Penny Junor: Prince William

Her marriage, however, proved less than perfect and, while her husband pursued his Army career and other women, she was left alone in the country with their two children. Charles and Camilla’s friendship resumed. It was still mutually rewarding, but it could never progress to anything more. The Prince of Wales had been weaned on the story of the abdication and how the previous Prince of Wales’ obsession with Wallace Simpson, a twice-divorced American, had wreaked mayhem and nearly brought the monarchy to its knees. Camilla would always be close to his heart but he knew he had to find love and a wife elsewhere.

Less than seven months after their conversation on the hay bale, when Diana had touched him with her concern and empathy, Charles asked her to marry him. The amount of time they had spent alone during that period was minimal; they scarcely knew each other, but his hand had been forced by the combination of the press and poor communication.

He invited Diana to join him and his friends and family at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s home in the Highlands of Scotland, where they traditionally stay during the summer. She was sweet and unsophisticated, bubbly and funny and everyone at the Castle that summer adored her. She was unlike anyone he had ever known and her interests and enthusiasms seemed to match his own.

She seemed like the answer to his prayers. Someone he could love, who was young enough to have no sexual past for the press to rake through, who would understand his world and be the perfect partner with whom to face the future. She was from the very top drawer of British aristocracy; as her father said at the time, ‘The average family wouldn’t know what hit them if their daughter married the future King … But some of my family go back to the Saxons – so that sort of thing’s not a bit new to me … Diana had to marry somebody and I’ve known and worked for the Queen since Diana was a baby.’

What he didn’t mention was that four of his Spencer ancestors were mistresses to English Kings in the seventeenth century; three to Charles II and one to James II, and the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, daughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, was the talk of the nation in the eighteenth century and counted the future George IV among her many conquests.

While the women of the family frolicked with Kings and Princes, the Spencer men became courtiers, and Althorp, the family estate in Northamptonshire, must have had more royal visitors over the centuries than any other private house in Britain. Spencers have lived there since 1486, accumulating a fortune, historically from sheep farming, and filling it with fabulous works of art. It is now home to the 9th Earl, Diana’s brother, Charles, to whom the Queen is godmother.

Johnny Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, had been an equerry to both George VI and the Queen before his marriage in the 1950s. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and until he moved to Northamptonshire on his father’s death in 1975, he had rented a house from the Queen on the Sandringham estate, in Norfolk, where Diana lived until the age of fourteen. Park House was just across the park from the big house, and sometimes Diana and Prince Andrew, who were contemporaries, played together during the Royal Family’s regular stay at Sandringham over the New Year. There were links on her mother’s side of the family too. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a friend and ladyin-waiting to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

On paper she was the perfect match, but in reality the vulnerable Diana was anything but perfect as a bride to one of the most complex men in the country.

Diana’s father was thirty-two when he married Frances Roche. She was eighteen; while her ancestry couldn’t compete with his for nobility, and is positively murky in patches, it did add a little colour to the picture, as well as some Scottish, Irish and American blood. The royal connection was comparatively new. Diana’s grandfather, Maurice, the 4th Baron Fermoy, became friendly with George V’s second son, Bertie, then Duke of York, when he and his wife moved to Norfolk. They played tennis together and their wives shared a passion for music; Ruth Fermoy, née Gill, an Aberdeen girl, was an exceptionally gifted pianist who’d been studying at the Paris Conservatoire under Alfred Cortot when they met. They moved from house to house in Norfolk until George V offered them Park House on the Sandringham estate (where Johnny and Frances later lived). Thus the Fermoys and the Yorks became neighbours and the friendship was sealed.

Frances was born there on the day George V died in 1936. It’s said that the news of her arrival was rushed across the park to Sandringham House where he lay gravely ill and that Queen Mary told him of her birth before he died that evening. When Bertie acceded as George VI after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, the friendship continued. During the war, Bertie and Maurice used to play ice hockey together against visiting American and Canadian troops on the frozen lakes at Sandringham, and Maurice was out hare shooting with Bertie the day before the King died in February 1952. After Maurice died three years later, Ruth became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, and they remained close until Ruth’s death in 1993.

Johnny and Frances met at her coming-out ball at Londonderry House in Park Lane. He was supposedly already engaged to Lady Anne Coke of Holkham Hall, eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, and there was a sharp intake of breath in aristocratic drawing rooms when he ditched her for Frances Roche. The Queen is said to have tried to distract him by taking him with her on a tour of Australia for six months as Master of the Household, but after seeing the daily flow of letters between them, she gave him permission to go home and prepare for the wedding.

They married in Westminster Abbey in 1954. It was the society wedding of the year, attended by fifteen hundred guests, including the Queen, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret. ‘You are making an addition to the home life of your country,’ the Bishop of Norwich had declared prophetically, ‘on which above all others, our national life depends.’ Who could have guessed that their fourth child would be the mother of a future King?

Their first child, Sarah, was born in Northampton in March 1955, nine months after the wedding, and was christened in Westminster Abbey with the Queen Mother as one of her godparents. They had started out in a rented house in Rodmarton near Cirencester, where Johnny was studying at the Royal Agricultural College, but by the time Sarah was born they were living in a cottage on his father’s estate at Althorp. His father was a difficult man, and it didn’t help that Frances refused to kowtow to him. It was a relief all round when, after the death of Lord Fermoy later that year, Ruth suggested that Frances and Johnny take over Park House. It was a large family home with ten bedrooms, extended servants’ quarters and garages.

Their second daughter, Jane, was born in King’s Lynn in 1957, and this time the Duke of Kent was a godfather. Two years later Frances was pregnant again and, on 12 January 1960, gave birth to a boy – the all-important son and heir – in her bedroom at Park House. They named him John but, tragically, he lived for only ten hours.

Frances plunged into depression after her baby’s death. Her marriage had not turned out to be the blissful union she had imagined. Johnny, who, as an older man, had seemed the embodiment of sophistication and excitement, had settled comfortably into monotony and middle age, while she was still just twenty-four, full of sparkle and wanting more from life.

More to the point, behind closed doors he was not the mild, kindly gentleman that his wide circle of friends and neighbours thought they knew. To them he was affectionate and witty, an entertaining addition to any gathering. In the privacy of his own home, he was altogether more physical and frightening. His mother, Cynthia, had put up with years of abuse from the 7th Earl and Frances endured the same. It clearly ran in the family.