Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES 1961-1997 and James Hewitt b. 1958

  Lady Diana Frances Spencer, the third daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer, could trace her aristocratic lineage to the reign of James I, who created the 1st Baron Spencer. The title was upgraded to an earldom by George III in 1765. Diana was all of nineteen years old, rosy-cheeked and packing on a bit of puppy fat, modestly working as a kindergarten teacher and nanny when her destiny changed forever.

  As a child Diana, whose step-grandmother was the prolific romance novelist Barbara Cartland, had dreamed of a fairy-tale happily-ever-after. Immersing herself in Cartland’s rose-colored canon, Diana longed for a real-life handsome prince who would sweep away the unpleasant memories of a broken home. Her adulterous mother deserted the family for the arms of a wallpaper magnate, and had been regarded as a pariah ever since. Her father was often absent. When he remarried, he conveniently forgot to inform his four children of the fact and presented it to his offspring as a fait accompli.

  So, the ruggedly masculine prince whose muscles rippled like Fabio’s and whose eyes smoldered like onyx would of course give Diana the perfect life she craved and all the love she believed she’d been denied. In fact, as a sixteen-year-old one of her favorite Cartland novels was titled Bride to a King, and from the first moment she met Prince Charles, she romantically decided to save herself for him—despite the fact that he’d barely given the chubby teen a second glance at the time, and even if he wasn’t ruggedly handsome and his eyes didn’t exactly smolder. Her imagination could fill in that part.

  Diana’s family home was Park House in Sandringham, the guesthouse right on the grounds of the royal estate there. One day when Diana was a little girl, her father informed his children that they were going to drive over to visit the royal family, who had invited them to a party. Diana, stubborn to a fault, according to those who knew her well, threw a temper tantrum at what other girls might consider a wildly glamorous prospect. After Diana’s energetic protests that she hated the “strange atmosphere” there, her humiliated father was faced with ringing the queen to send the Spencer family’s regrets.

  Yet a dozen years later, Diana was on the verge of becoming one of them, although from the outset she hadn’t exactly received the support of the people who should have offered it the most. Her mother, now Frances Shand Kydd, accompanied Diana to her first wedding gown fitting, but then kept her distance as the grand plans for the Big Day unfolded. The bride’s maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother, warned Diana that she would not fit in. “Their sense of humour and lifestyle are very different. I don’t think it would suit you,” cautioned Diana’s wise granny.

  Biographers dispute whether Diana was a sacrificial lamb that fateful July 1981 morning in St. Paul’s Cathedral, or if her wedding day was the delirious culmination of all her Barbara Cartland-fueled romantic fantasties, or if Diana was the finest actress in the world at masking her ruthless ambition to become the future Queen of England—knowing all the while by that point that she would share the fate of many a predecessor and never secure her royal husband’s love.

  The heir had briefly dated Diana’s older sister Sarah, so Diana must have known that Charles was, as romantic novels might word it, an indifferent lover—more Prince Chilly than Prince Charming.

  But there was an easy explanation for Charles’s coolness toward his potential marriage prospects: he’d rather be somewhere else. The love of his life was always in the picture, even if there were times when her image was closer to the frame. Knowing how desperately in love Charles seemed to be with Camilla, even during their awkward courtship, it’s doubtful that Diana was so naïve as to think that things would change with matrimony. Did she stubbornly (or optimistically) believe that her relationship with him would be utterly different?

  Sources interviewed for Tina Brown’s recent biography of Diana refer to her extreme youth and inexperience, an unworldliness that left her ill prepared for the monumental responsibilities that she would face as Princess of Wales and future queen. They also point to Diana’s prenuptial ecstasy over the fact that, as she put it, “He’s the one man on the planet who is not allowed to divorce me.” After they became engaged, she seemed to believe that once he was hers, she, younger and far more beautiful than her rival, could persuade him to forget all about Camilla.

  Like Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, Diana ended up in the unfortunate position of actually falling intensely in love with her Charles, a man who married out of duty and who never really loved her to begin with.

  Consider this awkward little episode: During their February 24, 1981, BBC interview, when the journalist asked the newly engaged couple if they were in love, Diana immediately replied, “Of course.” In contrast, Charles’s response could have frozen beer. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” he answered feebly. According to Tina Brown’s biography of Diana, the print media chose to excise the prince’s gut-plummeting words from their coverage of the interview.

  After they married, Charles’s infidelity mortified and humiliated Diana. But she figured out how to play the role of the wronged woman to the hilt, considered by many to be the first Windsor who truly understood the art of public relations, the power of the media, and the influence of the tabloid press—“the most artful practitioner of the media game,” according to Tina Brown. As a pre-Charles teen, Diana had avidly devoured the tabloids and was familiar with the names of their staffers and the interests of their readership. Diana was their readership.

  But Charles’s adultery was only a part of Diana’s rage for adulation, a craving that manifested itself, according to Ms. Brown, in her need for constant attention, affection, and confirmation that she was worthy and lovable, whether such reassurance came from a journalist or from the many lovers she took in an effort to heal her psychic and romantic wounds. Diana herself admitted, in reference to her relationship with her bodyguard, Barry Mannakee (but the remark could just as easily have pertained to the other men from whom she sought comfort and adulation), “I was . . . desperate for praise, desperate.”

  Mannakee, though initially starstruck by Diana’s beauty and charisma, realized just how needy the princess was when his role shifted from protector to paramour. He found her quite a handful and realized he was in over his head.

  Diana made frequent daily calls to some of her paramours, in which she demanded continual affirmation of their adoration, and went into a snit if they dared to admit that they had other obligations as well. “I just don’t get him,” Diana told a friend, upset that her great heartthrob, the thirty-six-year-old cardiologist Hasnat Khan, spent so much time at the hospital instead of with her. “He’s always so busy and his work is so important to him.”

  Sometimes her behavior bordered on stalking. According to Diana’s chauffeur Barry Hodge, when she was involved with the Islamic art dealer Oliver Hoare in 1992, the princess phoned her married lover up to twenty times a day. She left so many hang-ups that Mrs. Hoare feared the family were targets of terrorists and insisted that her (reluctant) husband inform the police. Scotland Yard traced the calls to a number of different phone lines, one of which was Diana’s mobile; three were located in Diana’s residence, Kensington Palace, in rooms “rented by the office of HRH the Prince of Wales.” And Tina Brown’s biography of Diana asserts that during her affair with Dr. Khan in 1995, Diana paged him at the hospital just as frequently.

  James Hewitt, the Londonderry-born Captain of the Life Guards, the unit responsible for protecting the royal family, either took his responsibilities to the extreme or failed miserably at them, depending on one’s point of view. From the start, Hewitt sensed that he had been set up all along by The Firm (as the royal family referred to themselves), which was looking for a way to halt Diana’s affair with Barry Mannakee. The latter died in a motorcycle accident on May 22, 1987, which Diana always deemed suspicious.

  Diana’s first encounter with James Hewitt took place in Buckingham Palace in the fall of 198
6. The twenty-six-year-old princess was standing alone at the foot of a staircase, backlit and barefoot, in a sheer summer dress, shoes in hand. Hewitt, two years her senior, had just exited a meeting regarding the impending marriage of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. Diana looked up and saw Hewitt in his uniform with its dashing red jacket. She gave him the seductive sidelong glance immortalized in countless photographs and purred, “Like the outfit.”

  She then arranged for Hewitt to be invited to a courtiers’ cocktail party hosted by her friend Hazel West, where she enthused about her love for horses and all but roped the cavalry officer into offering her riding instructions. As a cover for what would soon become a clandestine affair, Diana engaged Major Hewitt to teach Princes Harry and William as well.

  Hewitt quickly became something of a boy toy, or at least a kept man. Diana showered him with gifts of jewelry, clothing, and accessories, the way Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, did with Lillie Langtry a hundred years earlier.

  In her love affairs, the princess was anything but “shy Di.” Both Hewitt’s memoirs and Tina Brown’s biography of Diana assert that it was the princess who made the first move with Hewitt, taking advantage of a rare private moment in the Officers’ Mess to lean in and kiss him. “I need you. You give me strength. I can’t stand it when I’m away from you. I want to be with you. I’ve come to love you,” Diana told her swain, her eyes brimming with tears. She orchestrated their relationship with military precision, arranging for close friends to accompany them as “beards.” She even informed her personal protection officer Ken Wharfe of their illicit activities. Wharfe referred to Hewitt as a “protest fuck.” After all, Charles was rubbing Diana’s nose in his adulterous affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.

  And, according to Hewitt, “there was a tacit understanding between Diana and Charles that I was part of her life in the same way that Mrs. Parker Bowles was a part of Prince Charles’s life.”

  But Diana was so careful about keeping her affair with Hewitt a secret that she would rumple her lover’s bedsheets to make it appear as though he had spent the night in his own room.

  Tina Brown contends that with Hewitt, Diana evidently received the earth-shattering orgasms she’d craved. And he brought out the sportswoman in her, though Diana would eventually confess to Hewitt, “I hated every minute I spent sitting on a horse. I only did it for you.” Her previously bulimic figure grew tanned and fit and she ate properly and healthfully. “Only one thing went wrong,” Hewitt would later admit. “We fell in love.”

  From Diana’s perspective, viewed with twenty-twenty hindsight, much went wrong. “His head was inside his trousers,” she bitterly griped. Eventually, she would claim that Hewitt was “about as interesting as a knitting pattern.”

  But Diana had plenty of her own issues. She was needy and possessive, and routinely fumed when a paramour had other concerns, even outside of his control. The princess went ballistic when Hewitt was compelled to take another posting. She cut off all communication with him for three months after he told her he was being sent to Germany to command a Sabre Squadron. In 1990, he was posted to the Gulf and she was obliged to rewrite her fantasy script of a happily-ever-after romance, recasting herself as the solider boy’s girl back home. The princess sent Hewitt contraband bottles of whiskey and a gold cross that matched the one she wore, bearing the engraved inscription “I will love you forever,” in addition to a continual stream of letters and care packages, some of which contained girlie magazines.

  Privately, however, Diana confessed to Ken Wharfe that Hewitt had gotten “too serious.” And her tin soldier made an unforgivable misstep when he posed for a press photo-op atop his armored tank, waving one of her blue airmail letters. The photographer Ken Lennox overheard him shouting, “Look what I have got in my hand—you would pay a fortune for it.”

  Hewitt had crossed the bounds of discretion. The rest of the world did not need to learn what The Firm already knew. Hubristically, he had flown too close to the sun, and now it was going to scorch him.

  Naturally, the newspapers ran with it. Nigel Dempster, writing for the Daily Mail on March 15, 1991, delivered the headline “Di’s Dashing Pal to Tell of Desert Deeds.”

  Nine days later, Emma Stewardson, Hewitt’s ex-girlfriend, sold her confessional, “I Lost My Lover to Di,” to the News of the World.

  In Love and War, Hewitt’s memoir detailing his affair with Diana, he claims that the Stewardson story was a clever tweaking of the facts, since he and Emma had split up long before he became involved with Diana.

  But at the time, the public didn’t know that, and wouldn’t, until Hewitt’s book was published nine years later.

  The damage had been done.

  In the wake of the fallout from Hewitt’s Desert Storm debacle, Diana instructed the Kensington Palace switchboard to patch him through only on her instructions. He had lost the privilege of having her current mobile number. When she deigned to take his phone calls, Diana reminded her paramour of the importance of secrecy and discretion.

  According to myriad biographies of Diana, Hewitt was only one of several men, married and single, wellborn and working class, whom the Princess of Wales took to bed. But he was the only one who kissed and told for a hefty publishing advance. Ever since their romance was made public in 1991, Hewitt had fended off lucrative offers to sell his story. Once jilted, however, he began to self-destruct. He was twice fined by the army for disobeying orders, and failed his promotion exams—by one point, allegedly—a scenario that Hewitt was certain was rigged. “My card had been marked for some time,” he admits in Love and War. After the handsome and muscular former cavalry officer’s tell-all hit the bookshelves in 1999, two years after Diana’s death, he was quickly branded the “Love Rat” and “the vilest man in Britain.”

  In 1994, Hewitt had been booted out of the service with only a £40,000 severance check and a paltry £6,600 annual pension. Well, a boy’s got to eat, doesn’t he?

  His tongue was loosened by a £300,000 check from the Daily Express. In a series of interviews, Hewitt coyly divulged enough to the journalist Anna Pasternak to keep her readers guessing, and cooperated with Pasternak for her lurid exposé of their correspondence in the book Princess in Love. Diana was devastated that he had sold her down the Thames for a book deal. She would not live to see their love letters stolen from a safe in Hewitt’s home by his deceitful Italian fiancée, Anna Ferretti, who tried to sell them to the Mirror for £150,000. A fiasco ensued, in which no one came off looking good.

  To illustrate how much times had changed since the Tudors, the disclosure of their adulterous affair in 1994 amounted to a confession of treason. According to a fourteenth-century law that was still on the books, Hewitt would have been beheaded for his crime, while Diana could have suffered the same fate, or been publicly burned at the stake, the option Henry VIII chose not to exercise for Anne Boleyn.

  Although Hewitt had told Anna Pasternak that his affair with Diana began in 1986, it had been such a well-kept secret until Pasternak’s 1994 exposé that many believed the royal liaison had begun even sooner. There had been intermittent speculation in the press as to whether Hewitt, and not Charles, had fathered Prince Harry, Diana’s second son. Supposedly, when Charles first saw the redheaded infant prince, he grew quite upset, because he thought he didn’t resemble the child—and had a pretty good notion who did. Actually, Harry resembles a raft of redheaded Spencers, and Charles’s initial disappointment was put down to the fact he had hoped for a girl instead.

  Speaking to London’s Sunday Mirror in September 2002, Hewitt insisted that although he had been Diana’s secret lover for five years, he was not Harry’s father, reiterating that they had not met until two years after the prince’s birth. “Admittedly the red hair is similar to mine and people say we look alike.” However, he added, “I have never encouraged these comparisons, and although I was with Diana for a long time I must state once and for all that I’m not Harry’s father.” In referring to official photos t
aken that year to mark the prince’s eighteenth birthday, Hewitt said, “Looking at the pictures I have to say he’s a much more handsome chap than I ever was.”

  In 2005, Hewitt underwent the ultimate publicity stunt—a past-life regression—conducted by a man named Tony Rae, who specializes in such astral journeys. On Channel Five’s program Under Hypnosis, the trance-induced Hewitt admitted that his affair with Diana began much earlier than 1986, and he had lied to protect her.

  By then, Hewitt’s dignity had already been taking a nosedive for a couple of years. In February 2003, the BBC reported that Hewitt was trying to sell Diana’s love letters (the original documents). A year later he was arrested in Chelsea on suspected cocaine possession. In 2006, he sunk even lower, appearing on a reality TV show, The X Factor: Battle of the Stars.

  Diana remains endeared to us forever as a tragic (and tragically flawed) heroine. We knew as much about her frailties—her eating disorders, alleged suicide attempts, unloving and chilly marriage, and hideously impossible in-laws—as we did of her myriad charitable works and her seemingly endless compassion for anyone who suffered even the slightest pain. All of it contributed to her image as “the People’s Princess.”

  Diana reached her zenith in an age when the world demanded a right to know everything about someone. Ironically, that which made Diana so famous and so iconic—her talented collusion with the press—is what ultimately killed her. She perished in a speeding sedan alongside Dodi Fayed, her flashy forty-two-year -old beau of only six weeks’ acquaintance, during an attempt to evade a hellish cavalcade (two motor scooters, three motorcycles, and five automobiles) of aggressive paparazzi.

  “The camera was Diana’s fatal attraction,” Tina Brown observed in her biography of the princess. “It had created the image that had given her so much power and she was addicted to its magic, even when it hurt.”