The royals - Kitty Kelley [130]
Prince Charles was heartbroken. He wired Mountbatten’s private secretary: “This is the worst day of my life. I can’t imagine going on without him.” That night he poured his grief into his journal: “I have lost someone infinitely special in my life. Life will never be the same now that he has gone….”
Days later Charles met his mother and father for lunch at Broadlands to discuss Mountbatten’s funeral arrangements. Still distraught, he said he didn’t think he could get through the service without breaking down.
“He’s gone now, Charles,” said his father. “You’ve got to get on with it.”
The Prince of Wales started crying and left the room. The Queen, who did not respond, just continued eating. She dropped bits of chicken from her salad on the floor to feed her corgis. Prince Philip threw down his napkin.
“I hope that has ensured that Charles will shed no tears when he goes out in public,” he said. The Queen sipped her water and said nothing.
“Sounds cruel,” recalled John Barratt, “but the Duke of Edinburgh was determined to put some steel in his son’s spine. Her Majesty couldn’t have given a tinker’s cuss. Poor Charles was destroyed. He was so dependent on Lord Mountbatten. They spoke every day and wrote weekly. He was everything to Charles—his grandfather figure, his father, his tutor, his best friend.”
Although Philip sometimes chafed at this closeness, he mourned his uncle’s death and never forgave the Irish Republican Army. Two years later, during a tour of Australia with the Queen, he passed a group of IRA demonstrators. The Queen ignored them and stared straight ahead; Philip raised his hand to wave and gave them the finger.
On the day of Mountbatten’s funeral, Charles stepped sadly onto the podium at Westminster Abbey to read the prayer that his great-uncle had selected years before when he planned his state funeral. The Prince of Wales had pinned to his own naval uniform all his ribbons and medals because, as he told his valet, that’s what Mountbatten would have preferred. Tapping his chest, he said, “If the IRA want to get me through the heart, they’ll have a hard job.”
In a quavering voice, Charles recited Psalm 107 in memory of the Admiral of the Fleet: “They that go down to the sea in ships… These men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep….” He struggled to keep his composure, but as the buglers sounded the last post, he broke and brushed away a tear.
His emotion contrasted starkly with that of his mother, who sat a few feet away, as impassive as stone. On the day of the bombing, ten days before the funeral, the Palace had issued a statement that Her Majesty was “deeply shocked and saddened,” but she did not write a letter of condolence to Mountbatten’s children, who were her cousins and her closest friends from childhood. Nor did she interrupt her vacation at Balmoral, where she was joined the next day by her daughter, Princess Anne, for a picnic. The Queen was seen walking in her garden with her corgis and playing with her two-year-old grandson, Peter.
Such ordinary activity in the face of tragedy jolted one royal reporter, who watched the scene through high-power binoculars. He said he was stunned to see the Queen skipping and laughing as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “This was the day after Mountbatten had been blown to bits,” he recalled, “and I’ve never seen Her Majesty so relaxed and happy* in all her life.” Ever the loyal subject, the reporter filed a story for his newspaper, saying that the grief-stricken sovereign walked through the gardens of Balmoral in solitary sorrow.
Charles mourned his great-uncle’s death for months and turned for guidance to Laurens Van der Post, a writer who had served as an aide to Mountbatten in India. Charles was in awe of the older man, who now replaced Mountbatten as his guru, spiritual mentor, and political adviser. Van der Post, a