She gets to raise the kids.
He gets to sit on the throne.
The news of this purported arrangement–which has not been announced officially but was confirmed by Princess Diana’s well-connected biographer, Andrew Morton–capped a week that, for the beleaguered House of Windsor, combined the worst aspects of the abdication of Edward VIII and the blitz. It began with an account of an “intimate phone call” reportedly between Prince Charles and Parker Bowles, a tape of which had fallen into the hands of the Daily Mirror. Although the paper, exercising restraint rare for a British tabloid, held back an actual transcript, it implied that the contents were even more intimate than the notorious tape which revealed that Diana had a friend who called her “Squidgy.” A few days later, all London was talking about a report that Charles was considering a kind of preabdication, removing himself from the line of succession to pursue his other interests, such as brooding and canoodling. At the end of the week a large fire, believed to be accidental, broke out at the queens favorite weekend house, Windsor Castle. Parts of the centuries-old structure burned for a day, and estimates of the damage ranged into the tens of millions of dollars, although workers rescued most of the vast collection of art and furnishings.
And things could yet get worse; the modus vivendi between Charles and Diana is tenuous and subject to the stress of their apparent mutual loathing. To maintain even the legal pretense of a marriage they will have to be together for occasions of state, but on their joint trip to South Korea earlier this month “The Glums” (as reporters dubbed them) couldn’t even bear to look each other in the eye. Morton, who has just published an updated paperback version of his best seller “Diana, Her True Story,” reports that over the summer the princess had resolved to leave Charles and asked the queen and Prince Philip to approve a legal separation. They asked her to wait for three months, but instead of a reconciliation, Morton asserts, a new battle was touched off when Philip accused Diana of betraying the royal family. Diana responded-through her lawyer. Then came leaks from Charles’s side implying that Diana was a victim of “stress”–part of what Morton claims was a “smear campaign” aimed at impugning her mental stability.
Negotiations began this autumn, presided over by the queen and Philip. The Windsors and Diana haggled extensively over the terms of the separation, Morton says, although in the end all they did was ratify an existing reality. “It is an informal arrangement,” he says. “There is no need for a formal announcement … It remains a volatile and highly uncertain situation.”
The stress of these events affected both Charles and Diana, although in different ways. Charles appeared, if anything, even more glum and withdrawn than usual, particularly after the story broke about his alleged indiscreet murmurings to Parker Bowles, recorded sometime in 1989. (By whom remains a mystery; the paper didn’t say, but Charles’s biographer Anthony Holden suspects that it may have been a member of the prince’s security detail.) In truth, though, the tape–at least as much of it as was published–did not add much to what was already common knowledge. Gossips had long linked the 44-year-old prince with Camilla, 45, the wife of Charles’s friend Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles. Perhaps, knowing what else might be on the tape–there were reports that actual body parts were mentioned-he feared future revelations. Or maybe he was just depressed, as who wouldn’t be, by the banality of what was published (“I adore you … your great achievement is to love me”).
Diana, by contrast, seemed positively jubilant, at least when she was out of Charles’s presence. She announced her liberation in countless little ways. In Korea she delivered what the papers regarded as a devastating snub to her husband when she wore a tiara from her own family rather than one that had belonged to Queen Mary. When a home-economics class asked her to contribute to a cookbook, she responded with a recipe for watercress soup for three-just the thing to make when you have two kids to feed and aren’t expecting Daddy home for dinner. In kicking off European Drug Prevention Week, she astounded journalists with a 30-minute speech on the importance of hugging one’s children, suggesting a previously unsuspected familiarity with the works of Leo Buscaglia. The papers seemed to regard this as one of the most significant utterances in British public life since the retirement of Winston Churchill-and a clear public-relations victory for Diana over Charles, who is notorious for his apparent belief that hugging is a dangerous first step on the road toward smiling and kissing.
And few doubted that a public-relations victory was what she sought-a victory that would launch her independent career as “a substantial figure on the world stage,” according to Holden. “Her hold over the royal family has been her immense popularity and public support,” Holden says. “The royal family’s hold on her is her children-divorce would mean she would lose them.” The compromise is “a new set of rules in which she stays in the family on her own terms.”
It took a conflagration to eclipse the royal maneuvering. The Windsor Castle fire threatened the world’s finest private collection of art and decorative arts: paintings by Reubens and Van Dyck, tapestries, priceless clocks, porcelain, books. By the next day it appeared that all but a handful of the paintings had been saved-including works by da Vinci, Rembrandt and Holbein. The queen, said Prince Andrew, was “absolutely devastated” by the fire.
But to the undiminished band of royal-watchers, that was just a sad distraction from an even more astonishing development: that Diana, the whispery innocent chosen to be a decorous presence at Charles’s side, should have outmaneuvered one of the world’s richest families. “At the time of the marriage, everyone thought she was a total boo-boo,” says author John Pearson. “Obviously she is a woman of unexpected stamina and skills. It’s really very funny that this girl who was considered to be absolutely safe by the royal family has behaved like a rather ambitious shopgirl.” Funny-but also ominous, both for what it says about the level of intellect in Buckingham Palace and for what it says about the very future of the monarchy. It’s one thing for Diana to go her way as Princess of Wales, but what happens when she’s Queen of England? “If Diana sets up a kind of rival court, with glamorous showbiz celebs at her dinner table,” Holden says, “. . . she isn’t just going to overshadow him, she is going to deprive him of the authority and public popularity which are prerequisites to being a successful monarch.” The last word goes to Harold Brooks-Baker publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, who warns: “For someone to marry into the British royal family and emerge as an equal is extremely dangerous. The orders have to come from the top.”
“This,” he added gloomily, “is the beginning of the end for the British monarchy.”
And no one wants to see that.
Do they?
