The royals - Kitty Kelley [254]
Charles had a talent for shooting himself in the foot. He let the press know that he had sent a letter to forty stores where Diana regularly shopped: “With effect from 2 September 1996, any expenditure incurred by or on behalf of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, on or after that date should be invoiced directly to the Princess of Wales’s Office, Apartment 7, Kensington Palace, London.” Then he announced that he planned “to celebrate” his divorce at Highgrove—with a Champagne party.
The country’s sentiment was best expressed by the cartoonist who showed a huckster outside Buckingham Palace hawking royal playing cards. Chomping a cigar, the hustler pushed a deck of cards on a hapless young man who looked perplexed. “It’s just like an ordinary pack, son, without the Queen of Hearts.”
The monarchy had lost its brightest star, but the Queen was determined that the show go on without her. She instructed the souvenir shops of Balmoral, Windsor Castle, and Buckingham Palace to remove all memorabilia with Diana’s likeness—ashtrays, mugs, postcards. She also struck the Princess’s name from the official prayers said for the royal family in Parliament. The move appeared “comically vindictive” to Tory MP Jerry Hayes. “To most people,” he said, “it looks like they are trying to airbrush the Princess from the establishment in a Stalinist manner.”
The Sunday Mail agreed. “Diana should still be in our prayers,” stated an editorial that chastised Parliament for its “mean and vengeful” decision. “They should recall that forgiveness is the first Christian virtue.”
The final humiliation came when the Queen ordered the London Gazette to publish the Letters Patent: this was Her Majesty’s official notice to her government, her embassies, and her diplomatic missions that both her former daughters-in-law were toast.
“It’s Wallis all over again, isn’t it?” said the Queen Mother, shaking her head. She had received an advance copy of the notice that deprived Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer of their royal status without ever mentioning them by name. The Queen Mother had supported the move to strip “the troublesome girls” of their titles and was as complicit in the purge as she had been in depriving the Duchess of Windsor of her royal status. Now as then, the courtiers were as slick as seals. They dismissed the dry announcement as a routine matter of protocol: to inform people of the correct form of social address. But most everyone else saw the announcement as tactless and vengeful. They saw the monarch once again using the Letters Patent as a broom.
“First, you cauterize,” said one of the Queen’s advisers, “and then you heal.” The scholarly adviser had written to the Queen, quoting the wisdom of England’s sixteenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, who said, “[He] that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.”
But the seventy-year-old Queen did not feel she needed the advice. After forty-five years on the throne, she had developed her own endgame. Without a shrewd Prime Minister such as Queen Victoria had in Disraeli, Elizabeth relied on her courtiers. They believed, as she did, that she was anointed by God. With her position divinely ordained, she did not feel a need to respond to the whims of public opinion like a politician. She viewed the monarchy as a sacred destiny, not a popularity contest.
But when her authority was challenged, she showed that she understood the past was prologue. Her grandfather had built the House of Windsor on an act of expediency, which enabled the monarchy to survive during the First World War. By camouflaging his German ancestry and reinventing himself as English, King George V had appeased his Hun-hating subjects. “He knew and understood his people, and the age in which they lived,” said former prime minister Clement Atlee, “and progressed with them.” The Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Montgelas saw it differently. “The true