The royals - Kitty Kelley [221]
The Queen, who was at Sandringham, did not watch the announcement on television; she was walking her dogs. When she returned, her page was waiting to offer his sympathy. She nodded briskly and said, “I think you’ll find it’s all for the best.”
Charles was more forthcoming with his staff at Highgrove. “I feel a surging sense of relief,” he told them. He had already started refurbishing the rooms that Diana had vacated. He ordered all the belongings she had not taken with her to be burned, including some of the children’s old toys. On top of the bonfire was a carved wooden rocking horse that had been a birthday gift to Prince William from the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan.
After the Prime Minister’s announcement, reporters descended on Camilla Parker Bowles’s manor home in Wiltshire, but she feigned ignorance about the Waleses’ separation. “Obviously, if something has gone wrong, I’m very sorry for them,” she said. “But I know nothing more than the average person in the street. I only know what I see on television.” Fifty miles away, her husband emerged from his London apartment. The couple, who had been married nineteen years, lived apart quietly and saw each other only on rare weekends. When reporters asked his reaction, Andrew Parker Bowles kept walking. “Like everyone else,” he said, “one feels sad about this.” He scolded a reporter for suggesting that his wife had been instrumental in the breakup.
“No, it’s not true,” he said. “How many times do I have to spell it out? Those stories are pure fiction.”
Some people on the street told reporters they felt betrayed. “The royal family is supposed to be better than us,” said one middle-aged woman. “They’re supposed to show us the way to behave. Otherwise, what’s their purpose?”
Reaction split down generations. Those who had spent childhood nights huddled in London’s underground during World War II looked to royalty as a beacon. But those who grew up listening to the Beatles, not to the bombs, viewed the royal family as a relic. To the postwar generations, especially those reared on video games, the monarchy just looked plain silly. One nineteen-year-old student from Liverpool said, “Just a bunch of out-of-date, out-of-touch richies.”
But the royalist, Lord St. John of Fawsley, disagreed. He rationalized that the royal family was emblematic of the modern dysfunctional family. Next to the United States, the United Kingdom had the highest rate of divorce in the Western world, which was reflected in its royal family. “For this century the monarchy has been held up as an example of family rectitude,” he said with a straight face. “Well, that can’t go on. So the royal family will have to adapt itself to new circumstances. In some ways it will be nearer to the people because it will be sharing the family problems all of us have faced.”
No dynasty had taught its subjects more emphatically to shrink from divorce—and no dynasty had given them more from which to shrink. Yet by 1992 all the monarch’s married children were legally separated and headed for divorce. “Great weddings,” observed writer Valerie Grove, “too bad about the marriages.”
Half the country now believed that by the end of the twentieth century the monarchy would be finished and that Britain would not suffer. The press reflected the public’s sentiments. “Charles will not be King,” predicted the Sun, “Di will not be Queen.” The Daily Mirror said: “The latest royal mess is making a mockery of the monarchy. Unchecked, that mockery will destroy the monarchy itself.”
Measured against people’s expectations, Charles had fallen alarmingly far. Even Tory members of Parliament debated his right to the throne. Fearing a constitutional crisis, he called his friend Arnold, Lord Goodman for advice. The eminent lawyer said that a divorce would not prevent him from becoming King—but a second marriage would. So Charles said he did not intend to remarry. He maintained stoutly, “I will be the next King.”
The separation had international repercussions. In Germany wax museums moved