Diana: In Pursuit of Love (38 page)

The nurse who was present there, however, was disconcerted by the fact that when Prince Charles talked to her, he seemed curiously obsessive about the missing earring. ‘It is absolutely essential that she is wearing both earrings. She can’t leave like that,’ he insisted. It was the second time that day that hospital staff had noticed the royal family’s concern about detail and jewellery. Earlier they had received a telephone call from the Queen’s senior courtiers on the special ‘Balmoral hotline’ enquiring as to the whereabouts of Diana’s jewellery and asking for its safe return. After discussions with the Consul-General, Meresse explained that medical staff at the crash site had been more concerned about the Princess’s condition than her jewellery. (When the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, died in 2002, the Queen visited Kensington Palace herself to pick up her jewellery.)

The preoccupation with the protocol surrounding her jewellery was matched by concern about the form her funeral should take, discussions that foreshadowed and exposed the future battles for Diana’s memory that would end in Number One Court at the Old Bailey five years later. At first glance, the plan to repatriate Diana was coherent, considered and uncontroversial. Once Diana’s death had been confirmed and announced at 5.45 a.m. British time by the French doctors and the British Ambassador, Operation Overlord, a scheme drawn up in the 1980s to bring back a royal body from abroad, went into action. Under the plan every member of the royal family has a codename, taken from a bridge – for the Queen Mother it was Tay Bridge, for the Queen it is London Bridge,
Prince Philip is Forth Bridge and Prince Charles Menai Bridge. For an organization so reliant on protocol, these codenames, according to Dickie Arbiter, have an elegiac explanation – the ‘bridge between life and death’. Diana, however, being young and disengaged from the royal family, had no codename.

When Diana’s death was officially confirmed, a number of procedures were put in place that had previously been discussed and agreed by the Lord Chamberlain. The order went out from Buckingham Palace to lower to half-mast the Union flags at Holyrood House and Windsor Castle. At Buckingham Palace, which only flies the Royal Standard when the Queen is in residence, no flag flew at all. This was to become a cause of considerable public anger.

The attention to detail was so careful that when BA 146 of the Queen’s flight landed at RAF Northolt, the plane was taken away from the gaze of the watching media and the coffin carrying Diana’s body unloaded and turned around so that when she formally came home, she would be taken off the plane head first. After an RAF guard of honour placed her in the hearse, the Princess was driven to a mortuary in Fulham where she was formally identified by her sisters and her body fully examined by the royal coroner Dr John Burton. It is likely that it was here that she was dressed in her own clothes. Then, as Operation Overlord anticipated, she was taken to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace and her coffin, with a white cloth on which were laid white lilies, was placed on a catafalque surrounded by tall candles. For that week the wood-panelled chapel was treated and dressed as a shrine, a constant stream of members of the royal family and their staff paying their last respects. Apart from minor adjustments on the day – Prince Charles, for example, insisted that Diana’s body be taken from the Paris hospital to the airport in a hearse rather than a helicopter – Operation Overlord worked smoothly.

In the coming weeks and months, however, the impression was given by Prince Charles’s staff and his literary apologists, notably Penny Junor, that it was only his decisive intervention in the critical first few hours, and his subsequent mastery of the funeral details, that saved the monarchy. While the Queen and her
courtiers dithered about whether Prince Charles should go to Paris in the first place and, if he did, whether he should be authorized to use the royal flight, Charles, it was said, showed a steely resolve, determined that he should go to France to bring his ex-wife home. If a royal flight were not forthcoming, his assistant private secretary and spin doctor, Mark Bolland, declared, the Prince would get a scheduled flight from Aberdeen. Again, when they returned to Britain, the Prince was so horrified that Diana was going to the mortuary in Fulham – a strict legal requirement – that he insisted she should be laid to rest in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Using the vernacular of an East End gangster, the Prince, according to Junor, told a hapless aide: ‘Sort it. I don’t care who has made this decision.’ In touch, compassionate and strong-minded, the busy Prince was subsequently credited with virtually every innovation during the funeral week, from lengthening the route to include Kensington Palace to installing video screens in the park. In doing so, he apparently fought head-on with the Queen and the Old Guard at Buckingham Palace, their stuffiness and over-reliance on protocol contrasting with his imaginative and sensitive handling of the event.

This, however, was not the way senior courtiers remembered the funeral week. Not only were there existing plans in place to bring home a royal body from abroad, but many innovations of that momentous week came from the notorious ‘men in grey’, at both Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace. Even the Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell was impressed. ‘Charles was like a wet weekend at Balmoral,’ commented one of the Queen’s staff, perhaps a little unkindly. ‘He was poleaxed with guilt, and any suggestion that he was taking charge is ridiculous.’ It was, though, a foretaste of the tussles to come and a reminder to courtiers just what Diana had endured for so many years. As the Queen’s biographer Robert Lacey observed:

A simple way of making Charles look good was to make Diana look bad. After Diana’s death other figures in the royal family and in Buckingham Palace proved easy targets. The Queen herself was supposed to be off limits but that didn’t stop an easy sneering at the
ancien régime
and the big house. In fact after recent reforms, Buckingham Palace was a model of modern management practice compared to the feudalism and favourites surrounding the Prince.

While Charles’s supporters were eager to place their royal master centre stage, Paul Burrell, far from the sobbing creature remembered by those who were with him in Paris and London, portrayed himself in his memoirs as a forceful royal Zelig, like Woody Allen’s screen character, at the heart of every major decision concerning the Princess’s welfare. One story is typical. He claimed that when he and Lucia Flecha de Lima visited Diana’s coffin in the Chapel Royal there were no flowers and it was only their stern intervention that forced the uncaring authorities to make good this omission. Lucia is said to have warned the Queen’s chaplain, the Reverend Willie Booth, in a moment of melodrama, that if there were no flowers by the time she returned then she would go outside and tell the people, the implication being that they would rise against the monarchy in disgust. As already mentioned, however, when the Princess’s coffin arrived at the Chapel Royal it was treated with the reverence and dignity befitting the mother of the future king. Candles surrounded the coffin, which was decked with white lilies and a simple, plain white cloth. To commemorate the historic event, an illustrator from
The Times
newspaper was invited to sketch the scene.

Then there was the funeral itself. The Spencer family entered the fray early on. While the royal family’s Operation Overlord was put into effect to bring Diana home, when she arrived at the Chapel Royal that Sunday evening, there was still uncertainty about which family would take ultimate charge of the funeral arrangements, the Spencers or the Windsors. In the first hours, the collective reaction of the Spencer family was that Diana should be buried quietly on the estate at Althorp, followed some weeks later by a memorial service, in keeping with the traditional farewells to the great and the good. Earl Spencer, who was in South Africa, recalled that his sister had expressed a desire to have any service centred upon her favourite piece of choral music, Fauré’s Requiem. Initially, it seems that the Queen agreed with this proposal, and the
Spencer family were scheduled to take over arrangements once the Princess’s coffin had been installed, with full royal honours, at the Chapel Royal.

Indeed, the Queen’s press secretary Geoff Crawford, on holiday in Australia at the time, was told by Sir Robert Fellowes, who naturally was in constant discussion with his wife Jane and other Spencer family members, that, under these circumstances, it was not necessary for him to fly back to Britain immediately. That evening when the royal party arrived at RAF Northolt, the Lord Chamberlain Lord Airlie informed the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, that it was still not clear which family was going to organize the funeral. ‘We are going to need help to respond to this,’ Lord Airlie told them.

Any thoughts Sarah McCorquodale and her sister, Jane Fellowes, might have harboured that the Spencers could say goodbye to their royal sister in private evaporated when they saw the crowds standing by the side of the dual carriageway as they drove into central London in the convoy carrying her body. Diana’s comptroller, Michael Gibbins, who was in the procession, saw the sea of faces and observed, ‘There is no way this can be a private funeral.’ In her isolated cottage on the isle of Seil, Frances Shand Kydd took rather more persuading, unhappily agreeing to the unpalatable fact that her daughter’s funeral, like her life, would become a public spectacle. It irked her that Westminster Abbey was the venue chosen for the funeral, the place where, in 1954, she had married Diana’s father, the late Earl Spencer – ‘That was something I had to grasp, digest and get on with.’

Like so many others at the centre of this emotional vortex, she had not appreciated the sheer scale of the public response to the Princess’s death. ‘I expect you will get one or two bringing flowers to the gates,’ the duty police inspector at Kensington Palace remarked, with blithe unconcern, on the morning of Diana’s death. By that evening the Palace gardens had been transformed into a makeshift place of worship, the flickering glow from a sea of candles casting an ethereal light over the growing carpet of flowers.

When Earl Spencer arrived back in Britain from Cape Town, he, like his mother, was irritated that the funeral seemed to have been
wrenched away from his family and was now being orchestrated by the House of Windsor. There were personal reasons for his annoyance. During the last year of her life Charles and Diana had restored their fond familial bond, the years of distantness, sparked off by the row over the cottage on the Althorp estate, seemingly behind them. Before her visit to South Africa in March 1997, she had told friends that she was looking forward to being reunited with her brother as much as she was to meeting Nelson Mandela.

With his sister’s possible feelings in mind, Charles Spencer expressed strong opposition to the suggestion that, in keeping with royal tradition, the boys should walk behind the coffin. He felt that Diana would not have wanted it on the grounds that her sons would find it a painful ordeal. ‘I thought that was where tradition and duty went too far against human nature,’ he told Ian Katz of the
Guardian
. During one acrimonious conversation with Prince Charles he reportedly slammed down the phone. While the final decision was left to William and Harry themselves, in the end it was the intervention of their grandfather, Prince Philip, that proved decisive. ‘If I walk, will you walk?’ he asked. William agreed. ‘The boys are very close to their grandparents, adore them,’ observed Dickie Arbiter. ‘Significantly, they walked for their grandfather, not their father or uncle.’

In a week redolent with symbolism, this decision was probably the most telling, the sight of these two young princes walking behind their mother’s coffin an enduring and potent image of loss and grief. ‘I have never been in such a nightmarish place in my life,’ recalled Charles Spencer of that long walk. Paradoxically, it was the fact that the boys displayed the traditional royal virtues of stoicism and fortitude amidst a sea of tears that lent the tableau such an emotional resonance. They adhered impeccably to the maxim of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone: ‘You don’t wear private grief on a public sleeve.’

Yet it was these very attributes that came under fierce and anguished attack during the week. If the service at Crathie church had reinforced the royal family’s image as emotionally cold, then the reluctance to fly the flag at half-mast above Buckingham Palace and the decision to remain at Balmoral represented their apparent
indifference, not just to Diana but to a nation in mourning. ‘Where is the Queen when the country needs her?’ asked the
Sun
newspaper plaintively. In this highly charged atmosphere, which came to be characterized as ‘floral fascism’, the decision by the Queen to return from Scotland early and broadcast her own tribute to Diana from Buckingham Palace helped defuse the evident dislocation between the monarchy and the people. But while the Queen praised Diana’s maternal devotion, kindness, warmth and sense of humour, the feeling remained that it was too little, too late. Certainly Frances Shand Kydd was upset that the Queen had not personally contacted her to offer her condolences or to talk about the grandsons they shared. As Mrs Shand Kydd’s friend and biographer Max Riddington commented, ‘It remains almost inexplicable that the Queen did not even telephone Frances to express her sorrow that Diana had died.’

Whatever the machinations behind the scenes, the dramatic funeral was testimony, ironically, to the work of the ‘men in grey’, proving to be a ‘unique day for a unique woman’, which neatly meshed the ancient and modern, the traditional and innovative. As he walked past the motley moist-eyed mass of mourners on his way to Westminster Abbey, the lawyer Richard Greene, one of only eight Americans in the congregation, reflected on Diana’s impact: ‘She wanted to expand the capacity for people to feel and show emotion. And she succeeded. The police were in tears, everywhere there were flowers, London was like another planet. I looked up at the sky and said: “You did it.” What an impact for a nursery school teacher. Even in death she was orchestrating the whole thing.’