her role as a successful claimant to the throne if not the crown. No cloud was going to darken that achievement which she took in her father´s family name. Whereas at one point of time, the glory was hers, the role of the heir producer was not sufficient in itself to mitigate what was unmistakably the star role in a world mission. The vision had a flaw and the platform from which she drew the inspiration was threatened. Her sense of destiny and strange enlightenment was geared to becoming the centre of every glance and thought and if it had to come through her husband, then he too, had to be part and parcel of that ecosystem – a mistake that she proved unwittingly by scoring with the media in her rebel role with much greater ferocity. The plot that she had concocted in her mind did not come to her all of a sudden, but looked at in perpective and hindsight, it may well be that there were other advisors sharing the dream, in the background. She would show that as the mother of a Crown Head, she could extend her powers to encompass other nations and other dynasties much as Cleopatra had tried to do before. Like her, it was to prove her undoing but nothing that she did, however apparently socially unacceptable, was any different to hundreds of things Royal families and personages had done through the millenia in the quest for world influence. After all, Royal rules are not quite the same as those that bind local social structures and limited aspirations. If so, there would be no treaties, diplomatic climbdowns or mergers of interests which, behind the scenes, trade on power balances and always at a price to one or the other or both. This bears a little thinking about.
Diana began to show signs of illumination when she first