As fervent crusaders for mental health, both Prince William and Prince Harry have testified movingly about their own psychological pain, talking graphically and publicly of the mental health problems they’ve suffered in the past.
But the pain they describe is always related to the early death of their mother. Nothing before that.
It is as if Diana’s death in 1997 provides them with an alibi and a cut-off point. According to the princes, that’s when all their youthful heartache and subsequent problems started.
But what about their parents’ disastrous marriage and the impact it had upon their feelings and emotional stability? Or the sad story of how their closeness to each other was damaged by the consequent royal and public expectations in their teens and early 20s?
The fact is that William and Harry’s psychological problems started long before their mother was killed in a crash in a Paris underpass.
After the birth of Prince William, Diana hired 42-year-old Barbara Barnes as his nanny. She’d been recommended on the basis of 14 years’ loyal service to Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting, Anne Glenconner, whose five children Barnes had nursed with intelligence and care.
In her only brief contact with the Press, Barnes said she saw no special problems in bringing up a royal baby – ‘I treat all children as individuals . . . I’m here to help the princess, not take over.’
That turned out not to be the case, since Barnes rapidly discovered that she had to serve as nanny to her 21-year-old employer as much as to her offspring.
Suffering from bulimia and the accompanying self-harm, Diana had reached the stage of slashing her arms and wrists.
Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, with their sons Prince William and Prince Harry in the wild flower meadow at Highgrove
The nanny soon found herself bandaging the princess’s bloodied limbs, and stepped in firmly to assert control.
‘Barbara guarded the nursery floor like the Vatican,’ recalled one member of the Kensington Palace staff. ‘Trays would be grabbed and doors would be shut. It was her kingdom.’
The brothers tended to wake with the dawn, so Baba, as they called her, would bring them into her bed most mornings to play together, before giving them their breakfast and passing them on to their parents when they awoke.
Diana would then take over if she didn’t have work to do. But the princess’s time was more and more occupied by the charities and humanitarian causes for which she would become famous.
She also had an increasingly active social life, meeting girlfriends (boyfriends came later) to discuss the deteriorating state of her marriage, and she also continued to accompany Charles on his major foreign tours.
All this meant that Baba spent more and more time with the boys, and became something of a surrogate mother, particularly to William who’d been her solitary charge for two years before the appearance of Harry.
She taught both boys to walk, talk and read. She comforted them when they awoke crying in the night. In the absence of their parents, Baba even took her charges away on their own ‘family’ holiday without parents — to Scotland and the Isles of Scilly — where she set the agenda every day as any mother would.
But less admiring observers felt that Barnes was getting too possessive with ‘her’ boys and the princess came to share that suspicion.
Matters came to a head at the end of 1986, when Barnes took a holiday to attend the birthday party of her former employer, the ever-flamboyant Lord Glenconner, on his Caribbean island of Mustique.
There, the nanny was photographed alongside celebrities such as Raquel Welch and Princess Margaret — to the intense irritation of Diana. Baba had got above herself, Diana decided, and she made that clear when the nanny returned to work.
During the Sandringham Christmas break of 1986–7, Barnes resumed her daily routine with the boys as usual. But Diana cold-shouldered the nanny, sharing scarcely a word with her and ‘sending her to Coventry’ until the family got back to Highgrove, where Diana brusquely informed her that it would be ‘better’, as she put it, if Barnes departed.
‘One weekend, she just wasn’t there any more,’ recalled Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry. Diana had given instructions that the nanny’s bags should be packed and all trace of her removed.
‘No one saw her again.’
But less admiring observers felt that Barnes (pictured with Prince William) was getting too possessive with ‘her’ boys and the princess came to share that suspicion
Surrogate mother to Prince William for over four years and to Prince Harry for more than two, Baba Barnes had not been allowed to say the slightest word of farewell to her charges.
She was forbidden even to send them a postcard. So far as the boys were concerned, she just vanished into thin air.
Following the death of Diana in 1997, people remarked on how well the two young princes reacted to the unjust and unexpected removal of a mother figure from their lives — surprised, bewildered and distraught though they were.
In fact, ten years earlier, they’d had a little practice.
From the ages of four and two, William and Harry grew up with two parents who weren’t sharing the same bed, who were more inclined to talk to the Press than to each other, and who were engaging in patterns of systematic adultery and deceit. They were also engaged in bitter warfare.
Charles and Diana had never hidden from William that he would one day be king. And as the rows between his parents intensified, he came to find consolation in the knowledge of his weird and formidable destiny.
Many little boys fantasise about brandishing the unimaginable powers of a wizard or a pirate chief. Well, William really was going to be a king, and he could see from the deference already accorded him how, when that day came, he’d be able to exercise the authority that he could already observe his grandmother and father enjoying.
This seems to have given the challenged youngster the strength he needed to endure the pain and confusion that any child would feel with their family crumbling bled around them.
By the autumn of 1988, when William was six, people noticed a new cautiousness and sense of purpose about the young prince.
The year before — as Prince Charles later publicly admitted — his parents’ marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’, and Charles had resumed his full-scale intimacy with Camilla. As for Diana, in 1988 she’d started her five-year love affair with the Life Guards officer Major James Hewitt.
William’s response to all this was to become more reflective.
The trauma of his parents’ marriage had matured him early, forcing him to abandon the egotism of infancy, to look beyond himself and to develop a precocious sense of duty.
- Extracted from Battle Of Brothers: William, Harry And The Inside Story Of A Family In Tumult by Robert Lacey, to be published by William Collins on October 15 at £20. © 2020 Robert Lacey. To order a copy for £14 (30 per cent discount) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193. Free UK delivery on orders over £15. Promotional price valid until October 17, 2020.