The propinquity of Eton to Windsor meant William had forged a close bond with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Sometimes in the evening the boy would go for a walk in Windsor Great Park with Prince Philip, eagerly responding to his grandfather's tough code and sense of humor, which Prince Charles had always scorned. Having failed with his own son, Philip saw William as the boy he had always wished he'd had. They shared a passion for military history. It pleased Diana, but it also made her jealous. William was her closest confidant. "She told me she had with her son William very private and very profound conversations," Roberto Devorik said, "and he was an extraordinary moral support." William was older than his years, burdened as much by his mother's confidences as by his future responsibilities; she had taken him through the divorce terms before she agreed to them. She began including him in some of her lunches at Kensington Palace with the press.
"All my hopes are on William now," she told me. "I'm hoping he will grow up to be as smart about handling the media as John Kennedy Jr." But William was not John F. Kennedy's son. He was the heir to the British throne. However much William might look like her and smile like her, he belonged as surely to Prince Charles and the Crown as to Lady Diana Spencer—perhaps more. Inevitably, William would have to become Windsorized. As England's future King, it was his destiny.
Diana's fear of exclusion was aggravated by the deterioration of her relationship with Charles. The promising thaw, in which she had invested hopes, did a nosedive once she perceived the key issue in Mark Bolland's agenda. She had not reckoned that Bolland's rehab plan for her husband's image would be focused so intently on the selling of Camilla to the public. The Prince's mistress would not have sponsored Bolland for the job if his agenda had not tallied with hers. Much of Bolland's day was spent figuring out who was opposed to this agenda and making sure they left the employ of the Prince of Wales. As for Camilla herself, from not wanting to marry Charles because the status quo suited her, she had taken the opposite position. The divorce from Andrew Parker Bowles in March 1995 had reportedly left her short of money. When a friend went to have lunch with her at her house in Wiltshire after her divorce, he was startled when the doorbell rang and she rushed off to hide. "God, it's the fishmonger—I haven't paid him," she exclaimed. "We have to hide until he's gone.