On the morning of November 1, 2002, a man stood in the glass-paneled dock at the Old Bailey. For roughly 12 sitting days, Paul Burrell, a 54-year-old former royal butler, had been on trial for theft. Police had found 310 items belonging to Diana, Princess of Wales, in his Cheshire home in January 2001.
The prosecution’s case rested on a single premise: that Burrell had never told anyone what he had taken.
Then prosecuting counsel William Boyce, QC, rose and dismantled that premise with one sentence. The Queen had had a recollection. In December 1997, Burrell had told her he was holding some of the Princess’s papers for safekeeping.
He had told somebody. The charges were withdrawn, and Burrell broke down in tears.
The story of Diana’s marriage and divorce is often told through tabloid headlines. But the people who carried the trays, swept the floors, and kept the secrets were the household staff. They were the audience, the referees, and eventually the casualties.
Their accounts reveal a messier story than the simple tale of loyal servants betraying a dead princess.
When staff were hired into a royal household, they signed an ordinary private contract of confidentiality. It was enforceable in civil courts by injunction and carried no criminal liability. That distinction would become the most consequential piece of paperwork in the entire saga.
Wendy Berry signed hers when she arrived as housekeeper at Highgrove in late 1985. Her salary was reported at between 5,000 and 5,600 pounds a year. The house she was hired to run had been bought for just over 750,000 pounds in 1980.
Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House on the Queen’s own estate at Sandringham. She grew up next door to the royal family. On July 29, 1981, she married Charles, Prince of Wales, at St.
Paul’s Cathedral. He was 32. She was 20.
The household she married into had already been assembled around her husband. Stephen Barry, the prince’s valet, had risen from junior footman to become Charles’s closest daily attendant. His 1983 memoir, Royal Service, documented the precision of the role.
He knew to the inch how his employer should be dressed.
Somewhere in the Buckingham Palace footman’s ranks was a young man from a Derbyshire coal-mining village. Paul Burrell was born on June 6, 1958. In his own account, published in A Royal Duty in 2003, he brought an almost religious reverence for the monarchy into service.
He moved to Highgrove as under butler in 1987 and later became Diana’s butler.
That same year, Metropolitan Police Officer Ken Wharfe became Diana’s personal protection officer. His training was blunt and procedural, and he had license to speak to her in plain sentences no courtier could use. In Diana’s office sat Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, a traditional courtier whose job was to manage her public life and protect her from her own worst ideas.
Every one of them was recruited to serve an institution. Every one of them ended up working for a person instead. Nobody explained what to do when the institution and the person stopped wanting the same thing.
The cracks appeared quickly. In January 1982, Diana, pregnant with Prince William, fell down a wooden staircase at Sandringham. The Queen Mother was in the hall.
The Prince of Wales left the house to go riding. That sequence comes from Diana’s own account, recorded on tape and published a decade later in Andrew Morton’s book.
Stephen Barry did not last much longer. He resigned within roughly a year of the wedding, the friction with the new princess having become unworkable. He then did something no royal servant had done at that scale before.
He wrote it all down and sold it. Royal Service appeared in 1983. Barry died of an AIDS-related illness in 1986.
Prince Harry was born on September 15, 1984. Diana later told Morton that the marriage went bang after Harry’s birth. Not eroded.
Not drifted. Went bang.
Wendy Berry arrived at Highgrove in late 1985 and walked into the aftermath of that detonation. By 1987, the below-stairs cast was complete. Highgrove was running as something other than a country house.
Berry’s published account describes sweeping up the smashed fragments of a wooden chair before guests arrived. On another occasion, she was instructed to drive a dark green Ford Sierra off the estate while the Prince of Wales was away. The car belonged to James Hewitt.
It had been hidden behind hay bales. The housekeeper’s duties that day included removing her employer’s wife’s lover from her employer’s property.
Berry’s summary of the atmosphere was blunt. It was like living in a war zone with luxury catering.
Meanwhile, Diana carried a Motorola pager. Ken Wharfe’s memoir records the arrangement. She could buzz him silently during official dinners.
He would have to work out whether he was being summoned for a security reason or a human one. Over the police radio, her private companions were referred to as the package, an operational term that let him do his job without broadcasting her private life.
When Charles asked Wharfe to do something about his wife’s behavior, Wharfe’s answer was, I’m a police officer, not a marriage guidance counselor.
The popular version of the staff’s loyalties goes like this. Below stairs was solidly pro-Diana. She was the warm one who knew the names of their children.
He was the cold one upstairs with the classical music and the mistress.
That version comes overwhelmingly from Paul Burrell’s memoirs and broadcast interviews from 2002 onward. The revisionist version is different. Wendy Berry’s book, suppressed in Britain before most Britons could read it, was notably even-handed and in places distinctly warmer toward Charles, particularly as a father.
Ken Wharfe has publicly criticized Burrell’s account of himself as self-mythologizing.
Affection for Diana below stairs is real and independently attested. What is not attested is unanimity. These were people with employment contracts, pensions, and two employers who had stopped speaking to each other.
Their sympathies fell in the messy, individual way sympathies actually fall.
The geography did most of the work. This was increasingly two households pretending to be one. Highgrove ran around the prince.
Kensington Palace ran around the princess. Staff attached to one end acquired information the other end wanted and did not always have a defensible way to refuse to hand it over.
By the accounts of former Highgrove staff, Camilla Parker Bowles was present at Highgrove during periods when Diana was in London. That tells you exactly what position the people carrying the trays were placed in.
In June 1992, the underground arrangement stopped being underground. Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story was published. The bulimia, the self-harm, the Camilla relationship, all of it in print.
The household spent the summer being suspected of the leak. Morton later admitted the principal source was Diana herself. She had spoken onto tape.
On December 9, 1992, Prime Minister John Major stood at the dispatch box in the House of Commons and read a short prepared statement. The Prince and Princess of Wales have agreed to separate. They have no plans to divorce.
Their constitutional positions are unaffected.
The announcement was made not by the prince, not by his household, but by the elected head of the British government in Parliament. That is what these two people were. An arrangement with a constitutional footprint.
Below stairs, the effect was immediate. One household became two, formally. Diana kept the Kensington Palace apartments.
Charles remained based at Highgrove. Every person on the payroll was now, by the fact of their posting, on a side. Paul Burrell went with Diana.
Between June and September 1992, letters were passing between Diana and her father-in-law, Prince Philip. The famous version of those letters claims he savaged her, called her a harlot and a trollop. The documented version is different.
Extracts were read into the record at the inquest into Diana’s death in 2007 and 2008. They show a man offering to act as an intermediary and in effect a marriage counselor. They record his disapproval of either party taking lovers, both parties, no exemption for his own son.
They invite Diana to consider her own contribution to the breakdown. They contain the line that he and the Queen had never dreamed that Charles might leave Diana for Camilla. He signed himself pa.
The letters produced in open court contain no such abuse. They are advisory. They are pro-marriage.
Whatever else the Duke of Edinburgh was, in this correspondence, he was trying to hold the thing together.
He didn’t. In December, the Prime Minister read the statement out, and the household divided.
Wendy Berry left Highgrove service in 1993. Ken Wharfe resigned from royal protection the same year. In early 1995, Berry’s housekeeper’s diary was published in the United States.
Charles went to the High Court and obtained a worldwide injunction against her, along with an order that all profits be paid to him.
The popular version of that injunction is that the book was suppressed because of what was in it. The documented version is duller and considerably worse. The order rested on the confidentiality agreement Berry had signed when she joined the staff.
The court was not asked to adjudicate the truth of a single sentence she had written. She had signed, and she had written, and that was the case.
A confidentiality clause works on true accounts and false ones identically. The book was legally sold in the United States. It was not legally publishable in Britain.
Nine months later, on November 20, 1995, Diana gave an interview to Panorama. An estimated 200 million people worldwide eventually saw it. She said of her marriage that there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
She also spoke about being watched, about her own circle, about who could be trusted.
Inside her office, the consequences were structural. Patrick Jephson had spent years in a position that had become professionally impossible. He was required to issue official statements denying his employer’s involvement with the Morton book while privately suspecting she had been the source.
He kept a brass bell on his desk that he would ring when he judged the palace press office to be lying. By his own account, the bell got a workout. He eventually resigned.
Diana had come to believe he was leaking against her.
The divorce became absolute on August 28, 1996. From wedding to decree, 15 years and one month. The settlement removed the style Her Royal Highness.
She remained Diana, Princess of Wales, and used it for the rest of her life. Nothing about the divorce touched the succession.
Two months later, in October 1996, Diana sat down and wrote a letter in her own handwriting. She sealed it. She gave it to her butler.
In his account, she told him to keep it just in case. He put it away for 11 years.
Diana died in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997, in a car crash. She was 36 years old. She had been divorced for one year and three days.
In the days that followed, by his own account, Paul Burrell slept on the floor of her wardrobe at Kensington Palace guarding her clothes. Nobody has ever contradicted it. In those same days, Burrell and Diana’s sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, went through her private things and sorted the sensitive material.
There was a wooden box, mahogany with a brass lock. Letters and items judged too private to leave lying about were gathered up and put somewhere with a lock on it.
In December 1997, Burrell had a private meeting with the Queen. Buckingham Palace’s own chronology records it as running roughly 90 minutes. At some point, he mentioned that he had taken some of the princess’s papers for safekeeping.
Nobody wrote it down.
In January 2001, police searched his home and recovered 310 items. He was charged with theft. The trial opened at the Old Bailey in October 2002.
On November 1, because the Queen had remembered that 90-minute conversation, the prosecution’s entire premise collapsed. He had told the sovereign.
No sealed material was required to end the trial. No secret document was produced. The Queen did not appear.
What killed the case was that its central factual claim had been disproved. The decision to withdraw the charges was the prosecution’s own.
Diana’s estate was valued at approximately 21 million pounds. Burrell received 50,000 pounds from it by a variation of her will.
The 2007-08 inquest is where the paper finally surfaced. Philip’s letters were read into the record, advisory, not abusive. And the note Diana wrote in October 1996 was produced.
It records her belief that her husband was planning an accident in her car, brake failure, serious head injury, to clear the path for a remarriage. In the full version read at the inquest, she named Tiggy Legge-Bourke.
Be careful with what that document is. That she wrote it, sealed it, and gave it to him is fact. It exists.
It was produced in court. What it records is her belief. It asserts nothing about a plan existing outside her own mind.
Both the French and the British inquiries found no evidence of any conspiracy. A document proving fear is not a document proving a plot.
It does raise a question. Why did she believe her own household was against her?
For 25 years, the answer was assumed to be paranoia or illness. Then, in May 2021, Lord Dyson published the findings of his independent inquiry into how the BBC obtained the Panorama interview. Martin Bashir had commissioned forged bank statements and used them to convince Diana that people in her own circle were being paid to inform on her.
In March 2022, the BBC paid Patrick Jephson a settlement and issued him a formal apology. Her private secretary. The man she came to believe was leaking against her.
The man who resigned. The man the press filed away as the cold bureaucrat who walked out on a vulnerable woman had been framed. Not metaphorically.
With counterfeit documents by a journalist in order to win an interview.
Most of the staff didn’t turn on her. Wendy Berry was gagged by a contract before Britain could read a word she wrote. Ken Wharfe left in 1993 and has spent the decades since as the most reliably corroborated voice of the lot.
Jephson was framed. Stephen Barry, the one who genuinely broke the seal first, did it in 1983 and was dead by 1986. And the man who monetized her most thoroughly did the bulk of it after she was dead.
The case against them is real. They signed. They served.
Several of them sold it. The household that signed the strictest silence in the country ended up producing more published books than the family it worked for. Burrell’s claim that Diana called him her rock has been softened by people with equal standing to know, including her own mother.
The case for them is also real. They were hired by an institution that promised to be one family and handed a war. They were lied to from above and forged against from outside.
And when the machinery finally moved, it moved against a housekeeper on 5,000 a year, not against anyone upstairs.
Patrick Jephson, a quarter of a century after he walked out of Kensington Palace with his reputation in pieces, took the BBC’s apology and its money and gave the money to a children’s charity. A man who betrayed his boss does not spend 25 years proving he was framed and then refuse to keep the check.