Queen for a New Day

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His bride, however, had to be unblemished. "First on the list was virginity," insisted H.B. Brooks-Baker of Debrett's, the chronicler of British bloodlines, who once drew up a few requirements that aspiring Princesses of Wales should meet. "Second was the ability to do the job. Very few people understand how many really dreary things royalty must do. Third, she must be seen to have the potential to bear heirs to the throne [meaning that she should look young and robust]." Presumably Lady Diana has met and passed these obstacles.

Presumably, too, the quiet if not quite unremarkable quality of her early life, the absence of anything but a merely chronological past, brings her even closer to the royal ideal. She is only what she will become. Born to wealth and privilege, Diana Spencer, like the man she will marry, seems to have grown up at some operational distance from life. Not sheltered, exactly. Stashed away, secreted, in the protected closeness of a class and a culture. It is as if she spent every day of her nearly 20 years snug within the emphatic stillness of an English Sunday afternoon.

She was born at Park House, part of the 20,000-acre royal estate at Sandringham, in Norfolk, which the Spencer family rented from the Crown. The Spencers had run with royalty for hundreds of years, and the Earl has been equerry to both George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Diana and Charles may have met a few times when she was a child and he already a young man, but everyone is fuzzy on the details. The Spencers had the only heated pool in the vicinity, and, by the one theory of suburban living that seems to cross barriers of class and station, the old swimming hole attracted the neighbors. When the neighboring residence is Sandringham House, however, and the kids who drop by are from the Windsor family, it is not only a quick dunk that is being shared. It is a sense of community, of assumptions of privilege, of life lived at one remove.

Diana attended West Heath, a boarding school in Kent, where she excelled in sports and recorded a middling result on standard exams known as O Levels. At 16, she spent twelve weeks at a Swiss finishing school, primarily to learn to ski but also to brush up on French, cooking, sewing and typing. Nothing much here for a résumé, but perfectly fine, thanks, for the sort of genteel, pass-the-time employment that came Diana's way: governess, cook, nanny, kindergarten teacher.

The Prince's education was a little more rigorous. He was the first heir to the throne ever to go to school outside the palace. At the urging of his father, he was sent, like other boys of his social class, to boarding schools, first Cheam in Berkshire, then Gordonstoun in Scotland. Gordonstoun was a fairly tough place—cold showers in the morning, long runs in the often inclement weather before class—and Charles, despite a deficiency in mathematics shared with his future bride, did well. He went on to earn a degree in archaeology and anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming the first university graduate in the royal family, and served as an officer in both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. But if his schooling and military training brought him outside the palace walls, they did not bring him outside his class, any more than Diana's upbringing did.