that would involve. Norton agreed with all three observations and had very real fears for the future. He tackled the Prince on several occasions but was firmly told to mind his own business. None of them had the influence over him that Mountbatten had had. Mountbatten was like a father to the Prince – he called him his ‘Honorary Grandfather’ – and although Mountbatten was ambitious on his own behalf and would have dearly loved his own granddaughter to marry Charles, he would have seen that Diana was the wrong person for him to be bound to for fifty years or more. But Mountbatten was dead, and Charles was still consumed by grief, lost without the older man to guide him; and alone.
    He couldn’t talk to his own father; he and the Duke of Edinburgh had never been able to talk. If they had this marriage might never have happened, because what prompted Charles to make a decision before he was ready was a letter from Prince Philip. He told Charles he must make up his mind about Diana: he must either marry her or let her go because it was not fair to keep her dangling on a string. Charles took it to mean he must marry her. Friends who saw the letter have said there was no such ultimatum; the Prince misinterpreted his father’s words. Either way, over something so crucial, it is calamitous that they did not sit down and talk about it. And the Queen offered no opinion one way or another.
    The Duke had written his letter because of the media frenzy; Diana had been hunted from the day her face first appeared on the front page of the Daily Star with a question mark about her identity. She had been spotted through a pair of binoculars by the paper’s relentless ‘Charles watcher’, James Whitaker, on the banks of the River Dee. She was lounging around while Charles was fishing. He and his photographer, his companion in the bushes that day, quickly worked out who she was andfrom that moment until the engagement five months later, she was besieged – followed, photographed and occasionally tricked into talking – everywhere she went. And when a blonde was seen boarding the royal train in sidings in Wiltshire late one night, the press assumed, mistakenly, it was Diana. The Duke of Edinburgh realized that her honour was at stake and that any further delay in the Prince declaring his intentions would be damaging.

EIGHT
The Duty of an Heir
    It is too easy to say that the media is responsible for the whole mismatch between Charles and Diana. It is true that, had James Whitaker not been spying on the Prince of Wales while he fished that afternoon, Charles might have been able to get to know Diana better before popping the question. The media has a lot to answer for, and its behaviour during the most troubled years of their marriage was disgraceful. The war over circulation robbed newspapers of all humanity as they scrabbled to get the juiciest, most damning story and the most intrusive photograph. But what really forced the Prince’s hand was the system – a system