Prince William by Penny Junor Page B

revealed that she seduced him. As she confessed so publicly on Panorama , it was all true. ‘Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.’
    During their affair he was a frequent visitor at Kensington Palace but also at Highgrove, when the Prince was away. Diana would invite him for weekend parties and allot him a bedroom across the corridor from her own, where she slept in a four-poster bed. Once everyone else was asleep, he would creep into her bed for the night, returning to his room before the rest of the house was awake. This ruse fooled no one, except perhaps William and Harry, who slept in the nursery above. Like their mother, they thought the world of Hewitt. He represented everything that small boys admire. He took them to his barracks and dressed them in little army uniforms he had specially made and let them climb all over the tanks and other armoured vehicles at Windsor. He joined in pillow fights and read them their favourite bedtime stories. He gave them riding lessons on their ponies, and took them and Diana to stay with his mother at her home in Devon.
    He always insisted he hadn’t tried to take the place of their father, but he evidently bonded with them and both boys seemed to enjoy their time with him. Maybe what they enjoyed, subliminally, was seeing their mother happy.
    When he went to the Gulf in 1991, after Britain’s invasion of Iraq, Diana wrote him long, loving letters, which could so easily have fallen into the wrong hands. She watched the TV news avidly, with Harry beside her, fearful that he might be killed. When he returned home safe the following year and grew ever more besotted with her, she ended it in her usual way by refusing to take his calls.
    In what Diana saw as a devastating betrayal of trust,Hewitt wrote a book, Love and War , about their affair when it was over. He had been cut to the quick when she ended it, but recalled the happy times he’d spent with William and Harry and said they had ‘appeared to have the time of their lives.’
    Hewitt was a redhead like Harry and a rumour persisted in the wake of the affair that Harry was Hewitt’s son. It was untrue – he and Diana didn’t meet until Harry was two years old – yet it persisted and there are some who still ask the question today. Dates aside, Harry has the Spencer family colouring and his father’s and grandfather’s green eyes. He is a Windsor through and through – or, as Diana used to call him, ‘My little Spencer’.
    Their father turned a blind eye to what was going on. As he wrote in one letter, ‘I don’t want to spy on her or interfere in her life in any way.’ But she didn’t have the monopoly on love towards their sons. He had been brought up to keep his emotions hidden from public display but it didn’t mean he didn’t have those emotions or couldn’t show them.
    Away from the cameras, he was every bit as loving as Diana, but in a different way. He would fool around with the boys, kick a football and have a rough and tumble. They share the same silly sense of humour and are great practical jokers, as Diana was too – also talented mimics. They loved going to polo matches with their father or to follow the hunt. They also loved watching him shoot, and were not yet in their teens when they first picked up a gun themselves, taught by the gillie at Balmoral, Willie Potts, from whom they also learnt to cast for salmon. Charles built them a massive tree house in a holly tree at Highgrove, wittily known as Holyroodhouse, after the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Edinburgh. But as well as the Boy’s Own stuff, they weren’t afraid to hug and kiss – even in their teens.
    Charles never invited Camilla to the house when the boys were there, but William, at least, as the elder and Diana’s confidant, will have known about her existence. Her name was never far