To be sure, Woody’s split from Mia was arguably even more bitter and squalid, and Donald’s dumping of Ivana may have actually involved more cash. But seldom before have the stakes of a marital disaster been so high as in the case of Charles and Diana. How bad does a marriage have to be that you would give up being Queen of England to get out of it? One of the first skirmishes last week concerned nothing less than the question of whether the soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Windsor can continue to call herself “Her Royal Highness.” And the answer was that Diana had better get new monograms on her pillowcases. Going back to Richard III, the English monarchy always played for keeps.
As in any civilized society, the terms of the divorce will be worked out by lawyers, probably over the next few weeks. There was no question of following the example of the Ottoman Empire, where–as Oxford historian Norman Stone helpfully pointed out last week–superfluous princesses were usually strangled in a bag and thrown into the sea. But Britain is an 18th-century society as well as a modern one, and so this marital dispute also involves competing retinues: his court of obsequious lackeys, glumly stalking the sodden moors; her circle of gossipy lightweights, working off their chic lunches with private trainers. Charles’s party is armed, although mostly just with birdshot, but Diana’s friends are much more likely to be in touch with their inner child. And behind them stands all of public opinion, comprising the sober Times-reading middle class, the excitable perusers of the Daily Mail, and ultimately the rest of the world, in whose eyes the royal family cannot afford to look any more ridiculous than the events of the last four years have already rendered them.
This need to put the right spin on the divorce helps explain the baffling events of last week, compared with which the simultaneous negotiations to revive the IRA ceasefire were a model of openness and clarity. From the time the prince and princess separated in 1992, most observers expected them to divorce eventually; separation did little to heal their apparent mutual loathing. Diana brought matters to a head with her lip-biting television interview last fall, in which she admitted her own adultery–Charles’s was already on the record–and charged that the royal family had campaigned to discredit her with the public. Within weeks, Queen Elizabeth responded by urging the couple to put the marriage out of its misery. So no one was too surprised when Diana’s spokeswoman, Jane Atkinson, announced last Wednesday–following an afternoon meeting of the principals at St. James’s Palace–that “the Princess of Wales has agreed to Prince Charles’s request for a divorce.”
No one, that is, but the queen herself, whose spokesman described her as “most interested” in the announcement. “When the queen says she’s “most interested’,” one palace insider translated for NEWSWEEK, “it means, “How extraordinary to go ahead and announce this without even conferring with us!’ “–apparently an expression of the deepest emotion on Her Majesty’s part. Charles’s reaction was even more forthright. He “blew his top,” another source close to the royal family recounted, adding primly: “I can’t repeat what he said. They weren’t four-letter words, but they were very strong.” Atkinson’s statement went on to say, in full: “The princess will continue to be involved in all decisions relating to the children and will remain at Kensington Palace, with offices in St. James’s Palace. The Princess of Wales will retain the title and be known as Diana, Princess of Wales.” But Charles, who was visiting a Hindu temple in North London when he heard the news Wednesday evening, didn’t recall having agreed to any such thing. “The negotiations have only just started among the lawyers,” the queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, plaintively explained two days later. “The negotiations couldn’t start until the princess’s [agreement to a divorce] was known. And it only became known on Wednesday afternoon.”
For connoisseurs of divorce, this was an especially rich moment, because it encapsulated much of what was wrong with the marriage in the first place. Here was Diana looking willful and headstrong, eliciting as always Charles’s infinite capacity for stuffiness. (According to an authoritative-sounding report in The Sun, Charles had wanted a stenographer to record their Wednesday meeting, an idea nixed by Diana.) The actual terms set forth by Atkinson struck most observers as reasonable. It’s plausible to suppose that Charles assented to them in principle, subject to a final agreement that would cover other important details, such as money. But in the view of the palace, by presenting her demands as faits accomplis, Diana was limiting Charles’s room to bargain–a low trick generally associated with lawyers and other dubious characters, such as children and spouses. “It’s more one-upsmanship through the media,” said Sarah Bradford, author of a new and sympathetic biography of the queen. “It’s not a very nice way to behave.”
If anyone thought Diana would be chastened, they were wrong. She did call off an important public appearance Thursday evening at the 125th-anniversary dinner of the British Red Cross, one of her leading charities. Atkinson described her as “very upset and decidedly sad” at the decision to end her marriage and said she “would prefer a few days of quiet.” But a day later she was on the phone to a reporter for the Daily Mail, complaining that the palace was “playing Ping-Pong with me . . . I have given them everything they wanted and they are still not satisfied.” In a letter hand-delivered to Charles’s solicitors, Diana’s lawyer, Anthony Julius, repeated the points in Atkinson’s press release and demanded that they be publicly confirmed. Otherwise, Julius implied, the princess would call off the divorce altogether. “If we cannot rely on agreements that have been made, it would be unwise to continue our negotiations,” he said.
Diana’s defenders presented her tactics as a question of self-preservation. “She doesn’t trust the palace press crowd, and she’s dead right not to,” said Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review. “The palace has been leaking things like crazy lately”–always, he added, with the royal family’s own, inimitably heavyhanded spin. She was, in any case, only fulfilling the threat she made in her BBC interview, that she “won’t go quietly.” But some observers think the momentum of public opinion is shifting toward Charles and his family. “She’s been looking a little scheming and manipulative lately in negotiating her role,” said Robert M. Worcester, who heads Britain’s leading polling organization, MORI. The tabloids, long among the princess’s most ardent admirers, were quick to turn on her over reports that she had been beastly toward her children’s nanny at a holiday party, reducing the 30-year-old Tiggy Legge-Bourke to tears with a sniggering reference to a false rumor that Legge-Bourke had had an abortion. Diana’s five-year romance with Capt. James Hewitt didn’t exactly enhance her popularity–partly because of the morality of beginning an affair even before her separation from Charles (and with two sons under the age of 5) and partly, Worcester says, because Hewitt, a cavalry officer who taught Diana to ride, was viewed as “one of the hired help.” Proving that even royalty can’t get decent help these days, Hewitt caddishly profited from a book recounting his affair, and with his coauthor was peddling a TV interview last week–a development that inevitably leaves Diana looking both ill-used and slightly foolish in her choice of lovers.
If Diana has been scheming, it may be because she has more to lose than Charles. The royal family has short-term goals, but only one enduring interest, which is fundamentally dynastic (the polite term for “biological”): for Charles to succeed Elizabeth on the throne, and be succeeded by his son William. Nothing Diana says or does can prevent that from happening. In theory, a divorced Charles could even marry another nice Protestant girl, like Camilla Parker Bowles–although that could pose a conflict with the monarch’s role as head of the Church of England, a faith that confusingly permits divorce, but not remarriage. (His sister, Anne, got around this problem by remarrying in the Church of Scotland.) Obviously the royal family wants the divorce to proceed. Prince Edward, Charles’s youngest brother, is expected to announce his engagement to Sophie Rhys-Jones soon. The queen is said to want both Charles and Prince Andrew–who is separated from Sarah Ferguson–to get their scandal-prone wives out of the family pictures before the wedding. But they will wait if they have to; patience is one of the virtues that the House of Windsor enjoys in compensation for its dullness. As Farouk, the last King of Egypt, remarked shortly before his overthrow, one day there will be only five kings left in the world–the one in England, and the four in a pack of cards.
Of course, Farouk could not have predicted the advance of telephone bugging, through which Charles would one day be recorded telling his mistress he would like to be reincarnated as a tampon. Fears have been growing lately of a revolt by citizens tired of spending millions to subsidize the royal family for the same behavior that they can get free from Hugh Grant. Last month MORI reported that 43 percent of Britons think the monarchy will be gone within 50 years, up from just 11 percent when the question was asked in 1990. On the other hand, 70 percent say that they prefer constitutional monarchy, tampons and all, to the mess Americans have made out of their republic. “If they pull up their socks, the royal family will survive,” Worcester predicts.
Diana, though, has a more complicated agenda than mere survival. She wants to have a say in bringing up William, 13, and his 11-year-old brother, Harry–to take them on weekends to theme parks and shelters for the homeless, exposing them to more of life than the blood sports her father-in-law, Prince Philip, considers suitable distractions for young minds. It was through Diana’s influence that William enrolled last year at the relatively cosmopolitan Eton, rather than the spartan, quasi-military Gordonstoun school in northeast Scotland, where Philip and Charles studied. He is said to have taken his parents’ breakup hard–looking, as one observer put it, “like someone recently bereaved.”
It will be interesting to see how William turns out–whether it is possible to marry his parents’ temperaments, even though the people themselves couldn’t live under the same roof. Although greatly attached to his mother, he is said to be turning into a Windsor: reserved, introspective and sensitive, although not to the point that he shrinks from shooting the defenseless pheasantry of Sandringham. And that tendency will grow as he takes on more royal duties–becoming accustomed, says Nigel Evans of Majesty magazine, to the sight of “people walking backwards in front of him.”
The other main thing Diana wants, of course, is money. She was said to be seeking a lump sum of around pounds 15 million, or $22 million. In theory that should be no problem for one of the wealthiest families in the world, but in fact most of Charles’s wealth is in land, which cannot be sold. His reported counteroffer was an annual allowance of around $750,000. According to a detailed breakdown of Diana’s (estimated) expenses in the Daily Mail last week, this fell considerably short of her needs, which included $450,000 a year for household expenses and a similar amount for her secretaries and assistants; she has been living in Kensington Palace in London and presumably could be forgiven the rent. Charles is expected to keep his apartment at St. James’s Palace and Highgrove, the estate in Gloucestershire. Among Diana’s other outlays were $45,000 for clothing, $15,000 for “beauty” (including a $5,400 item for monthly hair coloring), $15,000 for “health” (including aromatherapy, psychiatry and colonic irrigation) and nearly $12,000 for “fitness.” That doesn’t even get into the question of whether Diana can keep the mounds of jewelry bestowed on her as wedding or state gifts.
But children and money are the stuff of everyday divorces; what makes this one unique is Diana’s demand to continue to play a role in public life–to be “Queen of people’s hearts,” as she memorably put it in her BBC interview. Diana has always been conscientious about her work, which consists of raising money and posing decorously in the wards and classrooms of the realm. Her desire to find some socially useful purpose for her celebrity, beauty and wealth is one of her most attractive qualities. Yet she seems not to realize how exhausted her country is by the turmoil she has helped wreak on an institution whose entire reason for being is stability. Acknowledging the difficulty in throwing her into the sea, Stone, the historian, suggests appointing her governor of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic instead. “Twenty or 30 years down the line everyone will have forgotten about Diana,” says constitutional historian David Starkey of the London School of Economics. “She will have joined the list of clapped-out celebrities living in California.” Who could have guessed that, 15 years after the Wedding of the Century, so many of the awe-struck multitudes would be hoping never to see the bride again?
Charles and Diana’s drama may be coming to an end, but the show will go on. Their tattered relationship is little more than another episode in a royal soap opera hundreds of years old. A sampling:
Henry VIII had tow marriages annulled and two wives beheaded
Edward VII’s favorite mistress Alice Keppel
Edward VIII’s devotion to Mrs. Simpson pushed him to abdicate
A young Princess Margaret was denied her request to marry the personable, distinguished, but also divorced fighter pilot Capt. Peter Townsend
Princess Margaret’s marriage fell apart, especially after a London tabloid caught her vacationing with young gardener Roddy Llewellyn on the West Indian island of Mustique
The Duchess of York, already separated from Prince Andrew, ended talk of repairing the marriage when she was caught topless and toe-sucked
Diana’s five-year affair with Maj. James Hewitt blew up in her face when he collaborated on a tell-all book ..MR0-
