A Royal Duty
Contents:
I watched the BMW turn left and out of sight. She was heading for Heathrow and an airplane to Athens. I was under strict orders from Maria to forget about work and the princess. Four days of no contact would be noticed by the Boss, so I found myself making excuses to go for long walks. The princess was on the deck with Rosa when I rang. She told me how sunny and hot it was. I told her how wet and miserable the Republic of Ireland was.
She had finished a book on spirituality and was tackling a new one already, she said. I hung up, promising to speak to her again when I was back at my vacation home in Farndon, Cheshire, and she was on the Jonikal with Dodi. I told Maria that the long walk had done me a power of good. On August 21, she made a short return to Kensington Palace, then dashed off to Stansted Airport for a flight to Nice to meet up with Dodi.
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While she had been away, the decoration of the sitting room had been finished and she saw the reupholstered sofas and the new sky blue curtains. The completion of the new decor was ironic because, after flipping through the real estate brochures for American properties without much success, the chance had arisen to purchase a clifftop property in California: The princess was seriously considering buying a holiday home where she could spend up to six months of the year, while she kept KP as her London base.
The dining arrangements are three dining rooms or was it four , lower orders right up to the Ladies in Waiting all of whom are aristocracy themselves and get wine with their meals. It is widely known that Diana accumulated suitors with the same enthusiasm she applied to collecting witty cushions and enamelled boxes, yet it was this statement of the biographically obvious that prompted the princes to accuse Burrell of a "cold and overt betrayal" and to demand a meeting in which to rebuke the upstart face to face. Although Burrell plainly got a tremendous thrill from the camp, girly aspects of her dependency - sharing the sunbed, shrieking over gossip, picking outfits - he can still summon up enough objectivity to see that her enslavement of his entire life was not really very humanitarian at all. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. I was under strict orders from Maria to forget about work and the princess.
A move to America had been in the cards since the spring. In August, between holidays, she had spread out the brochure and said, "America is where my destiny lies, and if I decide to do this, Paul, I would like you, Maria and the boys to join me. This is where William's room will be, and Harry's. And that annex is where you will live with Maria and the boys.
This can be a new life. It is a land where anyone can achieve," she said.
Start by marking “A Royal Duty” as Want to Read: Over the course of 21 years, Paul Burrell rose from member of the Royal household staff to personal attendant to the Queen of England and then butler to the Prince and Princess of Wales. Ultimately, he became the trusted personal. FREE UK Delivery on book orders dispatched by Amazon over £ A Royal Duty Paperback – 3 Jun Now he reveals new truths about Princess Diana – and presents for the first time as faithful an account of her thoughts as we can ever hope to read.
I had longed to live in America but it all seemed too sudden. Even I'm finding it impossible to keep up with you," I said, trying not to burst the bubble. That afternoon the princess peppered me with questions. It's nearer to London. We can travel the world, Paul, and seek out all those people who need help. And then there was one more thing. Something she had always talked about. The one thing she had always wanted at Kensington Palace but felt was not possible. The thought of America made her so happy.
The princess was making decisions. Many things were discussed, secrets that I cannot mention here. Secrets that will go away with me. Surprises would be coming, and the prospect of all that excited her. She spoke to me from the deck of the Jonikal.
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It was one of the last six phone calls she made in the final twenty-four hours of her life, as recorded in the call register of her mobile telephone. I was on the telephone, sprawled on the sitting-room floor at my brother-in-law Peter Cosgrove's house in Farndon, two doors down from our first house, bought that spring as a holiday home. The family — Maria, the boys, Peter, his wife, Sue, and their daughters, Clare and Louise — had all given me privacy, but were growing impatient in the kitchen because I'd been on the telephone to the princess for around forty minutes.
In that call, the timetable for her arrival had changed. It was very sad to me how he was treated so unfairly - thankful the Queen came through for him. Sad that Diana's sons are kept from the person who sons were also childhood friends - sad in a lot of ways.
The view from downstairs
Unlike some reviewers who trashed this book, I found it to be a very insightful look into a fascinating world that none of us, especially Americans, could have a clue about. He is frank, honest, and still in deep grief. This is a tribute book to both the Queen and Diana. It is definitely NOT a tribute book to her ex-husband. Paul clearly has deep affection for William and Harry and it shows.
Paul's wife Maria comes across as both a whining nag and saint. It must have been a horrible time for her especially during the trial period when he was falsely accused. I fail to see Paul as a "traitor" in his behavior as some others have. I see a wounded, used, abused and utterly heartbroken man. What he had to endure just to serve the royals, even though it was his choice of a career, is a strong lesson for the whiners and complainers in any society. As he quoted in his book from the movie Gosford Park, "a good servant has no life".
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That bird would not fly in America, especially with our demand of freedom and independence. Overall, this book is a riveting account of history in the making. Warts and all, it is worth the time and money spent to peek into a place seemingly frozen in time.
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At Balmoral, they are not even allowed to watch the television when the royals are out Princess Margaret would check to see if the set was warm. They are certainly not allowed to write books exposing a feudal master-servant relation which, according to this account, is still enforced in even the most enlightened royal establishments. Burrell learned that his first duty was invisibility: From his time as footman to the Queen, who has senior servants to enforce her household's petty despotism, Burrell offers only affecting episodes designed, like Crawfie's effusions, to show our fairminded and dutiful monarch in a yet more gracious light.
Prince Philip - tough but fair - receives his first good press in half a century as counsellor to Diana, while the union between these paragons is presented, in contrast to many recent accounts, as a model to us all: How unlike home life at Highgrove, where, after becoming butler, Burrell found that his duties also included spying, the supplying of alibis and the general facilitation of royal adultery.
It was his refusal to fib to Diana, Burrell claims, that prompted Charles to throw a book at him, shouting: Had it not been for the book-throwing, we might never have learned that this questing intellectual is unable to squeeze his own toothpaste even with the help of a crested silver toothpaste key , requires his standard to be raised on the roof the moment he arrives at Highgrove, and is an incessant leaver of memos, some of which have, unaccountably, found their way into this volume: Please look for it. Not that Diana emerges much more creditably from Burrell's memoirs of Kensington Palace.
For all his attempts to depict her as a selfless and enlightened philanthropist, her treatment of servants was, in its over-familiar way, quite as abusive as the Windsors' and more capricious. Progressive ideas did not stop Diana expecting Burrell to lean over and fasten her seatbelt - a detail which may be rather more telling than her prophecy of an assassination attempt.
On the other hand, the absence of any boundaries allowed her to send him to Coventry, subject him to interminable mobile phone chats, and get him to chauffeur her on charitable excursions to prostitutes, and to deliver love-notes at midnight. Although Burrell plainly got a tremendous thrill from the camp, girly aspects of her dependency - sharing the sunbed, shrieking over gossip, picking outfits - he can still summon up enough objectivity to see that her enslavement of his entire life was not really very humanitarian at all.
Or as his wife, the mother of their two young boys, told him: