This paperback edition published by Arrow Books 2011

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Copyright © Katie Nicholl 2010, 2011

Katie Nicholl has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain as William and Harry by Preface Publishing
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ISBN 978 1 84809 217 4

This book is dedicated to my husband for his uncompromising love and support, and to my family, especially my mother, for showing me what true courage is.

Acknowledgements

Andrew Morton, arguably the most controversial royal biographer of all time once wrote: ‘The eternal problem facing royal writers is that of authenticity. How to convince the world of the truth of your account, and the veracity of your sources when so many interviews are conducted on a confidential basis.’ My entire career as a journalist and royal reporter has depended on sources, none of whom I have ever been able to name or acknowledge. Understandably you all wish to remain confidential and it is my duty to keep you so. Please know that I am indebted to every one of you – thank you for all your time and trust. Without you this book could never have been written.

Some of the contributors to this book, however, have kindly agreed to be named. I would like to thank the Queen’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson for generously sharing her wealth of knowledge about William and Harry’s early lives. Having worked closely with the Prince and Princess of Wales for many years I must also thank Dickie Arbiter for his time, memories and archive footage. I would also like to thank Camilla Fayed for agreeing to speak with me about the summer of 1997 for the very first time.

My thanks also, in no particular order, to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Simone Simmons, Vivienne Parry, Emma Sayle, Sam Young, Ian Jones, Alan Davidson, Dominic O’Neill, Ingrid Seward, Darren McGrady, Mark Fuller, Andrew Neil, Kitty Dimbleby, Garth Gibbs, Mike Merritt, Niall Scott (Head of Communications at St Andrews), Dr Declan Quigley, Carley Massy-Birch, Ben Duncan and Katherine Witty. My gratitude and sincere thanks also go to Lieutenant Colonel Roy Parkinson and Major David James-Roll for inviting me to Sandhurst. Thanks also to the Ministry of Defence Press Office for their assistance and also the Royal Air Force press office, especially Martin Tinworth for his time.

Special thanks to my agent Jonathan Shalit for being the inspiration behind this book and to my editor Trevor Dolby for believing in me from the start. My publishers Preface have been fantastic throughout and I would like to thank in particular Richard Cable, Nicola Taplin, Vanessa Milton, Natalie Higgins and my picture researcher Melanie Haselden, you have been a pleasure to work with. Thanks also to Ian Monk for his guidance along the way.

Especial thanks to my esteemed colleague Laura Collins for her invaluable advice, assistance and encouragement and also to my dedicated researchers Helena Pearce and Charlotte Griffiths. I must also thank the Associated Newspapers reference library for all their help and Sian James and Marilyn Warnick at the Mail on Sunday. Finally my thanks to Peter Wright for his continued support.

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

About the Book

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Praise

Preface

An heir and a spare

The early years

Off to school

The Eton years

Goodbye, Mummy

Coming off the rails at Club H

A gap-year prince but a reluctant king

School’s out for Harry

The St Andrews years

Kate Middleton, princess-in-waiting

Stepping in line at Sandhurst

William’s wobble

Boujis nights

Remembering Mummy

Off to war

Brothers in arms

Princes of the future

Shadow king

Out of Africa

A Royal Wedding

List of Illustrations

Bibliography

Plates

Preface

Modernisation is quite a strong word to use with the monarchy because it’s something that’s been around for many hundreds of years. But I think it’s important that people feel the monarchy can keep up with them and is relevant to their lives. We are all human and inevitably mistakes are made. But in the end there is a great sense of loyalty and dedication among the family and it rubs off on me. Ever since I was very small, it’s something that’s been very much impressed on me, in a good way.

Prince William on his twenty-first birthday

It was an unexpected encounter with Prince Harry at the Kensington Roof Gardens in London in April 2003 that lit the touch paper for my career as a royal writer. At the time I was working as the showbusiness correspondent for the Mail on Sunday and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Prince Harry was enjoying a private party in the VIP room and invited me to join him. He should have been revising for his A-levels, instead the prince was drinking vodka Red Bulls and enjoying the company of a group of pretty young girls. Gregarious, vivacious and most of all normal, I was struck by how warm and charming the handsome young prince was. When I met his brother at a polo match shortly afterwards I was equally impressed. These are two young men born into extraordinary lives, with no choice but to live under the scrutiny of the public eye. Having overcome the greatest tragedy – the loss of their beloved mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, at such a tender age – they are now forging their own lives and careers.

Over the course of my career I have spent many nights in Boujis, once William and Harry’s favourite club, attending polo matches and travelling on official royal tours and engagements, getting to know the princes. In my book William and Harry, which I have updated, refined and retitled as The Making of a Royal Romance ahead of the royal wedding, my unrivalled sources told me that Prince William would finally marry his university sweetheart Kate Middleton in 2011. According to the couple’s inner circle they were already ‘as good as engaged’ and had made a secret pact to be together while on holiday in the Seychelles in 2007. William promised Kate she was the one, but he wanted to complete his military training before they got married. Kate put her trust in William and waited. The press may have dubbed her ‘Waity Katie’ but Catherine Middleton, as she prefers to be known, knew better.

It was on the slopes of Klosters on 1 April 2004 when the world was first introduced to the girl who had captured Prince William’s heart at St Andrews University in Scotland. ‘Finally . . . Wills Gets A Girl’ was the headline in the Sun newspaper. The truth was William and Kate had been dating for months but because of an agreement between the press and the palace to leave William in peace, the romance was known to only their closest friends. Ever since that day we have been intrigued, mystified and captivated in equal measure by William’s beautiful and beguiling brunette. I have been chronicling Prince William and Kate Middleton’s romance ever since it began when they were students living in a modest top-floor flat in Hope Street in St Andrews. To the public it may seem like a fairytale but this is a story of true love, companionship, compromise and sacrifice. It is in every aspect a modern royal romance which has experienced the same ups and downs as every love affair.

A normal middle-class girl from the home counties who descends from a coal-mining ancestry, it was this sporty yet quiet and unassuming girl who caught William’s eye when she shimmied down the catwalk in their second semester at university in a see-through dress and her lingerie. ‘Wow,’ William whispered to his friend Fergus Boyd. ‘Kate’s hot!’ After one of the longest courtships in royal history William and Kate are to be married on Friday 29 April 2011 at Westminster Abbey and history will be made. It will be the first time an heir apparent has married a commoner in 350 years.

William, who like his late mother continually pushes at royal boundaries, is determined do things his way from his wedding day and beyond. When the couple announced they were to be married, it was on their own terms. They kept their engagement secret for nearly a month before taking the palace and the rest of the world by surprise on 16 November 2010.

So who is this young woman who has been a part of William’s life for the past eight years and who waited so patiently for him to finally propose? To truly understand Kate, one must try to understand William. I spent more than a year trying to uncover just that in William and Harry. I discovered a sensitive, thoughtful and sometimes misunderstood young man who more than anything wants to be ordinary. It was something the Princess of Wales, whose legacy lives on today through both her sons, had desperately wanted. I discovered that just like all great love stories, the genesis of William and Kate’s romance lies in the character and the upbringing of the individuals involved.

William is a young man who will one day be the King of England. His future has been mapped out since the day he was born and it is exactly because of this that he refuses to be railroaded into anything. As a young boy he was known for being stubborn and sometimes spoilt, and as a teenager he was deeply sensitive and resented the attention he attracted far more than his robust and more extrovert younger brother. Like their father, William and Harry still struggle with the idea that their lives are pre-destined. While they recognise the unique privileges their royal titles bring, they both still crave normality. It is why William loves to ride his motorbike around the streets of London, safe in the knowledge that in his leather and helmet he is anonymous. And it is the reason Harry has admitted he often wishes he wasn’t a prince. It is more than a decade since William and Harry walked behind their mother’s funeral cortege. The single white envelope bearing the word ‘Mummy’ written in Harry’s hand is still probably the most powerful and moving image of these two extraordinary princes. Today they are young men – they are soldiers – trying to carve meaningful careers and earn the respect of their public. Ultimately it will be William and Harry who re-shape the future of the great British monarchy and they are working hard to shoulder their responsibilities. It is not simply a case of William being the heir and Harry the spare. The bond between them runs far deeper.

Since graduating from Sandhurst Harry has gone to war and fought on the front line for Queen and country in Afghanistan. He is determined to go back and is training to fly the Apache attack helicopter in order to do so. It has meant sacrifices for the young prince and over the years his on/off relationship with Zimbabwean born Chelsy Davy has suffered.

Now a fully qualified search and rescue helicopter pilot, William has finally found a sense of purpose as well as embracing his duty. When he pulled the student Kate in towards him on those snowy slopes to kiss her, neither could have predicted the making of this remarkable royal romance. In this book I trace the true story of how Catherine Middleton met and fell in love with the future King. It was over breakfast in the canteen at St Andrews that the pair became friends before they fell in love. Over the years they have weathered two separations, both instigated by William. But he always came back to Kate.

Some royal observers have been quick to compare Kate to the young Diana Spencer, but the truth is they could not be more different. While Kate is just as glamorous and intriguing as the late princess, she is headstrong and confident. Lest we forget, this is the young woman who when told she was lucky to be dating William retorted, ‘He’s lucky to be going out with me.’

As they prepare for their future as man and wife William and Catherine are, many believe, the future of the House of Windsor. Harry, who has always proved to be much more than just ‘the spare’, defined his role when he was in Africa with his brother on their first overseas tour. On a cold mountainside in Lesotho where he works tirelessly for his charity Sentebale he declared, for the first time, that his job is to support his older brother.

Male primogeniture dictates that we will have King Charles and possibly Queen Camilla before we have King William V and Queen Catherine. But many believe, myself included, that it will be William, with Catherine at his side, who will be the standard bearer for a new twenty-first century royal family.

Chapter 1

An heir and a spare

I want to bring them security. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I always feed them love and affection.

Diana, Princess of Wales

Princess Diana peered through the floral curtains of her room at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and watched the rain trickle down the Georgian sash windows. Below, the crowds snaked along the street, sheltering beneath a canopy of umbrellas. Among the sea of soggy cellophane-wrapped flowers, Union Jack flags and congratulatory banners, Diana could make out the press pack, some of who were on ladders, their lenses trained on the hospital entrance, eagerly awaiting the first glimpse of the baby prince. Very soon all eyes would be on the royal baby sleeping peacefully in his new cot oblivious to the fact that his first photocall was awaiting him.

Wrapped in swaddling blankets the future king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had already been assigned a full-time bodyguard from Scotland Yard’s Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Squad, who now stood guard outside the private hospital room. While Diana had wanted nothing more than for her son to be ‘normal’, this child would grow up in palaces. He was only a day old, but the young prince’s life had already been mapped out, his destiny shaped by a thousand years of royal history.

Outside, the mood was of anticipation and growing excitement. The Queen, jubilant and immaculate in a purple dress coat, had been to visit that morning. They had not always seen eye to eye, but today Diana could do no wrong in the eyes of her mother-in-law. She had produced a healthy heir to the House of Windsor, and in keeping with tradition a notice had been posted on the gates of Buckingham Palace announcing the happy news. The prince and princess had yet to decide on a name: Charles had wanted Arthur, but Diana preferred William and would get her way. It had been a long labour and she was desperate to get home to Kensington Palace, where more well-wishers awaited the couple’s arrival.

Diana had written royal history when on Monday 21 June 1982, the summer solstice, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales was born in the private Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital. Like generations of royals before him, his father Charles had been delivered in the Belgian Suite at Buckingham Palace, but Diana, as the royal family quickly discovered, wanted to do things differently. She had endured a difficult pregnancy and terrible morning sickness – which had been the subject of daily press articles to add to the indignity of it all – and when the time came, she was determined to give birth in a modern hospital, not a palace.

The prince and princess had arrived at St Mary’s in the early hours of Monday morning, following Diana’s first contractions. The princess later recalled she had been ‘sick as a parrot’ during the sixteen-hour labour. Charles had been there throughout, offering words of comfort and sips of water to revive her. At one point he had dozed off in an armchair but he was at Diana’s side when her gynaecologist George Pinker and his team of nurses safely delivered their son at exactly three minutes past nine that evening. The prince had blue eyes and a wisp of blond hair and weighed in at a healthy seven pounds, one and a half ounces. Only when he was content that Diana was asleep did Charles leave his wife’s side to address the public. The little boy, he announced, was beautiful, and mother and child were doing well. ‘We’re very proud.’ He beamed. ‘It’s been thirty hours, a long time.’ ‘Does he look like you, sir?’ a royal reporter enquired. ‘No, he’s lucky enough not to,’ joked Charles, adding that he was relieved and delighted, if a little exhausted from the birth. He couldn’t stop smiling, and when a female fan squeezed under the police barrier to plant a kiss on his cheek he blushed furiously. ‘You’re very kind,’ he spluttered before bidding the crowd farewell and returning to Kensington Palace for a nightcap.

The prince was the first to arrive at the hospital the next morning, followed shortly by Diana’s sister Lady Jane Fellowes and her mother Frances Shand Kydd, who had travelled from her home in Scotland to see her daughter and new grandson. As world leaders sent congratulatory telegrams, landlords at pubs around the country served rounds on the house. Even football fans managed to prise themselves away from the World Cup to celebrate the joyous news. Britain had been on high alert following Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in April, but on 14 June the Argentinian forces on the islands had surrendered and within days the war was declared over. Now the people of Britain had another reason to celebrate: a future king had been born. It was a momentous occasion and the great British public planned to celebrate.

The spring sunshine had dispersed the rainclouds when Diana and Charles walked down the steps of the Lindo Wing holding their newborn son. Dressed in a green and white spotted maternity dress adorned with an oversized white collar, Diana blinked against the exploding flashbulbs. ‘Over here, Diana! Look this way! Show us his face!’ the press men shouted above the clicking of their shutters. The crowds, cordoned off behind police barriers, called out their congratulations and waved at the happy couple. It was less than a year since they had lined the streets of the Mall to watch the newly-weds kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The wedding at St Paul’s Cathedral was the celebration of the decade and not since the Queen’s coronation had there been such a street party. The British public had their fairy-tale prince and princess and the royal succession was secured.

It was almost too much for Diana, still fragile and exhausted from the birth, to take in. Life had been a whirlwind ever since the Palace confirmed that the Prince of Wales was to marry Lady Diana Spencer. When she gave birth to William she was still navigating the maze of royal life and coming to terms with the fact that home was no longer a flat in west London but a grand palace. It was a steep learning curve and she had yet to master the confidence and sophistication she would acquire in later life. She was still painfully shy in public and turned to her husband, who was well practised in his public role, for support. While Diana had wanted to blend into the background, the British public positioned her centre stage, a role the baby prince would later also struggle with. The minutiae of her daily life was now public consumption. Every outfit she wore was pored over in the pages of glossy magazines as Charles and Di mania gripped Britain. It had not escaped Charles’s notice, nor the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s, that around the world the princess was being referred to as a ‘breath of fresh air’ in the House of Windsor. It was Diana the papers seemed most interested in, and before long the retiring and camera-shy princess would eclipse her husband entirely.

The couple had embarked on a whistle-stop tour of Australia and New Zealand following their wedding and Diana had been an instant hit on the other side of the world. Women demanded a ‘Lady Di’ cut and blow dry at their local salons while her signature spotted frocks and frilly Victorian-style collars were copied on the high street. While it was all rather flattering and laughable at times, privately Diana struggled with her new fame. Married life was not everything she had expected, and, she later complained, in the transition from her uncomplicated life as the unknown Lady Diana Spencer to that of Princess of Wales she had been largely unaided. However, she should have been well prepared for royal life. The youngest daughter of Earl Spencer and Frances Shand Kydd, Diana came from an aristocratic family which had been linked to royalty for over three centuries. Her father had served as an equerry to King George VI and later the Queen, while her mother was the daughter of the fourth Baron Fermoy. Both her grandparents served the royal family: her paternal grandmother Countess Spencer was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, while her maternal grandmother Lady Ruth Fermoy had worked for the royal family for more than thirty years. As a child Diana and her siblings would play with Prince Andrew, who would visit the Spencer family at their home Park House, an impressive mansion nestled amid great oak trees in the sprawling royal estate a short drive from Sandringham, the Queen’s Norfolk home.

As a teenager Diana dreaded trips to the royal residence, which she found ‘strange’, but she got along with Andrew, who was close to her in age, and they would spend hours watching films together in Sandringham’s home cinema. Charles had been paired off with Diana’s older sister Sarah and they had enjoyed a skiing trip to Klosters, but it was the lissome and gamine Diana who caught the prince’s eye at a friend’s barbecue in the autumn of 1980. At the time Diana was a nineteen-year-old nursery school teacher living with three girlfriends in Earl’s Court. The attentions of the prince, who had been linked with numerous aristocratic suitors known as ‘Charlie’s Angels’ in the British press, was a novel experience for Diana, who had not yet had a serious boyfriend. She immediately fell in love with Charles and was deemed the perfect virgin bride. For several months they managed to keep their courtship clandestine, but the newspapers eventually picked up on the romance. For the hitherto unknown Diana, life changed overnight. Her flat was suddenly besieged by reporters all desperate for nuggets of information about the beautiful aristocrat who had finally won the Prince of Wales. As she sped off in her battered Mini Metro, photographers clinging to the car, the strain showed on her beautiful face. ‘It’s been very difficult,’ her concerned father Earl Spencer remarked.

Incredibly, the couple managed to keep their engagement a secret for three weeks while Diana was in Australia for a holiday, but when she returned there was little option but to make it official. At 11 a.m. on 24 February 1981 Buckingham Palace announced they were to wed. While the prince was largely protected by Palace mandarins, Diana was left to cope with her new celebrity status alone. Her dignified silence won the royal family’s approval and Diana moved out of her flat and into the nanny’s quarters at Buckingham Palace on the second floor. There Diana complained she felt cut off and isolated and started to have second thoughts. While those around her put her doubts and anxieties down to pre-wedding nerves, it was apparent from the start that Diana and Charles had entered into the marriage with polarised expectations. The princess had dreamed of a romantic escape following their wedding; instead they honeymooned at Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish retreat, together with the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Princess Anne and her children Peter and Zara Phillips. It was not the honeymoon Diana had hoped for, and she was flummoxed by the family’s strict timetable, which was meticulous even when on holiday.

The Queen’s cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson recalled that Diana found the rituals of royal life hard to grasp. By now the princess was suffering from bulimia and could not tolerate the heavy three-course meals which were served at lunch and supper, nor could she fathom having to change for every meal and occasion.

Diana found her holidays to Sandringham and Balmoral tedious right from the start. She could not get to grips with the etiquette of changing her clothes sometimes as many as four or five times a day. The palaces work to their own timetables and Diana found them impossible. It is rather daunting as no one actually tells you when to change between breakfast, lunch, high tea and supper; you just learn. Diana’s grandmother was a lady-in-waiting for years so she really should have known the drill.

As Diana wrestled with the royal regime, Charles became increasingly perplexed by what he perceived as his wife’s strange behaviour. He could not understand why Diana would shut herself away in their bedroom for hours at a time. The Queen, more astute in such matters, was aware that the transition from carefree young woman to the goldfish bowl of royalty was taking its toll on the sensitive young princess. Amid growing concerns for her health she summoned a doctor to visit Diana, who was by then suffering from depression, but it did little good. The strain showed when the newly-weds posed for their first photocall on the banks of the River Dee. Against a backdrop of rolling hills and wild heather, Diana said she ‘highly recommended’ married life as her husband tenderly kissed her hand, but she was unconvincing and looked uncomfortable in the presence of the assembled press pack. It was only many years later that she admitted she had found her wedding day, which was watched by 500 million people around the world, ‘terrifying’ and that the pressure of becoming the Princess of Wales was ‘enormous’. There had been little time to master the assorted ceremonies and rituals of state she was expected to carry out as consort to the Prince of Wales and she lacked confidence. As Diana struggled to retain her identity behind the mask of royal protocol, rumours of her misery seeped into the newspaper gossip columns, which were obsessed with every twist and turn of the royal marriage. For those watching closely, the strains and tensions were already beginning to pull at this union of two fundamentally different people.

However, when she discovered she was pregnant less than a year into their marriage Diana was overjoyed and busily set about preparing the top-floor nursery in Kensington Palace. A former kindergarten teacher, she loved children and longed to start a family. Her parents’ marriage had broken down when she was just six years old, and Diana vividly recalled her parents fighting when her mother Frances produced three daughters but no heir to the Spencer estate. Eventually a son, Charles, was born, but it was not enough to hold the Spencers’ marriage together and eventually Frances left the earl for her lover Peter Shand Kydd. Diana recalled the awfulness of listening to her brother sob himself to sleep as her cuckolded father padded sleeplessly through the house. She did not want the same fate for her own children. ‘I want my children to have as normal a life as possible,’ she remarked, recognising that it was within her power to shape the future of the monarchy. Diana was determined to do things her way, even if it meant going against the grain, which it invariably did. ‘I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I feed them love and affection. It’s so important.’ Like Charles, Diana had been raised by a governess, but for her security meant being hands on. She was determined that she alone would raise their firstborn and insisted on breastfeeding William. However, with a packed timetable of royal duties and engagements it was soon apparent that a nanny was required.

Diana immediately dismissed Charles’s suggestion that his former governess Mabel Anderson should take up the post. She did not want an old-fashioned nanny with outdated ideas looking after her son. After many arguments it was decided that forty-two-year-old Barbara Barnes would join the royal nursery. Miss Barnes believed that children should be allowed to develop at their own pace, which immediately endeared her to Diana. She had come highly recommended by her former employer Lord Glenconner, a close friend of the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret, who lived next door to Charles and Diana at Kensington Palace, and during the early years the appointment was a success. It was made clear to Nanny Barnes that she was there to assist rather than take over. Diana was in charge of the nursery and she and Charles made all the important decisions. Nanny Barnes was told to dispense with her uniform and informed, as were all the staff, that she would be called Barbara. For a shy and demure young woman who had initially found the palace so daunting, Diana’s changes were fast taking effect in the royal household.

For the first time since their wedding Diana seemed happy, as did Charles, who wrote to his godmother Lady Mountbatten of his elation at becoming a father. ‘The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined.’ It was not just Diana who enjoyed spending time with William in the nursery. Charles loved being with his son, and at bath time he would jump into the tub and splash around with William’s favourite plastic whale toy. At bedtime he would often give William his bottle before retiring to his study to catch up on his paperwork.

On 4 August 1982, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday, William was christened in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was baptised in the same gown that Charles had worn as a baby. Diana, who kept William from crying with a soothing finger in his mouth during the ceremony, was still upset that Charles had chosen such mature godparents, among them his close friend and adviser Laurens van der Post. She had wanted younger guardians, but Charles refused to change his mind. Another source of friction was their state visit to Australia and New Zealand the following spring. Diana had been inconsolable at the prospect of leaving William behind for six weeks, and in a further breach of precedent it was agreed that they would take the nine-month-old William with them.

It was the first time a working member of the royal family had ever undertaken an official engagement with a baby and a far cry from Charles’s childhood, when he had been left in the care of his governess while the Queen and Prince Philip embarked on a tour of the Commonwealth. During Charles’s early years his parents were often overseas. Prince Philip was serving in the Royal Navy in Malta, which meant he barely saw his son for the first year of his life and missed Charles’s first two birthdays. Neither Charles nor Diana wanted such an upbringing for William. Times had changed, and with the speed and ease of air travel there was no reason to leave him behind. When Barbara Barnes descended the steps of the Queen’s Flight aircraft tightly cradling the baby prince there was no contest over who was the star of the show. William delighted the crowds and revelled in every second of his fame, happily crawling across the lawn in front of Government House in New Zealand for his first official photocall.

It was just two years before Diana discovered she was pregnant again, which was as surprising as it was joyful. Publicly the Waleses had put on a united front, but behind the wrought-iron gates of Kensington Palace the tears in the fabric of their marriage were beginning to show. The couple had not stopped crisscrossing the world, and eighteen months of tours and state visits on top of motherhood had left the vulnerable Diana tired and drained. She later admitted that Harry’s conception at Sandringham was ‘as if by a miracle’ but secretly hoped that the pregnancy would be the glue that would repair the fractures in their marriage. There was a glimmer of hope when she returned from a trip to Norway. On the desk in her study was a note from her husband. ‘We were so proud of you,’ he had written and signed it ‘Willie Wombat and I’. Her joy was to be short-lived, and on top of suffering from morning sickness Diana was convinced that Charles was seeing his ex-girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles.

Charles had first met Camilla in 1970 at a polo match in Windsor. He had been immediately smitten with the attractive and gregarious aristocrat but the following year had joined the navy and was sent on an eight-month naval tour of the Caribbean. By the time he returned Camilla was engaged to Andrew Parker Bowles, a captain in the Household Cavalry. Charles was crushed but determined to keep Camilla as a friend, and they remained close, moving in the same social circles and sharing a passion for fox-hunting. Diana, who was aware of their friendship when she first met Charles, became increasingly paranoid about Camilla during her marriage. When Charles disappeared, she would anxiously question their staff on his whereabouts. While the public only saw her smile, behind closed doors she was miserable and later conceded that her second son was born into the end of their marriage.

On Saturday 15 September 1984 Diana gave birth to another healthy boy at the same hospital where William was born. Prince Henry Charles Albert David – to be known as Harry – was delivered at 4.30 p.m., and weighed six pounds, fourteen ounces. Charles, who had fed his wife ice cubes during the nine-hour labour, left Diana’s side to tell the waiting crowds the good news before returning to the Palace for a Martini. ‘The delivery couldn’t have been much better: it was much quicker this time,’ he said. According to Diana, who had known from an early scan that she was expecting a boy, her husband’s comments were rather more crushing. ‘Oh, it’s a boy, and he’s even got rusty hair,’ Charles is understood to have commented. To compound Diana’s distress, she was devastated when upon returning home to Kensington Palace, Charles sped off in his Aston Martin to play polo in Windsor Great Park. ‘Something inside of me died,’ Diana later admitted. The fairy-tale marriage was falling apart.

Chapter 2

The early years

William is very much an organiser which probably might be useful in future years . . . Harry is more quiet. He’s certainly a different character altogether.

Diana, Princess of Wales

William had earned his nickname ‘Basher Wills’ with good reason. As he furiously pedalled his bright-yellow plastic truck along the upstairs corridor of Craigowan Lodge he let out a squeal of delight before crashing the toy into the wall for the umpteenth time. Harry, who had learned to walk and was quickly copying everything his older brother did, clapped his hands in glee and beeped the horn of his red tractor. His Christmas present from Granny was smaller but capable of doing just as much damage, and he raced from one end of the long narrow corridor to the other as fast as his little legs could pedal. The boys had been playing for over an hour under the eye of Nanny Barnes, and the evidence of their afternoon of fun was etched all over the wallpaper and skirting boards, which had been badly scuffed. As Nanny Barnes swept up chips of paint from the floor, Diana, dressed in jeans and a warm roll-neck jumper, for it was always cold at Balmoral, came upstairs. ‘Whatever will your grandmother say?’ Diana exclaimed as she scooped Harry into her arms and planted a kiss on William’s head.

Outside it was raining, and while the Queen had spent the afternoon riding across the moors Diana kept the children inside. William had a sniffle, and while the Queen’s advice for a common cold was to wrap up warm and brace the elements, Diana had insisted that both boys stayed indoors. Downstairs in her bedroom Diana had been flicking through the collection of magazines she had brought with her from London. She had spent most of the morning on the phone regaling her friends with the utter boredom of the New Year holiday while Charles had spent the morning salmon-fishing. Yet another barbecue had been planned for dinner that night, and Diana was not sure if she could think up a new excuse not to be there. Barbecues were the Duke of Edinburgh’s forte, and the weather, no matter how inclement, never put the Windsors off their picnics, which were either enjoyed outside in the summer months or in front of a roaring fire in one of the outhouses on the royal estate during Scotland’s wet and windy winters. It never ceased to amaze Diana that with a staff of hundreds the Queen would insist on washing up every plate and utensil before returning to the main house after dinner, having given the household the night off.

The princess had spent the last few evenings having supper with the boys in the nursery, but the Queen and Prince Philip were desperate to spend some time with their grandchildren and had insisted they all ate together that night. They adored the time they got to spend with William and Harry, and when Diana had insisted on moving out of the main house into Craigowan Lodge a mile away the Queen had been crestfallen. Diana, who privately complained to Charles that she felt suffocated at Balmoral, had needed some space. Knowing it was best not to antagonise her daughter-in-law, the Queen obliged and had offered the couple the use of Craigowan, where she resides when Balmoral is open to the public. When Princess Anne and her children Zara and Peter came to visit, which was at least twice a year, they always stayed in the main house, but Diana was different, and now that they had left, the house was suddenly terribly quiet. ‘The Queen was so upset when Diana and the boys moved to the lodge,’ recalled her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson. ‘She said, “Why did they have to move? There are so many corridors for them to race down here and it’s so quiet now they have gone.”’

While the Queen had noticed that William had become quite a handful, she adored her grandsons and encouraged them to let off steam at Balmoral. The boys were free to roam and explore every nook and cranny of the house so loved by Queen Victoria, who bought the estate in 1854. The turrets and sinuous corridors provided hours of fun for the young princes, who loved to play hide-and seek with their father. When they got older their grandfather taught them how to salmon-fish, and the boys would spend hours yomping with him through the wild Scottish countryside, Harry atop Charles’s shoulders and William working hard to keep up with Prince Philip’s brisk pace. They were happy days and an extension of William and Harry’s life at Highgrove, where they escaped the hustle and bustle of London at the weekends.

Charles had bought the 347-acre estate in Gloucestershire in 1980 for over £750,000 from Maurice Macmillan the Conservative MP and son of the former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and he adored the Georgian house. It was just 120 miles from the centre of London and had the added bonus of a working farm. Conveniently for Charles, as Diana later acknowledged, Highgrove was just a stone’s throw from the Parker Bowleses’ residence in the town of Allington, near Chippenham.

The prince and princess would arrive in their chauffeur-driven cars – Charles alone and Diana with the nursery – on Friday night. During the early days life at Highgrove was happy enough. The princess pottered around in the house with the children while Charles would spend hours in the gardens, tending his impressive beds of hydrangeas, sweet peas and roses, and while away afternoons wandering among the pear and plum trees discovering new herbs for his chefs Mervyn Wycherley and Chris Barber to incorporate in their recipes. Although a traditional country house, Highgrove is less grand and much smaller than you might expect for a royal residence. The cream-coloured property comprises two studies, a drawing room, dining room and kitchens on the ground floor, with two floors, primarily living quarters, upstairs.

The impressive grounds, opened to the public every summer, are a mixture of landscaped gardens and overgrown wilderness, reflecting the Prince’s taste. Charles once said he had put his ‘heart and soul’ into Highgrove, and accompanied by his beloved Jack Russell terrier Tigger and her puppy Roo, he was at peace. He desperately hoped both of his sons would inherit his passion for gardening. ‘I’ve yet to see which child will take to gardening,’ he once said. Thoughtfully he had reserved two small plots of land for William and Harry and invested in child-size tools so that they could tend the garden with him. While Harry loved to dig, as they grew up both boys were more interested in playing war games in their miniature military fatigues than becoming gardeners. While Charles gardened the boys would play army games in their tree house, which had a real thatched roof and windows that opened and shut. They kept rabbits and guinea pigs, which they fed with carrots their mother had chopped, and the highlight of many weekends was diving into a special play pit full of plastic balls that Charles had created in one of the sheds on the estate. When they played hide-and-seek or big bad wolf this was the most popular hiding place, and the boys would shriek with excitement as their father dived into the colourful sea of balls to pluck them out in time for tea.

When they were tucked up in bed on the top-floor nursery, Charles liked to entertain. Diana, who was a good decade younger than most of Charles’s friends, found she had little in common with his country set. She liked his skiing companions Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson and his old friend from Cambridge Hugh Van Cutsem, a millionaire farmer and pedigree bloodstock breeder, and his Dutch-born wife Emilie, but given the choice preferred to share informal suppers with Charles in front of the television. She did however look forward to visits from her future sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson and Charles’s younger brother Andrew.

William and Harry adored their uncle, who was a real-life navy pilot and had fought in the Falklands War. He would entertain them for hours with his war stories and Harry especially was mesmerised. During the summer holidays their cousins Zara and Peter would come to visit, as would their maternal grandmother, ‘Granny Frances’, who William and Harry adored. Diana was at her happiest when she and her mother could take tea on the terrace and watch the children playing by the swimming pool soaking the royal detectives with their long-range water pistols. They were happy days.

While she claimed to love the countryside, Diana was in truth far happier shopping on Sloane Street. She once confided to Highgrove’s housekeeper Wendy Berry, ‘It’s constantly raining there and Highgrove can be such a chore. The thing is that the children enjoy it, and I go because of them. It’s important that they can have somewhere like that to go at weekends.’ Instead of joining her husband in the gardens she would stay inside and watch her favourite soaps on the television or chat on the telephone for hours on end to her girlfriends back in London. If the weather was fine she would take the boys into Tetbury with her protection officer Sergeant Barry Mannakee for company. To outsiders it was a picture of domestic bliss, but to those who knew Charles and Diana it was apparent that the twelve-year age gap between them was beginning to cause problems.

Everything about their personalities was different, and they clashed over the simplest things. Diana wanted to listen to pop music and watch movies with her sons, while Charles preferred listening to classical music and being outdoors. While Diana loved nothing more than flicking through Vogue magazine and coming up with new ideas for her wardrobe, Charles would be poring over a philosophical tome in his untidy study, where magazine cuttings and half-finished letters littered the carpet. By 1986 the prince and princess were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Diana blamed Charles’s snoring and said she got a better night’s sleep in her own room, which was littered with soft toys and photographs of William and Harry. To the millions of royalists who still wanted to believe in the fairy tale all seemed well, but behind the scenes the marriage was in serious trouble.

* * *

Summer hung on into September and it was warm enough for shorts when Prince William arrived for his first day of nursery on the morning of Tuesday 24 September 1985. As he tottered up the stairs, the three-year-old prince clasped his Postman Pat flask in one hand and his mother’s hand in the other. It was William’s first day at Mrs Mynors’ nursery school, situated in a pretty tree-lined avenue in west London a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace. The Queen had expected William to be educated at home in keeping with tradition, but Diana wanted both her sons to mix with children their own age. It was all a part of her plan to raise the princes as ordinary boys and show the House of Windsor that it could be done successfully. On this occasion Charles was in agreement that William, who could be spoilt and difficult, would benefit from mixing with his peers – known as Cygnets, Little Swans and Big Swans at the school.

Diana had allowed William to choose his own outfit, and they had arrived on time, as had the hundreds of photographers who had gathered outside the school gates to take pictures. Diana’s wish to integrate her sons in modern society had disadvantages as well as advantages and it was with growing concern that the Queen noted that every stage of her grandsons’ young lives was now chronicled in the media. If William had a new haircut or Harry acquired a tooth, it would somehow find its way into the papers. By now William was accustomed to the omnipresent cameras. Unlike Harry, who shied away from the long lenses, William relished the attention and played up to the ‘tographers’, as he called them. With a wave he had already mastered, the prince smiled broadly before boldly marching through the front door.