Royals at War Page 11

  Fortunately for Carole, the new British Airways company was restructuring. Having brushed up on her schoolgirl French—a second language was mandatory for ground staff—Carole secured herself a coveted role as a dispatcher. The job was based out of London’s Heathrow Airport, just a few miles from Southall, the down-at-the-heels suburb where she was born in January 1955, in Perivale Hospital, to a lower middle-class couple, Ronald and Dorothy Goldsmith.

  As one of the most striking young recruits in the new company, she quickly made a name for herself as a face to watch. “In those days, British Airways was very exciting,” said a former colleague of Carole’s. “It was a good job with lots of good-looking people and it felt like you belonged to a large club. It had a feeling of being glamorous.”

  The life was glamorous indeed, while also being hectic and high-pressure. And yet Carole’s professionalism soon resulted in her progressing from flight dispatch to a coveted position as cabin crew, sailing around the planet with quiet elegance in her Baccarat Weatherall uniform. Carole’s new job brought her into daily contact with a wide range of situations and people from all sorts of backgrounds. They presented no problem for the seemingly unflappable young woman, colleagues recalled. Her equally ambitious mother, Dorothy, had instilled confidence and self-possession in her daughter, gifts that were invaluable in beginning an ascent up the ladders of British society. The next step was to find the right man.

  Flight dispatcher Michael Middleton couldn’t help but notice the tall, leggy woman who worked alongside him as ground staff at the airport. To be honest, not many of his male colleagues had been able to ignore her, either. Offers of drinks, dates, and no doubt more—the airline industry is renowned for colorful after-hours shenanigans—rained down on Goldsmith. But she was impervious. She had the quiet, courtly Middleton firmly in her sights. They began dating, to the delight of friends, who appreciated the dynamic between the pair. Carole’s energetic drive matched Michael’s quiet steadfastness and solidity. He came from a comfortable, cushioned background but wasn’t snobby about it, which drew in this working-class girl with big ideas. His calm and pleasant demeanor and especially his uniform, complete with brass buttons and the four gold stripes of a Captain, gave him a distinctly military bearing. Carole’s rangy physique and classically English Rose features—modest, natural beauty—made him light up whenever she came near. The pair was deeply in love. At just twenty-four years of age, Carole knew she had met her lifelong soul mate.

  After dating for some months, in 1979, the couple moved into a small, nondescript apartment overlooking the M4 motorway near Heathrow Airport, in an equally bland suburb of Slough. It was certainly an inauspicious start for a couple who would one day own luxury properties around the world. Shortly afterward—Michael having proposed—they moved to a small village, Bradfield Southend, where they found a pretty red brick house more in line with their plans for a big, happy family.

  Michael and Carole married on June 21, 1980, at the Parish Church of St James the Less, in the historic village of Dorney, Buckinghamshire. It was a momentous affair, with the twenty-five-year-old bride arriving in a horse-drawn carriage. The church was a chocolate-box, traditional British country building, dating back to medieval times, set in blissfully bucolic surroundings. On that hot summer’s day, it echoed with laughter, prayers, and the hubbub of friendly chatter as the Middleton and Goldsmith families joined together to celebrate the union. Michael’s parents, Valerie (then fifty-six) and Peter (fifty-nine) sat across from Carole’s parents, Ronald (forty-nine) and Dorothy (forty-four) before all celebrating long into the night at a nearby manor house, where a lavish banquet heralded a night of dancing, drinking, and celebrating in style. As she ate, danced, and gazed fondly through teary eyes at her pretty, happy daughter, Carole’s mother, Dorothy, would have sat and thought back to her own nuptials, all those years ago when she and Ronald had celebrated the humble church ceremony with a reception in a local pub. She had had to borrow a suitably special outfit to wear from a friend. If Dorothy had asked anything of her daughter, it was to better and elevate herself as far as she could. Now, as she swung around in the arms of her dashing new husband on the dance floor, watched by generations of comfortably affluent Middletons—she was ecstatic.

  For Carole, an upwardly mobile girl from a nondescript neighborhood and undistinguished family, her relationship with Michael was actually her first serious romance. Drawn by his saturnine good looks, Carole’s mother, Dorothy, was especially excited by her daughter’s new love. Said to be obsessed with status and class, she couldn’t have helped but beam with pride as her daughter grew ever closer to her handsome man, never imagining that one day he would walk their daughter down the aisle of Westminster Abbey to wed the second in line to the British throne.

  POOR LITTLE CHAP

  The baby who would grow up to be His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, K.G., K.T., G.C.B., O.M., A.K., Q.S.O., P.C., A.D.C., Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, and Lord of the Isles was greeted with national euphoria when he arrived on the evening of November 19, 1948. Within hours, the first-born son of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh was cleaned, swaddled, and on display for the courtiers of his grandfather, King George VI.

  “Just a Plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders—but with great affection and good will.”

  Meanwhile, the newborn’s father also generously made time to visit his wife and first-born son and heir. After being notified of the birth, during an energetic game of squash, Philip went for a refreshing swim before popping by his wife’s rooms to inspect the newcomer, whereupon he brusquely blurted that his new son looked like a “plum pudding.”

  The Duke of Edinburgh aside, the public’s goodwill reverberated across the land, only amplifying when, at the age of three, Charles became heir to the throne following his mother’s coronation. The cherubic toddler represented a fresh new era in the Royal timeline, a symbol upon which the postwar nation could focus their hopes that he would lead them out of an age of hardship. But in truth, there was precious little happiness at home for young Charles. His mother attended to her punishing program of global travel around the Commonwealth, while her husband was also often posted abroad on naval business.

  In the meantime, Charles would be left in the care of nannies and Palace staff, with brief visits from his mother, when she was at home. And when his stentorian father did return home, he was not pleased to discover his firstborn seemed ill-suited for the robust huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ lifestyle Prince Philip wanted for the boy. Charles grew into an unhappy, nervous, timid boy, prone to illness and noticeably sensitive. “Never, not even as a baby, did he have his mother entirely to himself for any length of time,” writes British author Penny Junor in her biography, Charles. “His mother saw him regularly for half an hour after breakfast, looked in on him briefly at lunchtime, and spent another half hour with him at the end of the day before he went to bed.”

  In a 2017 profile for the New Yorker, writer Zoë Heller argued that the Prince of Wales has made himself most unpopular when he tries hardest to be a worthy heir to the throne.

  She recanted how the Queen, whom Charles later recalled as being “not indifferent so much as detached,” oblivious to the effects of her distance-mothering technique, wondered if he was a “slow developer.” He also remembered Prince Philip snorting that Charles was simply “weedy, effete and spoiled.” Poor Charles, courtiers thought. Hopeless at team sports, shamefully scared of horses and even more humiliatingly homesick when, at the age of eight, he was sent away to boarding school, he was happiest spending time with his grandmother, the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon—the wife of King George VI. She indulged him and nurtured his artistic side, cosseted and pampered him, much to the frustration of the Duke of Edi
nburgh.

  Alarmed at Charles and the Queen Mother’s trips to the ballet and galleries, Philip determined to toughen the boy up by wasting no more time in sending him to the school he himself attended, Gordonstoun, in rural North East Scotland. Founded by a strict, yet not wholly unsympathetic pedagogue, Dr. Kurt Hahn, a Jewish émigré from Nazi Germany, Gordonstoun took in the shy Prince Philip as a boy and turned out a lean, mean, highly disciplined athletic machine a few years later. Philip always spoke fondly of his time at the spartan and brutal school, so it was a nervous Prince Charles who arrived in the autumn of 1962, aged thirteen, having been flown up by his annoyingly athletic pa in a private plane.

  The boys (and then, it was just boys) were subjected to harsh military-grade routines and discipline. The academic curriculum took second place to sporting and physical prowess. From the cold showers first thing in the morning to the endless cross-country runs, assault courses to sailing and PT classes, the young Prince endured what he later referred to as “hell in kilts” with lip-wobbling ineptitude. Charles also had to endure the merciless teasing and bullying of the other boys, who would either mock his stammering shyness, delicate manners, and big ears or make life unbearable for anyone who would show the young Royal friendship, thus being guilty of “sucking up.” “Bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough,” recalled John Stonborough, a classmate of Charles’s.

  Inevitably, Charles was miserable at Gordonstoun, and he begged to be allowed to leave. Philip wouldn’t hear of it. But it was clear something had to be done to avert a total calamity, so it was only after some special privileges had been afforded the Prince that he resigned himself to staying. He was allowed to spend weekends at the nearby home of family friends (where he would “cry his eyes out”) and even mysteriously became Head Boy of the school in his last year, enjoying the private room that came with the position. He took up the cello and was invited to perform recitals in the homes of neighboring aristocracy (“I was,” said Charles with characteristic gloom, “utterly hopeless”). What’s more, it was not only the school that was grinding down any tendencies to the artistic and aesthetic the young Prince had.

  Two years after Charles joined, a new English master, Eric Anderson, recognized Charles’s deep love of drama and literature and encouraged the Prince to act in school productions. In November 1965, Charles played the lead in Macbeth leading to Anderson admiringly noting that Charles’s performance showed “a sensitive soul who is behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because of other forces.” Charles, for his part, was thrilled, as his parents would be present for the opening night and he could finally show he had found something in which he could excel and dazzle.

  But, as he later wrote sadly in a letter, all he could hear as he emoted and writhed onstage was a particularly loud and depressingly familiar guffaw. It was Prince Philip, doubled over with laughter at his son’s amateur theatrics. “It sounded like The Goons!” cackled Philip to his crestfallen son afterward. Charles was devastated. It seemed that, yet again, in the face of his hopelessness on the sports fields, Charles just couldn’t get that fatherly approval he craved. Ridiculed by his family, abandoned by his mother for long periods of time throughout his early years, mocked by his peers, alienated by his privileged position, and weighed down by the expectations heaped upon his shoulders, Charles was becoming adept at hiding his feelings behind a carapace of duty and traditional stiff upper lip.

  Speaking many years later, Charles described his growing horror as he realized what destiny had in store for him in adulthood: “I think it’s something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense—the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.”

  Breaking with Royal precedent, Charles headed straight to Cambridge University immediately following school, rather than ambling around the world preparing for a career shaking hands and asking people what they did. At Cambridge, where he read anthropology, archaeology, and history, Charles found intellectual sanctuary and comfort. In another life, he would have loved to have stayed at the university indefinitely, subsiding into a comfortably anonymous life in academia, surrounded by books, friends, culture, and country pursuits. As if to remind him of the impossibility of this path in life, it was also while at Cambridge that his mother invested him with the title Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester in a grand ceremony in the historic Welsh town of Caernarfon.

  So, instead of punting leisurely through his twenties, Charles had to follow family tradition and join the military. On June 23, 1970, he graduated from Cambridge, a Bachelor of Arts in his hand and a daunting future as the professional heir to the throne lying in wait ahead of him.

  “I PUSHED HER DOWN THE STAIRS”

  One would have imagined the childhood of Diana Spencer as an idyllic upbringing in the bosom of one of Britain’s oldest, most aristocratic families. Yet, from an early age, Diana was witness to the painful disintegration of her parents’ marriage, emotional and physical neglect, and a nagging sense of inferiority, something that had already traumatized her elder sister Sarah.

  Diana Frances Spencer was born into genteel nobility on July 1, 1961, at Sandringham in Norfolk, near the Royal Family’s country residence, to John, Lord Althorp, the eighth Earl of Spencer, and Frances Shand Kydd. She was one of five children alongside Sarah, Jane, and younger brother Charles. Another brother, John, sadly passed away while he was still an infant. Her mother, Lady Althorp, was born Frances Ruth Roche in 1936 at Sandringham, the daughter of Ruth Roche, who was a close friend, confidante, and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

  Diana’s childhood was turbulent. Cursed with parents who seemed barely able to tolerate each other, the terrible marriage collapsed with Diana’s mother, Frances, Lady Althrop, being committed to a mental home and subsequently divorced by her husband in 1967, when Diana was six. A root cause was Frances’s inability—or unwillingness—to have more children. This was something Diana’s irascible father, Johnnie Spencer, could not countenance. A certain degree of what today we would call “gaslighting” of the unfortunate Frances ensued. Yet, contrary to what Diana herself would later refer to as her mother “legging it” for London, Frances made every effort to retain custody of her four remaining children. Despite the fact Diana had precious few fond memories of the marriage, the split stunned the child profoundly.

  To her school friends, the preteen Diana was a cheeky character, a girl who would eat numerous platefuls of food at a sitting for a bet, enjoyed joking and pranking, and was obsessed with ballet and sports while being an academic washout. In an era where divorce was still something of a stigma among the aristocracy, both parents sought to assuage their split and lack of emotional nurturing by indulging the children with limitless amounts of toys, gifts, and cash.

  As a result, the Spencer children gained a reputation for wildness, lack of discipline, and, as a result of being spoiled by their parents, arrogance and selfishness.

  “They never said they loved me,” Diana, in September 1992, told close confidant, Peter Settelen, her voice coach who recorded a series of explosive interviews with her. “I was always told by my family that I was the thick one, I was stupid, and my brother was the clever one.”

  Growing up in the family’s Park House home on the Royal Family’s Sandringham estate also meant she knew the Queen’s younger children, Princes Andrew and Edward, well, establishing herself on familiar terms with the Royals from an early age. From their late teens, Diana’s family, led by her socially ambitious mother, had Prince Andrew in their sights as a match for their youngest daughter. In fact, so confident were the Spencers that Diana would marry the Queen’s middle son that they nicknamed Diana “Duch,” or “Duchess,” in anticipation of the role that would eventually fall to the hearty country gal and Diana chum, Sarah Ferguson.

  Meanwhile, at home, matters failed to improve when in 1976, her father remarried a frou-frou socialite, the Countess of Dartmouth, Raine McCorquodale, whom Diana and h
er siblings loathed on sight. Dubbing her “Acid Raine,” Diana’s hatred of her stepmother peaked on her brother Charles’s wedding day, when she apparently—by her own admission—set out to hurt Raine.

  “I pushed her down the stairs, which gave me enormous satisfaction,” Diana told Settelen. “I wanted to throttle that stepmother of mine. She brought me such grief.”

  Bearing hardly any formal qualifications, Diana had little idea what the future held in store for her when she moved to London in 1978, ostensibly to work with children, but more in hope of bagging a wealthy husband who worked in finance. In those days, it was expected that young upper-class girls should occupy a more decorative, subservient role to their typically oafish buffers of boyfriends. Diana was unworldly, naive, and innocent. In other words, she was perfect prey for the soft-spoken men surrounding the Royal Family, now seeking a pliable, unquestioning girl to marry the Prince of Wales.

  CHARLES AND THE SWEET-CHARACTERED GIRL

  London, 1980. Matters had reached breaking point. Something simply had to be done. Throughout the 1970s, the Prince of Wales’s colorful love life had kept the media titillated and his family irritated, in equal measure. For much of the decade, the heir to the throne had been squiring a stream of lovelies around town, much to the dismay of his family. His one true love of the decade—indeed, of his life—Camilla Shand had ended their brief, passionate two-year affair in 1973, when Charles was sent abroad with the Navy, and in his absence, she married an old flame, Anthony Parker Bowles. Charles, devastated, tried to blot out his feelings for Camilla with other women, polo, a deeply unfashionable fascination with spirituality, his military career, and a hectic social life—centered around the infamous Mayfair nightclub, Annabel’s.