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with the Prince at the Brabournes’ house on Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Elizabeth called
it ‘a black day for British journalism’, but she had reckoned without her daughter-inlaw’s
fondness for seeing her own image in the papers; Diana let it be known to the
offending newspaperman that she had not minded at all. Just before the Eleuthera
holiday, Elizabeth was horrified and shaken when the Princess threw herself down a
staircase at Sandringham in front of her; one distressing incident in the black moods of
despair that seemed to grip her, although there were periods of happiness such as
Christmas at Windsor, when the Prince had written to a friend, ‘We’ve had such a lovely
Christmas – the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to
share it together.’ Elizabeth hoped that the birth of their son might change things and
calm her daughter-in-law’s erratic behaviour. Prince William was born on 21 June 1982.
Elizabeth is said to have remarked in one of her not-so-happy one-liners, ‘Well, at least
he hasn’t got his father’s ears.’ For the moment at least, there was joy and contentment
in the Wales family.
From the beginning of 1982, Elizabeth had had more important affairs to worry about
than her daughter-in-law’s mood swings. On 5 April the British naval task force had put
to sea destined for the Falkland Islands, invaded by the Argentines three days before.
On board HMS Invincible, which had sailed with the task force, was the twenty-two-yearold
Prince Andrew, serving as a helicopter pilot. Andrew was Elizabeth’s favourite child,
the baby she had been determined to have despite her husband’s qualms about adding to
the already sufficient number of ‘royals’. He had been born eight years after her
accession to the throne, when she had been less overwhelmed by her royal duties and a
more practised hand at pacing her private and public lives than she had been during the
childhood of her firstborn. She adored him, so much so that courtiers referred jokingly to
him as ‘the love-child’ (a joke that later surfaced in rumours, completely unfounded, that
he was the son of the Queen’s old friend and racing manager ‘Porchy’ Carnarvon, an
allegation that utterly astounded those who had been close to Elizabeth at the time).
When Prince Edward was born four years later, he was generally thought to have been
intended as a companion for Andrew.
Andrew had grown up to be an uncomplicated soul, rumbustious, a little spoiled and
more than a little arrogant. He had inherited the family penchant for practical jokes – in
Los Angeles in the 1980s he had shocked the American press by squirting them with red
paint, much as his father had ‘accidentally’ sprayed newspapermen with a hosepipe at
the Chelsea Flower Show. There had always been far less pressure upon him to succeed
than on his elder brother as heir to the throne and he had sailed through life hitherto
with none of the tortures suffered by Charles at the hands of an apparently hostile
world. From the nursery presided over by Charles’s favourite nanny, Mabel Anderson,
he had progressed to lessons with Mispy, Charles’s governess, and a few other children
of his age, including Margaret’s son, Viscount Linley, then to a smart preparatory
school, Heatherdown. The staff at Heatherdown were rather relieved when he left; at his
best he could be diligent and polite, at his worst aggressive, rude and obstinate. At home
he would place whoopee cushions on chairs and set off stink bombs; he once poured