Although it was well known that they had been leading separate retinues for years, the announcement of their separation last week still had the power to shock. For Americans, it evoked that peculiarly modern form of disillusionment that results when celebrities fail to live out the roles assigned to them by our magazines. We went through it when Jacqueline Kennedy remarried. Princesses shouldn’t suffer from bulimia and throw themselves down staircases; that’s what country-music singers do. Princes shouldn’t have to face allegations of squalid affairs with old girlfriends; we have Presidents for that.
For the British, the emotions were more complex. There was a certain sympathy for 66-year-old Queen Elizabeth, who, as she limped toward the close of an “annus horribilis” that also saw the humiliating breakup of Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson, might well have wondered, “God saved me … for this?” But sympathy was tempered by growing doubts that Britain needs to keep spending $85 million a year on the royal family when Monaco, say, gets just as much scandal out of its princesses at a fraction of the cost. When Prime Minister John Major had to postpone an important meeting with EC Commission President Jacques Delors so he could announce the breakup to Parliament, it was a reminder that England’s modern democratic state rested on a cultlike myth that was outdated by the 18th century. Once, of course, this was a perverse point of pride for the English, but last week it seemed increasingly an embarrassment. One advantage of a constitutional monarchy is continuity, but it was precisely this quality that the separation undermined, because it begged so many other questions. Will it lead to divorce? How will Charles and Diana now lead what is still called, with increasingly ludicrous inaccuracy, their “private” lives? And-most pregnant questions of all: Will Diana ever be queen? Will Charles be king?
The terse announcement that Major read in the House of Commons displayed Buckingham Palace’s usual fine hand with public relations, characteristic of institutions that haven’t faced any serious challenge since the Glorious Revolution. It blandly asserted that the decision to separate “has been reached amicably,” just a month after their mutual loathing was on display for all the world to see during a disastrous joint visit to South Korea. It promised that they would appear in public together “from time to time” for “family occasions and national events,” although it’s hard to imagine an event that would hold both their interests-the opening of a trendy restaurant in the basement of one of the 18th-century churches Charles dotes on’ maybe. On the day of the announcement, Diana was visiting a drug- and alcohol-treatment center in Tyne and Wear and Charles was at a business conference 270 miles away in north Wales. As for “family occasions,” less than 24 hours after the announcement Diana excused herself from last Saturday’s wedding of her sister-in-law Princess Anne to Cmdr. Timothy Laurence. And Diana’s Christmas plans are to share a cottage with Fergie, the disgraced duchess, two miles down the road from the royal gathering. Later Diana may take her sons, William and Harry, to visit her brother, Earl Spencer, at Althorp, the family seat, in Northamptonshire. Royal observer Margaret Holder called the cottage holiday “incredible: a case of the outlaws who have become outcasts staying in the outhouse.”
Major went on to promise Parliament that “the succession to the throne is unaffected … and there is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned queen in due course.” If this was meant to be reassuring, it had the opposite effect, prompting gasps from both sides of the house. A smattering of outright republicans led by Labor M.P. Dennis Skinner leapt at the occasion to pronounce the monarchy dead. A Daily Mirror poll published last Friday found that despite Diana’s great personal popularity, a huge majority-80 percent of the 500 people questioned-rejected the idea of her becoming queen. Tory M.P. Tony Marlow declared the possibility totally unacceptable. “We cannot allow Diana to become queen, even if it means taking the throne off Charles,” Marlow said to the press. “It would destroy the monarchy.”
Whatever ultimately happens, it appeared that so far this demure young woman with a high-school education had wiped the floor with her husband’s ermine robes. Reports of Diana’s unhappiness go back at least to 1983, as do the ritual denials by the palace. But serious talk of separation began only last summer, around the time author Andrew Morton published his lurid account of Diana’s depression, bulimia and suicide attempts. Lacerating herself with “the serrated edge of a lemon slicer” may well have been, as her friends described it, a cry for help, but it also positioned her as a sensitive soul crushed by her boorish and unfeeling husband. This made a divorce, which might have cast her back to the relative penury of her family’s 13,000-acre estate, politically untenable. “You are looking at a guy who has been completely outwitted by his wife,” chortles John McEntee, court correspondent for the Sunday Express.
The negotiations were carried on in strict secrecy, with both sides relying on some of the most dodderingly discreet and respected solicitors in London. (The firm representing Charles first had dealings with the royal family in 1761.) The princess reportedly met her lawyers at various flats around London and dealt with them under an alias, “Mrs. Walsh,” cleverly chosen to throw off the scent anyone suspecting a connection to the Princess of Wales. The exact terms, of course, are secret, although apparently they mostly ratify the status quo. Charles will live at his country estate, Highgrove, 100 miles from London, where he will preside over quiet dinners with friends such as Conservative M.P. Nicholas Soames and writer/philosopher Laurens van der Post (“In a Province”); his old friend Camilla Parker Bowles will continue to act as hostess, sources while her husband makes himself conveniently scarce. For visits to the capital he will have a suite at Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s mansion in central London, where he can surround himself with the congenial company of family courtiers.
Diana will stay in her apartments in Kensington Palace, which is home also to several other members of the royal family, and hold occasional court at her corner table at the tony, plant-filled San Lorenzo restaurant. (She reportedly has received her personal mail there and used the owners’ apartment around the corner.) Her retinue includes ex-auto dealer James Gilbey, banker Jacob Rothschild and cavalry officer James Hewitt, members of a crowd described by Evening Standard gossip writer Rory Knight-Bruce as “all fashion and hamburgers”-and certainly no philosophers.
But the status quo is inherently unstable, because we are dealing with a man and a woman here. Legally, Diana is not exactly free to take on a new lover as long as she is married to Charles. It would violate the Treason Act of 1351, although apparently the penalty-death-would apply only to the man in the relationship. Practically, both she and he are trapped by the epistemological revolution that began with the institution of the gossip column. Charles’s forebears include such notorious rakehells as Edward VII, whose mistress was so familiar to the royal family that the queen invited her for a last farewell as he lay on his deathbed. But that was before there would have been a dozen TV crews outside the palace filming every car going in and out. As soon as the word “queen” was out of Major’s mouth, a nightmare took shape in the minds of Britons: Diana, looking smashing as usual in a designer suit, dropped off by a handsome cavalry officer in a Jaguar at Westminster Abbey and strolling inside for her coronation.
And Charles? Well, in theory he could become king while separated, or even divorced; the only legal prohibition, according to Oxford University professor Vernon Bogdanor, is that he cant be married to a Roman Catholic. The smart money in London, in fact, was on divorce: “The Prince and Princess of Wales detest each other and they will eventually get a divorce…… Burke’s Peerage” publishing director Harold Brooks-Baker announced authoritatively. “The announcement of their so-called separation was a complete farce meant to test the waters and fool the people.” But the king is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which opposes divorce, to the point that Princess Anne had to go to Scotland to remarry. “Is it compatible with taking religious vows at [the coronation] to be separated from your wife?” asks Bogdanor.
From this looming constitutional crisis all sorts of escape hatches have been proposed. One, advocated by The Economist and writer Anthony Sampson, is to disestablish the Church of England, so that the monarch would no longer have to be a nominal paragon. Another, frequently mentioned over the last year, would be for Charles himself to renounce his rights to the throne in favor of Prince William. That would enable the couple to get on with their lives … except that it’s not clear what life Charles could have or want except to be king. And, of course, there are those who would dispose of the whole issue by dumping the monarchy, leaving the royal family free to lead lives of dissipation on the Riviera alongside the Romanovs. “The monarchy has been weakening over the last 40 years,” says Skinner. “Now they’ve pushed the self-destruct button. There are homeless people sleeping on the street 400 yards from Buckingham Palace. If Diana wants to continue dressing like a fashion model, let her become a fashion model.”
Could there be an England without a king? Defenders of the monarchy say it’s inconceivable, although increasingly they fall back on the hollow-sounding argument that the royal family is as crucial to the nations tourist economy as elephants are, say, to Kenya’s. Yet the disappearance of the Bourbons has not staunched the flow of tourists to Versailles. Will anyone come to watch the Changing of the Guard at an empty palace? Or perhaps the question is, will Charles, that least charismatic of men, someday unite his country in adoration-or go down as a footnote in history, the last of the Windsors, brought low by, of all things, a woman?
