Why the monarchy needed Diana: “She had to be a front-rank aristocrat, and she had to be a virgin”

A beautiful, rebellious teenage girl dreams of breaking free from her unhappy family and being swept off her feet by a worldly prince. In the hindsight of history, it’s easy to see why young Lady Diana Spencer‘s story seemed at first such a fairy tale. But behind the scenes, the girl was in many ways a game piece, moved around by royal insiders to keep the machinery of the monarchy running smoothly. How could the girl — how could anyone — have imagined how it would turn out? 

In “The Princess,” British bestselling novelist Wendy Holden imagines a fun-loving adolescent from a troubled home, blindsided by an infatuation with the seemingly perfect man. It’s a complex and warmly human view of one of the most influential women of the modern era, an intimate fictionalized glimpse into the person Holden calls “the ultimate royal disruptor.” 

“She was young, very aristocratic, but completely in love with love,” Holden said on “Salon Talks,” “completely idealistic, completely romantic.” Drawing on a wealth of intimate royal memoirs and biographies, Holden discovered that “How she actually got to be the Princess of Wales is quite unknown.”  So she set out to reveal the magnetic yet sheltered young woman who later reportedly felt “like a lamb to the slaughter” when she entered her artfully arranged marriage.

Holden talked to me about the real-life inspirations for the characters in her compulsively readable new book, including Charles’ private “fixer” Stephen Barry. And she also explained why the royal family was dead set on finding “a front-rank aristocrat” who also “had to be untouched and undefiled and pure and innocent,” and how Diana’s influence still remains so powerful decades after her untimely death. Watch the “Salon Talks” episode on “The Princess” here or read below.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I know a lot about this family. I’m a little obsessed with them. But, I want you to imagine for a moment that I am someone who has never heard of Princess Diana. Tell me about the heroine of your novel, this fun-loving, romantic, teenage girl named Diana Spencer.

That’s a great question, because that really puts us right in the middle of what’s going on. This is a story of two opposing forces. This is a story of the Buckingham Palace royal machine, which wanted to find a bride for Prince Charles, who was 30, and in the eyes of his family needed to get married. There was a very pragmatic, very hard-headed, very unsentimental search for a bride, and the person they hit on, the sole candidate more or less, was this girl, Diana Spencer. She was young, very aristocratic, but completely in love with love, completely idealistic, completely romantic, a massive fan of romantic novels, which I think had probably formed her entire worldview. They were completely opposing forces, and it was the combination of these two forces that brought about the 1981 royal wedding.

I wanted to look at Diana’s background because even though she’s the one of the most famous women who ever lived, her background and how she actually got to be the Princess of Wales is quite unknown. It’s quite obscure. It’s a very complicated story that tells us a lot about the 1980s, a lot about the British class system, and a lot about Diana herself. All those themes came together in “The Princess.” She most of all is a really warmhearted, really funny, really clever, really compelling heroine who was doubly betrayed. 

It’s a sad story as well as a funny and happy story. She had a very sad childhood. Her parents were spectacularly and acrimoniously divorced, and she fell in love with Prince Charles, who she thought was going to rescue her from all that and take her into a realm of bliss, and then she was betrayed on that front too. But in between, there was joy. She had a wonderful time living in London with her flatmates. I particularly wanted to get across all the fun that they had there, and just a young girl full of hope. She was a great heroine, one of the most interesting women I’ve ever written about. I really enjoyed it, and I came to really love her, and I was sad when it was all over and the book was finished.

We have to remember, this is a teenager we’re talking about. [Diana was 19 when she became engaged to the Prince of Wales.]

Absolutely.

There’s a particular character I found very interesting in this story, Stephen Barry. Tell me about him and his role in changing the course of history.

Stephen Barry was the valet to Prince Charles. He was his manservant, but more than that, he was his fixer, and he used to specifically deal with Prince Charles’ love life and his girlfriends. When Prince Charles got a new girlfriend, Stephen Barry would take charge of the affair. He would tell the girl where to park when she came to Buckingham Palace, he’d tell her which door to go through, which room to go through. He would organize the dinners, he’d organize the candles, the food, everything. He really ran the Prince’s love life for him. I discovered this when I found, at the bottom of a pile of books in a market stall, the 1980s autobiography of Stephen Barry. I quickly realized it was a complete goldmine for all sorts of detail, but specifically that.

In “The Princess,” I wanted to bring together all the different elements that really manipulated this wedding into being. There were so many different people involved and Stephen Barry was one of them. The Queen Mother was another, and another was the British press. I wanted all these people to have a voice. But Stephen Barry was completely crucial because he was the machinery. The Queen Mother star-spotted Diana, identified her as the girl, but somebody in the palace had to be on hand to make it all happen and take charge of the affair and get the whole thing on the rails. 

[Barry] is slightly sinister, but he’s also quite funny. I particularly imagined him deciding to help her, deciding that this girl was going to be the one. Diana was so young and Charles was so much older and the environment she was entering in the Royal family was just full of people who were so much older, so much tradition, so much Victorian hangover. It was completely unlike her and the kind of life she’d been having in the flat and so on. I fictionalized Stephen Barry giving Diana advice to help her bridge this gap between herself and her husband-to-be, just to get the affair to run more smoothly. 

He would give her advice on what to do on board the Royal Yacht Britannia, how to behave at Balmoral. One of my most fun things I really enjoyed imagining was him explaining to young Diana, the teenage girl, why Prince Charles was so obsessed with this completely old-fashioned comedy series called “The Goon Show.” You couldn’t even hear it at the time, it had been on the radio in the 1950s. Prince Charles was completely obsessed with it, but Diana would never have heard of it. She wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what he was talking about, and so I had him explaining who all the characters were. He was kind of Buttons to her Cinderella, but with a slightly sort of worldly, slightly sinister twist.

You used that word, “affair.” And yet one of the things that you take on in this book that often goes unspoken because it’s so sensitive, is that she had to be a virgin.

Completely. It’s so fascinating because I suppose the music is still very much around, and fashion, the 1980s seems much closer to us than it actually is. In terms of social conventions, it’s so far in the past. Now, if you were marrying a royal prince, you wouldn’t have to be a virgin, but in 1980, the same conventions applied as would’ve applied a hundred years before. This is why it was so difficult to find the right girl. She had to be young so you could have lots of children, she had to be Protestant, she had to be a front-rank aristocrat, and she had to be a virgin. She had to be untouched and undefiled and pure and innocent. This is completely double standards. Prince Charles, of course, had had loads of girlfriends, and these standards didn’t apply to him at all, but nobody thought there was anything wrong with that at the time. It was all completely normal. So, absolutely, she had to be a virgin. 

Even at the time, doubt was cast on whether this is actually the case with Diana. How could she have been? How could she, this young pretty girl living in London with her friends, always being visited by all these eligible young men. How could it be the case? But it was one of my themes in the book, and my theory is that her exhaustive reading of romantic novels made that a completely normal situation for her. She’d read so many novels in which the young innocent heroine was swept off her feet by the worldly dashing Duke or whoever, and chastity was always rewarded with true love. This was always a theme of these novels.

She would’ve taken this in over hundreds and hundreds of these books, and she said herself that she was keeping herself pure. She was keeping herself for the right man. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how that could have been seen as completely normal in that context?

Yet you also portray her as a woman. She is a 19-year-old, she does have desires. She’s not cold. 

Not at all, not at all. She was absolutely crazily in love with Prince Charles, or the idea of Prince Charles and what she thought he was. She was completely convinced he was the absolute embodiment of the romantic hero and life with him was going to be bliss. 

One of the reasons for that was that she’d had this really sad childhood with the acrimonious divorce of her parents, which has had such a terrible effect on the family. Her parents had split at a time when that wasn’t really normal at all, and the siblings had lived with her father and seen her mother only occasionally. The Diana of the book, and possibly the Diana of real life, constructed for herself this alternative reality in which love was valued and rewarded and everybody was happy as a complete contrast to her, as a way of coping with what had happened to her, and Charles fitted into this, and he was going to take her away from all the misery of the past.

We as the reader come to this fictional Diana through a fictional schoolmate Sandy she confides in, who she then has this pivotal recurring moment with later on near the end of her marriage. How did you create her? Did you draw upon memories of other friends of Diana’s? Were you looking at people who have spoken out about her, who knew her when she was a young woman? 

Yes, a bit of that. I found various bits and pieces of memoir from her school days and thought about how a friend would possibly work. But the main inspiration was Nancy Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love,” when Fanny goes to stay with the Radlett family. The Radlett family is the sort of crazy aristocratic family who do all these bonkers things. Fanny’s very sensible and she’s quite shocked, but really is completely bowled over by these people. I just imagine that when you were a little girl, that’s very possibly how the Spencer family might’ve appeared to someone like Sandy.

I wanted to have this relationship between them when we encounter the Spencers to start with as quite colorful, very aristocratic, slightly eccentric, but then the picture darkens and you realize all the pain that’s behind it, all the difficulty, all these awful misogynistic attitudes and the way that her mother had been treated, and all the toxic relatives such as her grandmother, and so the picture slightly darkens. That was really where she came from. 

I also wanted Sandy to represent a modern girl, because she’s a clever girl, but she’s also got ambition. She wants to do work, she wants to have a job, she wants to have a career. She’s a contrast of Diana, who’s still very much in this sort of this romantic mindset, but also never really had been encouraged to fulfill her potential in that way.

Sandy tells Diana at various junctions through the novel, “You could do so much more. You could work.” She tries to encourage her at one stage to work in nursing because she has fantastic empathy with the patients at the local mental health facility where Diana is the only pupil who knows how to deal with them, how to approach them. [This] came from a real incident and pointed out the fact that all the things that she later became so famous for as Princess of Wales — she could cope with anybody, she knew exactly what to say, how to make everybody feel good, had no fear. That was there right from the beginning, all her most famous characteristics. That was Sandy’s role as well. She frames the story for us, but she also presents a few contrasts and makes us realize how different Diana was from what would’ve been a modern girl at the time.

And which puts her, as you have positioned this trilogy that you’ve written, as a disruptor. 

Totally.

I want to ask you a little bit about these two other women who you’ve written about who also shook up the Windsors in the 20th century. These other women who came from outside the inner circle and who challenged it in their own ways.

The first in my series is called “The Royal Governess,” and it’s about Marion Crawford, who was a young Scottish teacher who taught Queen Elizabeth as a little girl. I found her very old, battered autobiography in a bookshop in the north of England one day. I opened it, and the very first paragraph said something like, “I didn’t mean to work for the royal family. I wanted to work with poor children in the slums of Edinburgh.” I was completely like, “This is a story. How did somebody with those ambitions end up working for the royal family for nearly 20 years?”

I dived into the story. It quickly became obvious it was an amazing tale, and it had been buried for nearly 80 years. Marion Crawford spent 20 years with them, and they happened to be the 20 most tumultuous years of the 20th century, the abdication followed by World War II. She was with the Windsors all this time, and she experienced it as they did, and she tried to leave a couple of times but they always reeled her back in. 

She eventually left, retired, and wrote a book about the family and her work with the family, and it was very admiring, very, very sympathetic. It was a lovely book. They were furious, and they canceled her. Cut her off completely brutally and forever, and they never saw her again. It was so sad because it had been such a happy story. She was completely devoted to them, particularly to the Queen, little Princess Elizabeth. 

It was a really fascinating story, and I hadn’t particularly intended to take it any further. But during the writing of “The Governess,” Wallis Simpson had appeared in a scene at Balmoral. Wallis had come up in a visit because King Andrew VIII had asked her to come stay in the Scottish castle. I started to wonder if everything we think we know about Wallis, at least here in Britain, where everyone is led to believe that she was basically the most wicked woman who ever lived, whether that was actually the case. What had actually happened, how had she captured the heart of the world’s most eligible bachelor and why?

When I started to look into that, I uncovered another amazing story, and I novelized her journey from obscurity in Baltimore to the British throne, almost. I had two books about royal disruptors, and then naturally there was Diana, the ultimate royal disruptor and disruptive on such a scale that the consequences of her involvement with the royal family are still playing out. They’re still here. There’s still every day another story about Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Prince William, Prince Charles, the great schisms. It just goes on and on and on, like ripples in a pool. I see them as three very interesting women who completely changed the institution and revealed a lot about it in the course of their careers with them.

Now we have this new American divorcee who is a royal disruptor, I wonder where you see Meghan in this lineage, Diana’s daughter-in-law who she never got to know. Where does she fit in this story? 

I think Meghan could be really interesting, but we’re too close to the story at the moment. We’re too close to what’s been. It’s quite hard to see it in context and in time. The thing about Diana is that it’s 25 years now since she died, and she is a proper historical figure. She belongs to a proper historical epoch, which is now being studied in school now. It’s history, and she’s part of it. Meghan is not. She may well be one day, but she’s too close. We can’t really see what’s going to happen next and how the whole thing’s going to play out. 

Diana’s is an entire arc from start to finish. Obviously it ended very tragically and spectacularly, but we have an entire life there, just as we have with Wallis and just as we have with Marion Crawford. [Meghan’s] not really another Windsor disruptor in a novel sense for me yet, but she may well be one day, certainly.

The thing that is so fascinating about Diana is still very much in the present. The Duchess of York was recently saying, “I can picture us being grannies together.” William and Harry still talk about, “If she was here, she would be doing this.” When you were thinking about her writing this book, were you thinking about what your Diana would be like now in this post-Elizabeth world where her ex-husband is on the throne?

It’s really hard to say, isn’t it? I think it would depend who she was with, who she was married to, what her situation was as to whether she was happy or not. If she was happy and settled, that would have a huge effect on how she behaved and how she saw the world. 

In terms of her enduring effect, it’s obvious to me from the amount of things that I’ve read and seen and watched, that there was something so special about her, which has not ever really been replicated. It’s something to do with this incredible connection with people. I don’t think any other member of the royal family, possibly the Queen Mother when she was young, has ever really had that impact. It was to do with people. The British people, people all over the world felt that she understood them. She was a sort of friend in high places, that they completely saw her as someone who understood them and they understood her because she’d suffered and she knew what it was like, and there was just always this instinctive connection. That’s what endures and why she remains as a presence. I don’t think that’s the case with anybody else, certainly not with the present royal family. It’s like a wattage from a fading star. She’s gone, but she’s like one of those stars that still shines because it was so different, so dramatic. 

If she was still around, I’m not sure whether things would be better or worse really because obviously she had great capacity for disrupting. She was quite naughty. Maybe she’d be really happy that Charles and Camilla were now King and Queen, or maybe she wouldn’t. It’s really hard to say.