I have no idea what Ingrid Seward is thinking, trying to rewrite royal history to make most of the Windsors (even the dead ones) sound like absolute trash, but here we are. Seward has a new book which is allegedly about King Charles and his relationship with QEII. Every excerpt I’ve read from the book is about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex or Princess Diana. You know, the actual stars of the family, two of whom escaped to America. C-Word makes the late QEII and Prince Philip sound like racist trash, which is a pretty unique perspective for a royal biographer. Of course, she also makes Princess Diana sound like a manipulative psycho, and she completely rewrites the narrative on Diana and Charles’s courtship.
In 1980, Diana had twice gone to stay with her sister Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, then the Queen’s assistant private secretary, at their cottage on the Balmoral estate. And after the second visit, she’d been invited to spend four days at the castle to join one of the regular Royal house parties. During her time there, recalled one member of staff, Diana was desperate to make an impression.
‘Most of the ladies do not get up until after the guns have gone out, but Diana was always up early. If you looked out of your window at a quarter to eight, you would see her walking in the garden, and she made a great point of being there to see them off. It was then that she played her sharpest card. She would go around telling everybody how much she loved Balmoral and that it was such a magical place and how she loved it beyond imagination.’
Impressed, Prince Charles started asking her to accompany him fishing and to join him on long walks through the estate in which she professed such an interest. Diana, everyone agreed, was ‘enchanting’.
The Queen, alert to a possible new woman in her son’s life, had just two reservations. She wondered whether anyone that young could differentiate between the man and the prince. And she couldn’t help thinking that the Spencer girl would be far better suited to her younger son, Andrew.
The Queen Mother took a more positive approach. In a grandmotherly intervention, she invited Diana and Charles for a few days’ stalking a month later at Birkhall, her house on the Balmoral estate. A few low-key, discreet dates followed in London, and in January 1981, Diana was invited to Sandringham. She made a point of going to the nursery and making a great fuss of nanny Mabel Anderson, then looking after Princess Anne’s son, who’d been the emotional linchpin of Charles’s childhood.
And when the guns went out early in the morning, Diana was always there to wave them off with an ingratiating remark about how ‘wonderful’ Sandringham was. ‘She was everywhere, picking up the birds, being terribly gracious and absolutely oozing charm,’ a Royal confidant remembered.
The idea that Diana and Andrew would have been better suited for each other is something I’ve heard before. Sometimes the suggestion came from QEII, sometimes the Queen Mum. It was more to do with their ages than some big statement about their temperaments, although it’s long been said that Lord Mountbatten encouraged Charles to marry someone young and inexperienced, and that’s why Charles pursued Diana. It’s also important to realize that Diana’s early years were spent at Sandringham, living on the estate there in a home her father (not yet the Earl Spencer) rented. It’s important to remember that the Spencers and Windsors have long been intertwined, and it’s not like Diana showed up one day and that was the first time anyone saw her. Charles had even dated Diana’s older sister, and the Spencers and Windsors socialized together (Diana’s grandmother was one of the Queen Mum’s closest friends and allies). Many people believed that one of the Spencer girls would end up marrying one of the princes, and the older Windsors would speculate on who would match with whom.
All of which to say, I do believe Diana schemed a bit to “win” Charles. But that ignores the fact that everyone else was scheming to encourage Charles to marry Diana too – his parents, his friends, even Camilla greenlighted Charles’s pursuit of Diana.
Photos courtesy of Getty, Avalon Red.