Free The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham

following summer, Charles suffered a ghastly tumble from his polo pony. He broke his arm so badly that part of the bone was protruding from the flesh below his elbow. It was a complicated break in two places, and set so badly the first time that the bone had to be rebroken and set with the aid of a metal pin and bone from the prince’s hip, which was grafted on. Add to this a tendon which became trapped in the fracture, with the bone healing around it, and for Charles it signified a long period of permanent pain.
    Diana was with him for both operations in July and September, and personally escorted him back to Highgrove. But each time, after about an hour, she left him there and returned to London, with hardly a civil word having been exchanged between them. Moments after she left, Mrs. Parker Bowles would be driven in through the gates of Highgrove by Charles’s detective.
    For most of that summer Charles and Camilla lived at Highgrove virtually as man and wife. Friends viewed her as his official hostess in Gloucestershire, and she organized parties and dinners in his home. When Diana made one of her very infrequent and unwelcome visits there, Camilla would dash home until her rival had gone back to London, and then resume her place as Charles’s nurse and comforter.
    Despite this blissful domestic scene, Charles was increasingly subject to bouts of deep depression, a condition, his doctors believed, which could have been brought on by delayed shock from his polo accident. However, for whatever reason, it was now Charles’s turn to suffer from the pressure. By the end of that summer he was displaying all the symptoms of going through a nervous breakdown, and he was unable to fulfill an official function of any kind for four months.
    He holed up in Balmoral with Camilla and Patsy Palmer-Tompkinson, and scared friends and courtiers alike by sinking ever deeper into depression. But even at such a low ebb he was still unable to find any blame, within his own behavior, to explain his marital problems. It was all Diana’s fault, he maintained, and his friends commiserated. It was Diana, they agreed, who received all the adulation and press attention, and Diana who devoted every second, it appeared, to upstaging her dejected husband. She had become his nemesis, his torturer, his personal hell on earth. However hard he tried to capture the public imagination, nobody appeared to care a damn. All they ever wanted was Diana. The damage to his pride was substantial, and his jealousy of his despised wife became overwhelming.
    After two months in Scotland, followed by a few brief hours with Diana and their sons, Charles flew to the South of France. The ache in his arm still troubled him, and he now suffered an added pain in his hip from where the bone had been removed to graft his broken arm. He took with him a physiotherapist who helped reduce the aches and pains, but he could find no one to relieve his mental anguish.
    After a week the prince returned home, too restless and troubled to enjoy the sun and the stunning views from Baroness Louise de Waldner’s chateau near Avignon which she had made available to him at Camilla’s urging. What tormented Charles the most was that he genuinely believed Diana had understood the ground rules of royal marriage before their wedding. It was for this reason that he was so bewildered, and angered, by the constant tantrums surrounding his relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles.
    Diana, on the other hand, amazingly still believed that the marriage could be saved, and told her confidants, including her royal protection officer, that if she showed enough love for her husband then he would surely start to love her back and no longer feel the need for a mistress. For her it was still not too late to rule out a “happily ever after” scenario. Or at least so she maintained.
    Diana’s displays of affection were rare, but occasionally, said Wendy Berry, she would run up to him out in the garden and