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had been discussed. In 1978 Jane, the second eldest, married Robert Fellowes, then the
Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary and son of the Queen’s popular Sandringham landagent,
Sir William ‘Billy’ Fellowes. The wedding took place in the smart Guards’ Chapel
at Wellington Barracks, the Guards’ headquarters a stone’s throw from Buckingham
Palace. Later Diana was overheard to say, ‘It’ll be Westminster Abbey for me.’ It was
perfectly understandable that she should already have had the Prince of Wales in mind
as a potential husband. She was of an age when women dream of marrying men who
are not just powerful or attractive but inhabit a plane above everyday life. Charles, as
the future King, was the world’s most eligible bachelor, and, since Diana’s elder sisters
had entered the royal orbit, he was not just a distant impossible star but an accessible
one. Her sights were set. She began to court the limelight. At her sister’s wedding she
bounced up to James Whitaker, doyen of the royal reporters known as the ‘ratpack’: ‘I
know you – you’re the wicked Mr Whitaker, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I’m Diana.’ 3 Her love
affair with the press had begun.
Two years later in July 1980, moved by Diana’s sympathy and compassion when they
had a long conversation sitting on a hay bale at a Sussex barbecue, Charles began to
consider her as a possible bride. Her feelings were not feigned; Diana always had an
instinctive capacity to sense suffering and pain and a vocation to reach out towards the
victim. According to Charles’s account of the conversation to his authorized biographer,
‘she said how sad he had seemed at the Mountbatten funeral and how she had sensed his
loneliness and need for someone to care for him’. That she had an ulterior motive for
this approach does not make it any the less heartfelt. She thought she could help him,
that she could provide the solace he was seeking and that they could be happy ever
after. The sympathetic approach worked; less than a month later, during Cowes week in
early August, Charles confided to a friend that he had met the girl he intended to marry
and described Diana’s warmth, ease of manner and, less perceptively, ‘her enthusiasm
for rural life’.
From then on things began to snowball and acquire a momentum that none of the
participants would be able to stop. That same summer Charles had had a spectacular
scene with Anna Wallace, one of the women to whom he had proposed, another
beautiful, strong-willed blonde with a rich landowning father, at the Queen Mother’s
eightieth birthday ball, and another at a ball at Stowell Park when he had danced the
night away with Camilla Parker Bowles. The sweet, sympathetic and apparently pliable
Diana Spencer seemed the perfect antidote; he invited her to join the house-party at
Balmoral that September. Among the Prince’s house-party were his great friend Nicholas
Soames, and Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana, Soames and Parker Bowles
flew back to London later on, leaving Camilla behind with the Prince. A few days later,
on 17 September 1980, photographers gathered at the nursery school where Lady Diana
Spencer worked, caught the famous shot of her in a filmy skirt against the sunlight – a
virgin madonna with child in her arms and sexy legs below. It was an unforgettable
image and the beginning of a media superstar.
A month later Diana was photographed again, watching the Prince ride his horse,