The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor Read Online Free

with the Prince, immediately after the honeymoon. As she climbed out of the car at their first stop, she looked briefly to her husband for reassurance and then set off into the crowds with a big smile on her face and arms outstretched to shake as many hands as she could reach. She was a natural; there wasn’t an elderly person in a wheelchair or a babe in arms that she didn’t notice and single out for attention. A thirty-second conversation is going to be banal at the best of times, but she seemed to find just the right words. ‘What nice shiny medals,’ she said to one hunchbackedold soldier, and then to his beaming wife, ‘Did you polish them for him?’ And when a seven-year-old boy called out from a couple of rows back, ‘My dad says give us a kiss’, she smiled and responded, ‘Well then, you’d better have one’, and leaning right forward gave the boy a kiss on the cheek.
    The crowds were contained behind barriers on either side of the street, as with all such visits, leaving the middle clear for the royal party. Diana and Charles took one side each and there were audible groans of disappointment when people realized that they would get Charles rather than Diana. It was no secret that the enthusiasm and the flowers were all for Diana. ‘Do you want me to give those to her?’ Charles said time and time again as people held posies aloft and looked longingly in her direction. ‘I seem to do nothing but collect flowers these days. I know my role.’ He was laughing, and I have no doubt at all that at that time he was terribly proud of his wife and pleased that people liked her, but as time went by and the pattern repeated itself endlessly, his laughter began to ring hollow.
    He was not used to sharing the limelight. He had been the centre of attention wherever he went for thirty-two years – and he was being eclipsed by his wife. His work, his speeches, his visits, everything was being overshadowed by Diana; and through no fault of her own. Later it became a deliberate ploy but at that time she was as surprised as anyone by the mania which gripped the nation. Every day some trivial story provided an excuse to have her on the front page of the newspapers. Charles began to lose heart – and who can blame him? There were so many serious and important issues that needed airing but no one seemed to be listening. All they seemed to care about was Diana’s wardrobe. Diana wore pearl chokers that had scarcely been seen since the nineteenth century and suddenly the shops were full of them. She wore culottes onhoneymoon and culottes returned to fashion; high necks and they too flooded the market; and her hairstyle was copied in every high-street salon.
    Diana’s popularity was phenomenal but it was not the first time that the nation, or indeed the world, had fallen in love with a beautiful royal princess. The Queen is good-looking now in her seventies – as the young Princess Elizabeth she was breathtakingly pretty. She was not tall and rangy like Diana, and her style was quite different, but she had flawless skin, a good figure and the most radiant smile that won hearts as surely as Diana’s did thirty years later. When the mania over Diana was at its height, one of the Queen’s courtiers said, ‘Ma’am, you will never have seen anything like the publicity Charles and Diana are having.’ ‘You were not around,’ she said witheringly, ‘when Margaret and I were having our future husbands talent-spotted for us. In comparison with the width and breadth and depth of the media in those days, it was just as great if not greater. Daily we were being lined up with some new suitor.’ ‘I couldn’t argue,’ he says. People turned out in their thousands not just in Britain but in the countries she visited all over the world to see Princess Elizabeth and cheer her. Monarchy at that time was revered in a way that the youth of today would find incomprehensible.
    Her marriage in November 1947 to the Greek Prince