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aware of what marriage into the royal family involved and turned him down.
Through all this time Charles dated a string of beautiful upper-class and not so upperclass
girls – including Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington,
Georgina Russell, Sabrina Guinness, Davina Sheffield and Anna Wallace – and proposed
to at least one of them. Elizabeth and Philip favoured the lovely and sweet-natured Lady
Leonora Grosvenor, but she married Elizabeth’s cousin, the Earl of Lichfield, instead.
Mountbatten persisted with his dream of seeing his granddaughter destined for the
throne of Great Britain and concocted a scheme whereby he and Amanda should
accompany the Prince on an official tour of India envisaged for 1980. When he put the
idea to Elizabeth and Philip, however, Philip was adamantly against it, pointing out
that the presence of the former Viceroy would overshadow the purpose of the visit which
was to introduce the heir to the British throne to the Indian public. Elizabeth thought of
the effect upon Amanda, whose presence on the tour would make her an object of
speculation to the press, who had, until now, taken no notice of her, regarding her
simply as Charles’s cousin, and remained unaware of the frequency of his visits to
Broadlands to see her. Amanda’s parents were of the same opinion and that if she were
to go an engagement would have to be announced or denied in circumstances which
would ruin any chance of the couple getting together. In the event, as we have seen,
Amanda Knatchbull chose freedom, confirming the lonely Prince in his belief that
marriage into the House of Windsor was a sacrifice which no one should be expected to
make.
In the interim he carried on a series of short-lived affairs and one-night stands, so
much so that by 1978 Mountbatten began to admonish him against ‘beginning on the
downward slope that wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful
abdication and futile life ever after’. On an official visit to Australia Checketts had to
warn him against spending the weekend with two former girlfriends because inevitable
press speculation about it would spoil his visit; Charles, again like his Uncle David,
insisted obstinately that his private life was his own affair, and only gave in when
Checketts threatened to consult the Queen. Where once he had been the epitome of
kindness and consideration, he now began to display an inconsiderate selfishness,
changing his plans when he felt like it with no thought for his hosts. When he did this to
the Brabournes, Mountbatten told him angrily that he was ‘showing no signs of pulling
yourself together’ and that his behaviour was ‘typical of how your Uncle David started’.
On the morning of 27 August 1979, the IRA detonated a bomb planted in
Mountbatten’s fishing boat as he left harbour at Mullagh-more on the west coast of
Ireland on a fishing trip with his family. They were about to collect lobster pots when
the bomb expoded almost under Mountbatten’s feet, killing him instantly with his
grandson, Nicholas Knatchbull, aged fourteen, and a local boy, Paul Maxwell, aged
fifteen. His daughter, Patricia, and her husband, Lord Brabourne, were severely injured,
and Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother died the next day. Elizabeth was at
Balmoral when she heard the news. She was terribly shocked; a piece of her past had
been violently torn away from her. (It had been unwise, to say the least, for a member