The royals - Kitty Kelley [185]
Some of the men in Hewitt’s regiment suspected the relationship from the beginning and nudged each other with burlesque winks about the Princess and her riding instructor, whom they had nicknamed the Red Setter. But none dared publicly to suggest anything improper. “Even when I saw them kissing and cuddling in the middle of the riding school, I was so shocked that I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my wife, for a year and a half, until after I left the army,” said the former groom.
He described what he saw: “It was in the middle of November 1988 and Hewitt had been transferred to Combermere Barracks, not far from Windsor. I got the Princess’s horse ready for her three-thirty P.M. lesson… and took it to the riding school because the weather outside was awful…. The two of them met inside, and I stood on a mounting block to watch them. I saw his hands going up the back of her blouse. Her blouse was outside her jodhpurs. She was all over him. He was all over her.”
As the affair progressed, Diana drew her former roommate, Carolyn Bartholomew, into her confidence as well as her friend Mara Berni, who owned the San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, where Diana and Hewitt sometimes lunched together. She also relied on her detective, Ken Wharfe, who accompanied her with Hewitt, making their trips look like casual excursions rather than romantic outings.
Diana included her lover on the Queen’s invitation list for a formal white-tie ball in November 1988 to celebrate Prince Charles’s fortieth birthday. She knew without looking at the list of five hundred guests that Charles would invite his mistress. So she added the name of her riding instructor next to her favorite dress designer, Bruce Oldfield. Everyone in the royal family attended the ball at Buckingham Palace, except Prince Andrew, who was aboard the HMS Edinburgh in Australian waters. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia flew in from Spain to join the king of Norway, the grand duke of Luxembourg, the prince of Liechtenstein and Sophia’s brother, Constantine, the deposed king of Greece. The Dukes of Northumberland and Westminster danced and drank champagne until three in the morning with rock stars, disk jockeys, and industrialists.
Charles had started his day by visiting the inner cities of Birmingham northwest of London, where the charity he founded in 1976, the Prince’s Trust, employed disadvantaged young people. He arrived in the morning wearing a “Life Begins at 40” button, a gift from his children, and was cheered by crowds, who burst into a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
“When will you be King?” shouted a mechanic.
“Dunno,” said Charles. “I might fall under a bus before I get there.”
The inner-city celebration did not impress the chairman of the Labor Party. “It’s just a way in which the benevolent hierarchy operates,” said Dennis Skinner. “They have to push a few crumbs off the table for the poor and underprivileged… to ease their conscience and create an image of benevolence.”
That evening’s Palace party aroused even further indignation. “They’ll spend as much on this celebration as many poor families would be able to spend in a lifetime,” said Skinner. “Those on Easy Street, including the royal family, should take great care not to treat poor people with contempt. This party is like kicking sand in the faces of those people at the bottom of the ladder.”
Charles said he would not be deterred by criticism, especially from cranks. “Now that I’m forty,” he said, “I feel much, much more determined about what I’m doing.” He considered his work for the underprivileged of Britain worthy of royalty but said his wife’s patronage of AIDS patients was “inappropriate” and that the press coverage she received by visiting them was at times “sentimental” and “exploitative.” He said her trip to visit AIDS babies in New York City’s Harlem Hospital a few months later was totally unnecessary. When he refused to accompany her to Harlem,