They did not bother with subtleties, like asking men if they were lonely or fancied company. Stamping a cigarette out in a puddle, they would bellow: "Coom 'ere!" Remembering this, I also remember that on the statue were engraved the words, "Let me but bear your love; I'll bear your cares". They must be Shakespeare, although I have never found the source. But they stayed with me, those words, because of their incongruity. It was not just the contrast with the sodden traffic in lust beneath them. It was the suggestion that this ancient queen, by then a hermit who seldom left her dusty palaces, was still as hungry to be loved as a youngprincess, still as eager to purchase love with royal sympathy and good works.And now there is the Princess of Wales on the box, staring through her strange panda rings of eyeliner and saying with touching and terrible urgency that if she could but bear our love, she'd bear our cares.
She no longer aspires to be Queen, only Queen of Hearts.But melting hearts is not the same as ruling them. Millions were touched by her tale of married loneliness and neglect; few wives in the Kingdom (to say nothing of all the adjoining republics) did not see at least something of their own feelings in her confessions and complaints Plainly, she currently bears a lot of love. But my suspicion is that not nearly so many people want her to bear their cares. Where does she fit in now, and what is her future? Is she not trying to have her Queen's Pudding and eat it at the same time? Who, in short, does she think she is?As the famous interview rolled on, I became increasingly depressed. The damage done by her stretch of national service as a royal spouse was not just bulimia, depression or a sense of unworthiness - all now overcome It was damage to her sense of reality. Those who feel cheated of their entitlement of love often turn to power as a substitute, and the Princess was plainly in that category She was not going to let go - not going to be thrown out.
She was going to carry on with her work as Queen of Hearts, a member of that royal team whose task - if only they understood it better - was to go fearlessly down into the people and bestow their love upon all who needed it.But this is not on. Never mind, for a moment, that web of fantasy and invented tradition which people have the nerve to call the British Constitution. Even in their wildest dreams, it provides no special coach, no grace- and-favour apartment or crew of pages for a Queen of Hearts The point is more cruel and final Rejection has taken place. Like the wrong sort of kidney, Princess Diana has been rejected by the body of the House of Windsor, and there is nothing to be done about that. No doubt it speaks badly for the monarchy that somebody so lively could not be assimilated, but it is a fact.It is not just a matter of a failed marriage, but of a deep incompatibility of tissue.
Even if there were to be a reconciliation between the Waleses, this would still remain true. In a different period, with one of the older and less constricted Hanoverian generations, things might have been easier from the start. But with this generation there is no place for somebody who appears not to know her place.Alan Watkins, on page 19, lays out her constitutional position. I am sure that he is right to say that the Princess's two wishes not to be divorced and not to become Queen are mutually exclusive under Westminster rules; if she is not divorced, she has to become Queen.