01x04 - Shadow of a King

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This year, the royal House of Windsor celebrates 100 years on the British throne.

They are now the most famous royal family in the world and have prospered while other great dynasties have fallen.

They've seen their relatives overthrown, m*rder*d and exiled, overcome family feuds, fire and betrayal.

And they have always followed one crucial rule -- survive, whatever it takes, whatever the cost.

The Windsors learned the dark art of survival in the days of w*r, a century ago.

They've never forgotten it.

Now, Channel 4 can uncover their secrets, with the help of family insiders, royal experts, and some of the most closely guarded papers in the world.

We've combed through letters, diaries, government memos, confidential royal reports, and for the first time, cameras have been allowed into the Queen's personal family archives at Windsor.

What we found rips aside the mask of royal pomp, to reveal the human frailties and the secrets of the family that built Britain's most powerful dynasty.

On the 1st of July, 1969, the Windsors introduced their new hope to the world.

To survive, the family needed to mould Prince Charles into a strong and dutiful king.

But instead, Charles's love life went off script and began to mirror the man whose abdication had almost destroyed the dynasty.

There was always an anxiety that Charles would go the way that his great-uncle, the previous Prince of Wales had done.

To the rescue came the Windsors flamboyant elder statesman, Lord Mountbatten.

Yet before his work was done, a t*rror1st m*rder tore the heart out of the royal family.

Charles was absolutely devastated.

He felt he'd lost everything.

Now, using personal documents and royal family private photographs, some filmed for the very first time, we reveal the Prince's agonising search for a queen .

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how v*olence shattered the Windsors and helped push Charles into the arms of Diana Spencer.

Caernarvon Castle in north-west Wales.

Seat of ancient tradition.

And in the summer of 1969, the stage for the debut of a new leading man.

I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liegeman of life and limb and of earthly worship and faith and truth I will bear unto thee, to live and die against all manner of folks.

On the 1st of July, the 20-year-old Charles was formally invested as Prince of Wales.

It looks like a medieval pageant, but every minute detail of the ceremony had been crafted by the Windsors as a modern TV spectacular.

A great canopy was made of transparent perspex to make sure the TV cameras didn't miss a bit of the action.

While, in case it got too heavy during the filming, the great orb on top of Charles's crown was really a ping-pong ball.

As the Queen and Charles paraded before 500 million global viewers, the Windsors sent a clear message to their public -- the future of the dynasty was secure.

Yet behind the smiles lurked an agonising chapter in the Windsors' story.

The last time the royal family had gathered in this very castle to launch their future face, the results had been catastrophic.

58 years earlier, Caernarvon had hosted the investiture of Charles's predecessor as Prince of Wales.

The future Edward VIII, known to the family as David.

Just like Charles, it was a calculated media spectacular to reassure the world of the future security of the royal family, but instead, this Prince of Wales brought scandal and disaster.

The temperamental David clashed with his authoritarian father, George V, and threw away his crown to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee.

Because the Duke of Windsor had reacted with rebellion, had made what the rest of the family thought was an appalling mistake, a dereliction of duty, everyone was very determined that no future royal would make that mistake.

Charles's childhood was completely overshadowed by the spectre of what happened to the Duke of Windsor.

Charles was very close to his grandmother, the Queen Mother, and his grandmother of course was Her whole life was completely altered.

The future she'd seen for herself was derailed by her brother-in-law abdicating the throne and her husband, therefore, having to become king.

So she would have drilled into Charles at a very early age that duty to the Crown and to the country came ahead of everything else.

Everything else.

But the Windsors attempt to mould Charles into a well-rounded future king had got off to a bad start.

Up till now, Charles's father, Prince Philip, had been in charge of his upbringing.

I think what Prince Philip wanted in a son was a man in his own image -- a man's man, a rough, tough, outdoorsy, real alpha male.

And what he got in Charles was a very sensitive child.

Philip had sent Charles to his old school, the tough Gordonstoun, in north-east Scotland.

Philip had loved it.

Charles called it, "Colditz in kilts.

" He was a sensitive boy.

He was diffident, he was shy.

Phillip's approached to Charles was typified, I think, by the fact that in order to teach him to swim, he just threw him in the swimming pool.

Charles felt he was going to drown.

The difficult father-son relationship was a troubling echo of George V and his rebellious son, David.

Charles and David both had autocratic fathers, fathers who had a very definite vision of how their son should develop and come to the throne.

And I think that both fathers, both George V and Prince Philip, really knocked aside any expectation that their child might be a bit different or, you know, may be a more thoughtful child.

If Charles failed to get moral support from his father, his relationship with his mother wasn't especially warm, either.

The Queen, to be fair to her, was being Queen for most of Charles's childhood and the rest of his life.

She was on a pedestal and he did not have a warm and cosy relationship with his mother.

By the mid-'60s, Charles had grown into a sensitive teenager.

He was already painfully aware of his greatest duty in life, as his first ever TV interview would reveal.

This is obviously difficult, because you've got to remember that when you marry, in my position, you're going to marry somebody who, perhaps, one day is going to become Queen, and you've got to choose somebody very carefully, I think, who can fulfil this particular role, because people like you, perhaps, would expect quite a lot from somebody like that, and it's got to be somebody pretty special.

Charles's words show he was already feeling the weight of expectation over his future bride.

But in the absence of hands-on parents, there was no-one to provide the guidance he desperately needed.

Yet in the grounds of Caernarvon Castle, one of the most experienced and colourful royals was waiting in the wings.

Lord Louis Mountbatten was Charles's great-uncle.

On his mother's side, he was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, who had held him as a baby.

In a spectacular career, Mountbatten had been head of the British Armed Forces and the final Viceroy of India.

He was vain.

He was charming.

Somebody in the Second World w*r said that he could charm a vulture off a carcass.

He is the personification of Britannia the imperial power.

And I think he therefore carried almost a prestige that no other m not even the Queen could really match.

As he'd shown in a 1969 interview, modesty was of Mountbatten's strong points.

When have you lost your self-confidence? - When have I lost it? - Yes.

- How d'you mean? - On what occasion in your life, looking back now, have you consciously lost your self-confidence? Well, I wouldn't be where I am now if I had ever lost it.

That's the difference, isn't it? Mountbatten was the elder statesman of the royal family.

But it was his experiences as a young man that now become critical to the Windsors.

In the '20s and '30s, one of the royals who was closest to the rebellious Prince of Wales was Mountbatten.

Mountbatten was eyewitness to the abdication.

He was in there.

He was a close friend, so he saw the disintegration of this monarchy.

Mountbatten was the living link between the Windsors disastrous past and their fragile future.

He could steer Charles away from his great-uncle David's fate but Mountbatten also had another motivation, one driven by a trauma buried deep in his own past.

Like Charles, Mountbatten himself had been born a prince, in the German descended family of Battenberg.

But during the First World w*r, anti-German hostilities swept Britain.

In 1917, the royal family changed its German name, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, to Windsor.

The Battenbergs had to become the Mountbattens.

And the 17-year-old Louis was stripped of his royal title.

Mountbatten's ambition to get back to the centre of the royal family, rather than the outer edges, was born there.

For the next 40 years, Mountbatten worked his way back to the heart of royal power.

In the 1940s, he'd engineered the marriage of his nephew, Prince Philip, to the Princess Elizabeth.

But now he could go one better.

He would mould the future king.

Mountbatten wanted to be a power in the land.

There's absolutely no question that Mountbatten wanted to be close to Prince Charles and wanted to exercise the absolute maximum influence in his role as a kingmaker, almost in the most literal sense.

Mountbatten was now a man with a mission.

He would boost his own power and guide Charles away from his great-uncle David's fate.

So just three days after the Caernarvon Castle ceremony, he wrote to the prince with a warning.

"Realise how fickle public support can be.

"Your Uncle David had such popularity "that he thought he could flood the government and the Church "and make a twice-divorced woman queen.

"His popularity disappeared overnight.

" But Mountbatten's mission soon ran into trouble.

Behind the scenes, the young Charles would begin a secret love life that echoed the rebel king and threatened the future of the Windsor dynasty.

On 3rd October, 1971, in a windswept Paris, a secret Royal meeting was about to take place.

Away from the eyes of the public, the old man who had thrown away the Crown and the young man who would one day wear it were about to meet.

I happened to be in Paris and I was told that Prince Charles had come into to Paris and there seemed to be no reason for it and it hadn't been announced beforehand.

And on a hunch, I rang the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's private secretary, John Utter .

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and as journalists have a habit of doing, I said, "Oh, I believe that the new Prince of Wales "and the old Prince of Wales have met.

" I had no evidence for it whatsoever.

But Mr Utter was awfully kind.

He said, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, they have.

" The ex-king, now demoted to the Duke of Windsor, had spent 35 years in lonely exile.

He now suffered from cancer and was half blinded by a cataract operation.

Since childhood, Charles had been told his great-uncle was the man who almost wrecked the dynasty.

But now, Charles had set out to meet the outcast, face-to-face.

In Paris, the two men talked alone.

As Charles confided to his diary "We got onto the subject of his relationship with his father "and he said he'd had a very difficult time with him.

"Uncle David then talked about "how difficult my family had made it for him "for the past 33 years.

" David had a terrible time with his father.

And while Prince Philip can't quite be put in the same bracket, he certainly -- towards his son -- behaved in a fairly ruthless way and they would have had much to discuss.

For Charles, the secret meeting was a unique chance to talk to someone else who had done the job.

Charles was fascinated by this character from history.

He abdicated.

He nearly caused the end of the House of Windsor, but people still loved him.

When Charles met David, he had not yet come out into the world.

He hadn't yet seen those millions.

He'd seen a few thousands.

David had strode the world.

The two men had forged an unforgettable connection.

Yet they would never meet again.

Eight months later, the Duke of Windsor was dead.

His body arrived back at an RAF base in Oxfordshire, followed by the woman for whom he'd thrown away his crown.

But the Windsors were about to be treated to one last show of the ex-king's popularity.

'2,000 people an hour came to pay their respects.

'They literally queued miles 'and waited hours for the man they all loved.

' On 2nd June, the widow was seen gazing from the window of Buckingham Palace.

That night, Charles and Mountbatten accompanied Wallis to see the body lying in state.

Charles wrote in his diary "She stood alone, "a frail, tiny, black figure gazing at the coffin.

"She kept saying, 'He gave up so much for so little,' "and pointing at herself.

" But Wallis wasn't the only person deeply affected by the death.

At the funeral, Charles followed the coffin down the aisle and wrote in his diary "Somehow I felt deeply moved by the whole experience.

"And felt that it was right "that we were honouring Uncle David like this.

"My eyes filled with tears.

" The Windsors had wanted Charles to see his great-uncle as a warning from history.

Instead, he had seen an object of sympathy, even affection.

David had followed his heart and retained the love of his people.

It was a dangerous lesson for a young man, soon to set out on his own search for a wife.

But first, Charles had another duty to attend to, one fraught with its own problems.

Eight months earlier, he had dutifully followed his father and his grandfather into the Navy.

Yet Charles wasn't cut out for a life on the ocean wave.

At sea, he banged his head, failed to master navigation, and was seasick.

A despairing Charles wrote "I'm afraid I tend to suffer from bouts of hopeless depression, "because I feel I'm never going to cope.

" With Charles adrift, the man who had sworn to protect him now swung into action.

Mountbatten invited the vulnerable prince to stay in Broadlands, his Hampshire home.

Mountbatten recognised that this was a young man who had very little self-confidence and he gave him a safe place.

With the Queen taken up by official duties, Mountbatten now began to teach Charles how to be a king.

Mountbatten talked to him endlessly to make sure that Charles was given some kind of preparation for the role ahead of him.

Few knew more about royal history and tradition than Mountbatten.

From the quirks of royal etiquette to the need for pomp and ceremony, as he'd shown in a 1969 TV series about his life.

I think I've inherited a certain weakness about dressing up.

I come from a long line of dressers-up.

Seen here, the man in charge of Mountbatten's epic wardrobe was his valet, William Evans.

We'd go off on these royal tours.

I would take probably 80 suitcases and trunks.

I would have 40 of 50 different uniforms, everything from Lifeguards, tropical uniforms to Royal Naval full ball dress and gold lace trousers.

If he split his gold lace trousers, in the morning, I'd find them, a note tucked in it with a pair of scissors, just to bring me to the point that there was a stitch off the gold lace in case I missed it.

Not that I would.

But as well as his love of display, Mountbatten knew that what a future king needed most is inner confidence.

As Charles struggled in the Navy, Mountbatten wrote boosting letters to his protege.

"I don't mind betting that when you've done as long at sea, "you will be a greater legend than "your old great-uncle seems to have been.

" A grateful Charles wrote of his time at Broadlands "To me, it has become a second home in so many ways.

"And no-one could ever have had such a splendid honorary grandpa.

" I think Charles it sounds very mean to his parents, but I think he, for the first time, felt loved, appreciated, wanted.

He felt that somebody was listening to him.

Mountbatten was in many ways a remarkably lovable man.

And he did command a very close affection and I think that probably, the Prince of Wales came more closely into that category, even than Mountbatten's own daughters, who loved him.

Yet as Mountbatten moved ever closer to the Prince, his long-term dynastic ambitions begin to emerge.

He started trying to manipulate Prince Charles to be the sort of puppet master behind the throne, as he, Mountbatten, saw it.

Mountbatten played him like a fish.

He exerted all his charm on him.

Part of Mountbatten's agenda was to be the kingmaker, to be the man at the heart of the Royal family who pulled the strings.

And Mountbatten certainly wanted to increase his influence within the royal family.

Mountbatten's influence over Charles was most controversial when it came to women.

He now designed a programme for the Royal love life, as spelled out in a letter in 1974.

"In a case like yours, "the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can "before settling down.

"But for a wife, he should choose a suitable, attractive "and sweet-charactered girl, "before she met anyone she might fall for.

" Mountbatten's home was the perfect place for Charles to meet women for casual affairs.

But one of the women he was to see there was about to change his life.

Camilla Shand was a vivacious, horse-mad member of the Sussex country set.

She was funny, she was outspoken, a bit outlandish, she'd lived a bit and he was still very green around the ears and he just fell for her.

Big time.

Charles was young, he was red-blooded, he was a passionate man and I think he was looking for somebody who could blow him away and the meeting of the two was like a thunderclap.

Camilla's experience ruled her out as a wife.

The Windsors had strict demands for the future queen.

It was absolutely vital to have on the throne, somebody who was a virgin, you know, a future queen must have no past.

I mean, there's no suggestion at all that Camilla was, you know, a loose woman, but I mean, she had had boyfriends.

She had had boyfriends.

Camilla had been in an on-off relationship with one Charles's polo friends, Andrew Parker Bowles.

Charles knew his duty.

Despite the intensity of his feelings, in January 1972, he walked away from Camilla, to spend eight months with the Navy in the Caribbean.

That April, Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles.

Charles was absolutely heartbroken.

Absolutely devastated.

He wrote to Lord Mountbatten, saying, "I suppose I shall eventually get over it, but I'm just absolutely, "you know, this lovely, warm, friendly relationship that we had, "I had imagined it would last forever.

" Charles now stepped up his efforts to find a royal bride.

To the media's delight, over the next decade, he dated over 20 women.

He's a bit like a sort of pedigree dog.

His breeding, his mating habits are of intense fascination to vast swathes of the population.

All he has to do is look at a girl, in the 1970s and the press are all over it.

Is this the mother of the next King or Queen of England? And that pressure, I think, must have been almost unbearable.

He was constantly in the news, which he hated, because it made girls run a mile.

And he had his father, sort of, constantly badgering him and, you know, "Come on, make something of your life, "do something, find a girl, get on with it, stop fooling around.

" The press, too, were hungry for Charles to copy his decisive, ultra-masculine father.

Bizarrely, at this moment when people tried to project him as, basically Prince Philip Mk II, action man, playboy, possible contender to replace Roger Moore's James Bond, you know This kind of image of Prince Charles which is utterly at variance with the Prince Charles that we know now, but I think became a bit of an albatross for him, because it meant he was trying to live up to an image that was completely false.

But Charles had an even bigger problem.

Dubbed an action man, he was learning that his real job was to wait.

The problem is, if you hang around being Prince of Wales for too long, the gilt starts to wear off the gingerbread.

You don't get to call the sh*ts, you don't get to see the state papers and also, he's hemmed in by the Secretariat at Buckingham Palace.

Just be the Prince of Wales, don't give us any more that, because it's the Queen who's the star of this show.

And I think he became more became more and more frustrated.

For the Windsors, Charles's frustrations were about to turn toxic.

An old obsession would return.

And Mountbatten would launch a secret plan to save the prince.

'The wedding of the decade.

' On the 14th of November 1973, Britain celebrated a spectacular royal wedding.

With this ring, I thee wed.

But not the one everyone had been hoping for.

The 23-year-old Princess Anne married the cavalry officer Mark Phillips.

'The many thousands outside the palace 'have come from far and wide, just to see a real princess 'marry her soldier.

Yet one Royal had been less than happy at the news.

Seven months earlier, Prince Charles had learnt of his younger sister's engagement on his naval ship in the Caribbean.

The vulnerable Charles was once again questioning himself.

He felt his family was being broken up, as he wrote to a friend "I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly, "otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable.

" By the mid-'70s, Charles' hunt for a bride was looking increasingly desperate.

Among his friends, Charles' behaviour was starting to raise concerns.

Charles became increasingly cavalier as far as treating these young women was concerned.

You know, he simply took them up and let them down.

What he'd got was a string of arm candy, people who he really wasn't that interested in, and people who he would take out simply because it made him look good.

Unluckily for the Windsors, the Prince of Wales's search for love came just as press interest in royal private lives was heating up.

There was this intense circulation w*r, you know, it's sort of life and death for newspapers.

So, the pressure within the Sun and the Mirror to have more and more royal exposes becomes greater and greater.

Then you get the Mail and the Express following suit and it becomes a sort of feeding frenzy.

Yet, in the mid-'70s, another royal began to take the media heat away from the Prince.

In 1974, Charles' aunt Princess Margaret met a Welsh wannabe pop star, named Roddy Llewellyn.

Though married, she began an affair.

In 1976, a photographer from the News of the World smuggled himself onto Margaret's holiday island of Mustique.

On the 22nd of February 1976, for the very first time, the sexual infidelity of a Windsor hit the front page.

Is your relationship with Princess Margaret finished or is it intact? Well, really, I never talk about my private life to comparative strangers, only to my best friends.

I hope you understand.

The scandal marked a new intensity of press intrusion into the royal family.

Windsors' private lives were private no longer.

But the heir to the throne had an even more expl*sive secret of his own.

I think he had a closer relationship to Camilla than practically anybody.

He really, really loved her.

And it was, you know, they had so much in common, their brains kind of work in the same way.

I guess he didn't really meet anyone else who quite matched up to her.

In public, Charles kept up his dutiful search for an acceptable wife.

But, now, he had an added problem.

Any pretty woman who was around wanted to be seen on the arm of the Prince of Wales but pretty soon, they came to the realisation of what it was like to live with a man who was in love with somebody else.

And Lady Jane Wellesley was an early example of that, and everybody looked to her as the new Princess of Wales, but she saw very early on the shadow of Camilla.

On the 18th of June 1978, the Queen celebrated 25 years since her coronation.

But, behind the scenes, the royals were in crisis.

The Queen and Prince Philip knew everything about Prince Charles' relationship with Camilla.

The Queen said, "I will not have that woman in my presence.

" Prince Philip had a very pragmatic view of mistresses.

And he thought it was perfectly OK as long as it was kept in the background.

The problem with Prince Charles was you're not supposed to be in love with your mistress, you're supposed to have sex with your mistress.

But Charles had fallen in love with Camilla and that really screwed everything.

The Windsors' worst nightmare was coming true.

The one thing that the royal family wanted to avoid was that the Prince of Wales should become involved with a woman who was unmarriageable from the point of view of the royal family.

And this of course had been what happened with David, but it seems that with Charles, this pattern was beginning to reappear.

But there was one royal who had made it his mission to make sure history didn't repeat itself.

With Charles risking a catastrophic scandal, Mountbatten stepped back into the fray.

Alarmed at Charles' selfish behaviour, Mountbatten now sent the Prince a harsh warning.

"I thought you were beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your "uncle David's life and led to his disgraceful abdication "and his futile life ever after.

" The following April, he called Charles' behaviour ".

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unkind and thoughtless.

"Typical of how your uncle David started.

" But Mountbatten knew the crisis needed more than words.

And the great royal matchmaker had an audacious plan up his sleeve.

The University of Southampton Special Collections Archive now houses Mountbatten's private family photograph albums.

But one special album, never before filmed for television, reveals Mountbatten's choice for the future Queen of England.

His own granddaughter.

His granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, was the perfect candidate.

She was the right age.

And the two of them got on really well.

Amanda was Charles' cousin.

These intimate photos were taken on the Caribbean island of Eleuthera in 1977.

For years, Mountbatten had been discreetly lining Amanda up as a future Queen.

He is manoeuvring the prince away from Camilla, saying, "If you carry on with her, you're going to end up like David.

"People will hate you and your reputation will just disappear.

"So why don't you give her up and go for my granddaughter?" In the summer of 1979, Charles and Amanda were due to holiday together.

Amanda gets on board the Royal Yacht Britannia, and they sail off to the Western Isles.

And during that period, Charles turns to her and says, "Will you be my wife?" And she says, "No.

" They'd been together a lot and I think that, actually, the relationship was too close.

There were like brother and sister.

Charles had tried to do his duty and follow the advice of his mentor.

It seemed the crisis over his future couldn't get any worse.

But, just two weeks later, v*olence would rip through the Windsor dynasty.

And leave Charles truly alone.

By the late '70s, the Northern Irish troubles had been raging for over a decade.

The IRA and other nationalist paramilitaries were locked in a bloody conflict with the British Army.

For the Nationalists, the British were an occupying power and that power's symbolic head was the House of Windsor.

Yet, despite these risks, one of the Windsor's most high-profile figures still took his holiday in the Republic of Ireland every year.

Just 12 miles from the troubled Northern Irish border.

For 20 years, Mountbatten had spent each August at Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo.

Lord Mountbatten thought it was the happiest place on earth.

He enjoyed it, looked forward to it so much, and so did all the family.

The grandchildren, they loved it.

In a 1969 series about his own life, Mountbatten had taken the film crew to Classiebawn.

As the footage shows, he was a proud and doting grandfather.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Hold Nicholas's hand.

That's right.

They would play games.

They would go walking together.

They would go onto the beach.

He loved being in the middle of them.

Mountbatten's greatest delight was his customised fishing boat, Shadow V.

He always felt safe there.

He never once thought of anything happening to him.

He always felt safe.

The 27th of August 1979 was a perfect summer bank holiday.

It was a very hot day, it was a scorching day, and the family were out the day before in Shadow V, and they put out some lobster pots.

In the quiet village of Mullaghmore, Lord Mountbatten's family prepared for their daily fishing trip.

The entire security system was the two local Garda, two local policemen in green, who would hang about the harbour.

That was the entire security.

At just after 11am, on a journey they had made countless times, the family boarded Shadow V and headed out into open water.

It was a quiet moment about 11:30am.

There were glasses on a tray in the dining room and the glasses vibrated.

I heard a cr*ck, which I thought was something happening at one of the hotels.

I did not in any way associate it with a b*mb.

A hidden IRA expl*sive had torn the boat to matchwood.

They were coming into the harbour with them and people were there tearing up sheets for bandages, and making up stretchers, trying to get the wounded seen to.

It was just .

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pandemonium.

Mountbatten's 14-year-old grandson and a 15-year-old local Irish boat boy were both dead.

The b*mb had exploded below Mountbatten's feet, k*lling him instantly.

His body was found floating face down in the water.

Earl Mountbatten of Burma, final Viceroy of India, was wrapped in a sheet and carried up the beach.

I was back in Ireland when it happened and just ten miles away, and he'd been with us on the Thursday before the b*mb.

That was our last day together.

When he left .

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he shook hands and said goodbye.

And .

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and "Look after yourself, old boy.

" And that was it.

Mountbatten's funeral on the 5th of September 1979 was the biggest since the death of Winston Churchill.

While the Windsors mourned, the blow fell hardest on one man.

Lord Mountbatten d*ed at a critical moment for Charles.

Mountbatten had scooped him up, he'd started to give him some feeling of self-worth which he had not got from his own family.

And when he was blown up, Charles was just, you know, I think he felt he'd lost everything.

He was absolutely devastated.

The night of the m*rder, Charles wrote in his diary "I have lost someone infinitely special in my life.

"In some extraordinary way, he combined grandfather, "great uncle, father, brother and friend.

"I only hope I can live up to the expectations he had of me, "and be able to do something to honour the name of Mountbatten.

" For Charles, the way to honour Mountbatten was to find an innocent girl, as his mentor had wanted all along.

Yet the desperate Charles had no-one in sight.

But then, less than a year after the m*rder, Charles was at Petworth House in Sussex.

There, he began chatting to a young woman named Diana Spencer.

What did they talk about? They talked about Lord Mountbatten, and Diana told Charles how sorry she was, how sad he seemed, how he seemed to have had no-one to turn to.

And she must then, Diana the nursery nurse, have seemed like a figure of comfort and support.

She had huge empathy.

She was very, very clever at knowing what to say to people at the right time, particularly people who were vulnerable or who were hurting.

She got him, you know, she just really She touched him .

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in a way that I don't think anyone else perhaps could have done.

Charles was a desperate man.

There was huge downward pressure on him from Prince Philip and from the Queen and the whole court to sort out his life, to stop running round and try and find someone.

With Mountbatten dead, Prince Philip now wrote Charles a fateful letter.

Prince Philip effectively urged his son to get on with it.

To either propose to Diana, or to back off.

He needed paternal advice, counsel, sympathy.

All he got was a jogging letter from his father -- "Get on with it, decide, make up your mind.

" In private, Charles had wrenching doubts over whether Diana was the right woman.

- He told a friend - "I'm terrified sometimes of making a promise "and then perhaps living to regret it.

" For the second time in the Windsors' existence, the future of the dynasty faced a desperate struggle over his duty.

Here are two men, they both have a duty to the nation.

David didn't really want anything apart from the woman that he loved.

Charles did have a great sense of responsibility and, yes, of course he wants the woman that he loves, Camilla, but he realises that he must do something else.

On the 29th of July 1981, Charles did his duty.

Three quarters of a billion people worldwide watched as the heir to the throne became a married man.

It was way too soon.

Charles and Diana scarcely knew one another when he proposed to her.

He only had one decision to take in his life, of real importance at that stage, which was to marry the right wife.

And he chose absolutely the wrong person.

It was one of the great paradoxes of royal history.

Prince Charles, desperate to do the right thing, gets married to Diana, and only precipitates the greatest catastrophe that has occurred to the House of Windsor since the abdication.

What Charles is trying to do is to avoid the mistake made by Uncle David.

What Charles actually is doing is lighting the fuse which is going to end in the most almighty expl*si*n.

Next time, Prince Charles's marriage is engulfed in a wave of scandal.

And Diana threatens the survival of the dynasty itself.