The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown

Author:Tina Brown [Brown, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Royalty, Rich & Famous
ISBN: 9780385522885
Google: TOgnHjKG_6sC
Amazon: B000SCHAJY
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2007-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Two Kinds of Love

I have lain awake at night loving you desperately and thanking God for bringing you into my life.

—Diana to Major Hewitt, August 1989

JAMES HEWITT OFTEN ASKED himself in later years if it was really an accident that had thrown him together with the Princess of Wales at a courtiers’ cocktail party in the fall of 1986, when she was twenty-six and he, just two years older, was a staff captain in the Life Guards, a regiment of the Household Cavalry. He suspected that he had been set up, Mannakee removed, and the whole thing engineered by Buckingham Palace—that “place of long corridors and quiet whispers,” as he called it. By the time he wrote those words, in his book Love and War, published in 1999, Hewitt was infected with the paranoia that engulfed everything to do with Diana after her death. It is nonetheless noteworthy that during the five—or more—years of their secret affair neither the Palace hierarchy nor Scotland Yard ever made a move to stop him seeing the Princess. Hewitt, unlike Mannakee, seems to have had the blessing of the Prince of Wales to be his wife’s lover, and one can see why. Unlike Mannakee, the young Army officer knew how to play by the rules. He hailed from an upper-middle-class Army family, was a graduate of a fancy boarding school, was comfortable moving on the fringe of court circles, and was now a rising young captain based, conveniently enough, at Knightsbridge Barracks. He was not unlike a younger, cuter, less complicated, and far less burdened version of Prince Charles: cordial, mannerly, and handsome in the tall, chiseled, storybook way that Diana always admired. Another plus: in a ploy to spend time with him, Diana herself had enlisted him to give her riding lessons. He was unlikely to want to rock any boats. “Only one thing went wrong,” Hewitt would write. “We fell in love.” Actually, a lot of things went wrong—mostly because with Hewitt, as Diana later acknowledged, “his head was inside his trousers.” But at first, he was a heaven-sent solution for the frisky young Princess of Wales.

Diana needed this affair. Her sex life was nonexistent. Charles was all but gone from her bed. Their miserable country weekends were made more excruciating by the fact that in between they were traveling the world together as a dazzling ambassadorial couple. The Prince and Princess’s tour of the Arabian Gulf in November 1986 was hailed as the model of what they could achieve when they worked together as the perfect royal team: the future King—man of substance, well versed in Islamic tradition and history—and his poised, radiant Queen-to-be. Such was the local clamor to meet Diana that the royal couple were able to brush aside the Desert Kingdom’s single-sex tradition and host a reception aboard Britannia for Saudi business leaders. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, then commercial counselor at the British embassy in Riyadh, watched the starstruck businessmen buzz like flies around the glittering vision of Diana in a long pale pink Jacques Azagury chiffon dress dotted with gold sequins.

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