The Princess, a young woman used to immersing herself in other people's grief, made all the arrangements herself. It was a wonderful gesture made at a time when their spirits were at their lowest.' She said it was such a lovely and peaceful spot and she would give them a key so they could come and go whenever they wished to visit the grave. 'She offered her garden out of the blue,' says a friend of the Princess. Distraught, she was being comforted by the Princess when Diana offered what to her was a simple way in which the grieving Lawsons could stay close to their lost child. Diana was thrilled.īut the following spring Rosa, then aged 40, lost the baby who would have been a sister to her lively daughter Savannah, nearly 10. It was the autumn of 1993 and in the domestic wasteland that Diana's life had become since she and Charles had parted the previous year, it was wonderful news. Rosa and Diana holidayed together and the Princess always knew that in her friend she had a shoulder to cry on as well as a cheerleader when times were good.Īnd then Rosa told her she was pregnant.
Her mother Marianna was a member of the Maltese nobility who were part of the Queen's inner circle in the early years of her marriage to Prince Philip. Her grandfather Walter Monckton (later Visby count Monckton of Brenchley) drafted the abdication speech of King Edward VIII in 1936 and was the only Crown official to witness his marriage to Wallis Simpson. Rosa, a successful businesswoman who opened the Bond Street branch of the jewellers Tiffany, is from a family steeped in a tradition of royal discretion. When Diana was at her lowest ebb, it was to the warm and welcoming home of Rosa that she would retreat. It is a story of profound friendship between two women - the kind of relationship that men are incapable of sharing - and how they helped each other in times of desperate need. Behind the burial - against the garden's west wall - lies a story that is both immensely sad yet poignantly uplifting. The Lawsons have never revealed the location of their baby's grave - and last night refused to comment on the matter. In fact, the parents were Rosa Monckton, one of Diana's closest friends and confidantes, and her husband, newspaper editor Dominic Lawson, son of the successful former Tory Chancellor Nigel (now Lord) Lawson.
For her part, the Princess always feared that if the story of the grave ever got out, it would provoke a frenzy of suspicion that the child must surely be hers. The baby, of course, was not Diana's, though the idea for the burial and its location was hers and hers alone.
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