The royals - Kitty Kelley [270]
Burrell pleaded not guilty, and his trial was set to begin in the Old Bailey in January 2002, but Her Majesty’s court postponed the date so as not to interfere with Her Majesty’s jubilee celebration. Rescheduled for October 2002, the butler’s trial unearthed more dirty Diana laundry than almost all the tell-alls combined. Prince Charles was reported as telling friends he did not want Burrell to be prosecuted because he was afraid Princes William and Harry would be dragged into the trial. The government was made aware of these objections and neither Charles nor his sons were called to appear.
For nine days Britain watched the trial coverage and its rising tide of lurid allegations, including homosexual rape among Prince Charles’s staff. There were also accusations of tax fraud on the part of certain royal retainers who worked for Charles and secretly accepted gifts without declaring them. As a prosecution witness, Diana’s sister, Sarah, and their mother, Frances Shand Kydd, testified against Burrell, saying he had misinterpreted Diana’s reliance on him as a “rock.” Mrs. Shand Kydd admitted she and Diana had not spoken for many months before the Princess died but denied it was because she had criticized her daughter’s affairs with Muslim men. Diana was further incensed when her mother sold an interview to Hello! magazine in which she said she disapproved of her daughter’s divorce. Mrs. Shand Kydd said she had accepted payment for the interview only to raise money for one of her charities.
Under cross-examination, Burrell’s lawyer got Diana’s mother to admit having shredded many of the Princess’s documents at Kensington Palace, and the lawyer said Burrell had rushed in to save them. A letter from Charles Spencer rejecting Diana’s request to seek refuge at Althorp after her divorce was revealed. The butler later said Diana had wept as she read her brother’s letter and sobbed when he accused her of being mentally unstable. The Earl Spencer had also demanded Diana return the family’s diamond tiara, which she had borrowed for her wedding. She did return it, leaving the jeweled crown in a cardboard box to be picked up at the back door of Kensington Palace.
The butler’s trial illuminated the crass self-entitlement of the British class system when he testified that someone within the Spencer family had told him, the son of a truck driver, “Just remember where you came from.” By then the Spencers, once one of England’s most illustrious families, looked like spiteful, snobbish, arrogant aristocrats, who treated commoners like cattle. The Windsors did not look much better. The trial was tarnishing “the good and the great,” who took curtsies as their due.
Estimated to have cost $2.5 million, the proceedings suddenly collapsed on the ninth day just as the butler was to take the stand in his own defense. Chambers quickly adjourned and the jury was dismissed minutes after Prince Charles’s lawyer contacted the police to say that Her Majesty had just recalled that Burrell, her former footman, had once mentioned to her that he had taken away some of Diana’s possessions for safekeeping. Hearing that it was the Queen herself—who headed the government by divine right—vouching for the butler, the trial was terminated with Burrell’s acquittal. The prosecution knew there was nothing further to be discussed,