In a sad postscript, Prince Charles finally “got it” when—after learning of Diana’s Paris accident, but not yet informed of its dreadful outcome—he admitted to Mark Bolland, his assistant private secretary, “I always thought that Diana would come back to me, needing to be cared for.”
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES and Camilla Parker Bowles b. 1947
She might not have been a stunner to look at, but she had an opening line that couldn’t be beat. The popularly repeated story goes that on a rainy day in 1970 at a polo match at Windsor, feisty Camilla Shand marched up to Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales—you can just imagine her tweed skirt, quilted Barbour jacket, and muddy boots—and told him, “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather.”
Supposedly following this setup line with the brazen question “How about it?” it was the come-hither equivalent of presenting her credentials for the position, boldly suggesting that she and Charles might like to continue what Edward VII and Alice Keppel began.
Tina Brown, Princess Diana’s most recent biographer, relates a different story in The Diana Chronicles. According to Brown, Camilla appraised Prince Charles’s horse with a gimlet eye and in an opening gambit huskily said, “That’s a fine animal you have there, sir.”
Whichever line is genuine, the effect was the same, whether or not Charles had already heard the rumors that the candid Camilla was terrific in bed. The heir to the English throne was intrigued. Camilla and Charles began a relationship, and by all accounts they were quite suited to one another in every way but one. Though Charles was likely keen on making her his wife, Buckingham Palace wouldn’t hear of it. Camilla, from a proper family, and with all the right education—at the Queens Gate School in South Kensington, and at finishing schools in France and Switzerland—was quite obviously not a virgin, and old royal traditions die hard.
The two were more or less compelled to officially move on. And absence had made the heart falter rather than grow fonder after only about a year, when in 1971 Charles entered the Royal Navy. In 1973, while the prince was still performing his military duty, the twenty-five-year-old Camilla married another old flame, the cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles. They had two children together: Tom, born in 1975, and Laura, born in 1979.
But in August 1979, the literally explosive murder of Charles’s favorite relative and chief confidant, his “Uncle Dickie,” Lord Mountbatten, sent the grief-stricken thirty-year-old Charles back to Camilla’s consoling arms. Mountbatten, the victim of a political assassination, was killed, along with two others, by agents of the Irish Republican Army when a bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat was blown up by remote control.
The Prince of Wales began to spend considerable time in the company of Camilla and her husband. In 1980, Charles and the Parker Bowleses attended a soiree during which the prince and Camilla spent considerable time on the dance floor, French-kissing in full view of the appalled guests—and Camilla’s husband.
A bounder himself, according to several sources (including his wife), Parker Bowles observed, according to Tina Brown, “HRH is very fond of my wife . . . and she appears to be very fond of him.” Seven years later, Parker Bowles would be promoted to Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry.
Meanwhile, back in 1980, the quest for a proper virgin bride for Charles continued, even as his relationship with Camilla was rekindled—while her marriage to Parker Bowles understandably began to collapse. Ironically, it was Camilla who nudged her lover into the arms of the nineteen-year-old, diffident yet radiant English rose, Lady Diana Spencer.
Viewed as young and unworldly enough to be pliably molded into the perfect complacent consort, Diana, a noblewoman from a prominent and prestigious line, filled all the proper criteria for the future Queen of England. And although she had previous boyfriends, including having very briefly dated the notoriously randy Prince Andrew (who had been a girlhood crush), Diana was allegedly intacta. She famously told an interviewer, “I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead,” meaning her fantasy marriage to Prince Charming. If Barbara Cartland novels had taught her nothing else, it was that fast girls don’t get the future king.
There was only one major obstacle: Charles was madly in love with Camilla, even confessing to his valet, Stephen Barry, that Mrs. Parker Bowles “was the only woman he had ever loved.”
But the prince did his duty, no doubt gritting his teeth and thinking of England when he married Diana on July 29, 1981, in a royal wedding watched around the world. Goggle-eyed romantics from New York to New Delhi stayed up late or woke up early to stake out a seat in front of the television, as a Cinderella-style coach transported the beautiful blond bride. She was wearing a voluminous silken confection of a gown that would be copied for years.
Rumors soon surfaced of marital trouble, trouble that had in fact persisted throughout the prince’s lukewarm courtship of Diana. As the wedding gifts had poured into the palace in advance of the big day, Diana discovered among them a gift box for Camilla that contained a stunning bracelet engraved with the entwined initials F and G—according to one source, for Fred and Gladys, Charles and Camilla’s pet names for each other. (According to Tina Brown, the letters stand for “Girl Friday,” Charles’s nickname for Camilla.) And Charles’s valet, Stephen Barry, admitted that Charles had likely spent the night of the prewedding ball in Camilla’s arms.
During his honeymoon with Diana aboard the royal yacht Britannia, Charles phoned Camilla every day. According to Barry, the prince was a man unmoored without her.
Camilla was a frequent visitor to Highgrove, Charles’s beloved Gloucestershire retreat, and knew the manor’s layout better than Diana did. The Parker Bowleses resided only sixteen miles away at Bolehyde Manor, which made Highgrove particularly convenient for a royal tryst. Charles and Camilla’s tight-lipped Gloucestershire clique treated them as a couple.
According to Diana’s personal protection officer Ken Wharfe, on one occasion the princess had her suspicions confirmed that the minute her back was turned Charles took advantage of the occasion to rendezvous with Camilla. Not too many months after Charles had surprised Diana with a romantic seventh-anniversary celebration at Highgrove, one Sunday afternoon, as Diana headed back to London from weekending there with her husband, about a half hour from Highgrove, she urged Ken Wharfe to turn the car around and head back there. Sure enough, Camilla’s car was in the driveway. The prince’s lover did in fact play châtelaine at Highgrove quite often in Diana’s absence. Prince Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, records that the affair with Camilla resumed in 1986, though Tina Brown seems to believe that date simply became the standard party line. Some royal biographers believe it; some beg to differ. Brown is among the writers who are convinced that Camilla and Charles resumed their affair in or by 1983, the year before Charles and Diana’s second son, Prince Harry, was born. In fact, Diana had admitted that it was a miracle Harry got conceived at all, so infrequently were the Waleses having sex together by then.
Where hundreds of years ago a royal scandal was whispered about among the envious and ambitious bluebloods at court, nowadays, thanks to freedom of the press, pernicious paparazzi, and, more recently, the Internet, royal adulterers are tried in the court of public opinion. Camilla and Charles—though he came out the worse for it—were thoroughly excoriated (amid titters and giggles) when the press released the “Camillagate tapes,” transcripts of the December 18, 1989, mobile phone conversation that Charles had with his lover, in which he passionately murmured his desire to be reincarnated as Camilla’s tampon.
The transcript was first published in 1992 by the Australian weekly periodical New Idea and was soon afterward picked up by fifty-three news outlets internationally. In London, it was the Daily Mirror that published it. These days, the transcript can easily be Googled and located on a number of Web sites, where it is available in its entirety.
Then again, according to an ex-girlfriend, the Prince of Wales prefers to be calle
d “Arthur” during the throes of ecstasy, which can’t help but make one wonder about Excalibur. So much for Charles being remembered for his keen interests in such comparatively mundane subjects as architectural preservation and organic farming!
Toward the end of 1992, in a bit of classic British understatement, Buckingham Palace reluctantly conceded that Charles and Diana had been having some marital problems. In December, the Waleses would officially separate. Eventually, they brought their case to the press, each of them seeking to sway the tide of public opinion in their favor.
In an interview on June 29, 1994, with the BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles confessed that he had in fact been unfaithful to Diana during their marriage. But he immediately issued a disclaimer of sorts, telling Dimbleby, “Until it became irretrievably broken down, both of us having tried.”
The reaction of the Daily Mirror was, “He is not the first royal to be unfaithful, but he is the first to appear before 25 million of his subjects to confess.”
The following year, when Diana appeared on Panorama, she invoked the specter of Camilla, bitterly telling the television journalist Martin Bashir, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” It must have been a dreadful situation for Diana to have fallen in love with her husband, only to be forced at every turn to acknowledge his long-standing infidelity—but this time in an age when people were supposed to marry for love, and when the official royal mistress was an archaism that should have been relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history.
All three of them—Camilla, Charles, and Diana—were caught between the ridiculously conflicting exigencies of duty and desire, and the palace’s stubborn refusal to admit that times had changed. If Charles had been permitted to wed Camilla in the first place, an infinite amount of pain, and eventually tragedy, might have been avoided.
In 1995, Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles divorced. A year later, Charles divorced Diana. Interestingly, it has been said of Camilla that the love of her life was Parker Bowles, not Charles, though she has always remained the prince’s grand passion. Perhaps the canniest royal mistresses (and Camilla’s got the genes to prove it) comprehend that it is always preferable, if not profitable, for your lover to care more about you than you do for him.
Lest anyone assume that annuities and financial gifts to royal mistresses are a thing of the past, in 1995, Camilla’s grocery shopping for her new Wiltshire estate was performed by Charles’s Highgrove butler. The bills were sent to the Prince of Wales’s account. And after Charles divorced Diana and Camilla was acknowledged as Charles’s lover, his maîtresse en titre , he awarded her a wardrobe allowance. Charles eventually covered her £130,000 debt at Coutts bank and gave Camilla an annual stipend of £120,000, which over time increased to £180,000 per annum.
Diana’s tragic death in August 1997 once more put the spotlight on Charles’s infidelity. Many people expressed the wish that if only he had been kinder to Diana, had loved her the way she loved him, hadn’t cheated on her and then rubbed her nose in it, had dumped Camilla for good and really tried to make the royal marriage work, then Diana would never have been in that sedan with Dodi Fayed.
The thought had even occurred to Charles himself. The prince told his private secretary, Stephen Lamport, “They’re all going to blame me.”
People also found a way to blame Camilla as the temptress and interloper who didn’t do the noble thing and allow her former lover to be a faithful husband. To the mortification of the House of Windsor, Diana’s death effectively deified her. Though Camilla and Charles were now fully free to proclaim their coupledom, the months following Diana’s death would have been the worst possible moment to do so from a public relations standpoint.
So Camilla receded from the spotlight. Not until 1999 did she and Charles appear together publicly as a couple. It took another year for the queen to remove the royal blinders and acknowledge Camilla’s relationship with her son by attending a luncheon at which the prince’s lover was also present. Three years later, in 2003, Camilla moved into the prince’s residence, Clarence House.
In 2002, the Church of England was finally dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age when it ended the centuries-old practice of prohibiting divorced persons with living ex-spouses from being married in the Church. This had been the sticking point when it came to the subject of whether Charles could wed Camilla, because as the King of England he would also become the titular head of the Anglican Church. The old law is also what had tripped up Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson and prevented their marrying—not that Wally was American, a commoner, or even that she was a double divorcée. Nowhere in the British Constitution are any of these three issues a valid barrier to a royal marriage. The issue had been that the mistresses’ former spouses still lived.
Now Camilla would be able to marry her prince—so long as Charles received permission from his mum the sovereign, in accordance with the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. It was also important that in the intervening years since Diana’s tragic death, the tide of public opinion had begun to flow in Camilla’s favor. No one changed his mind and suddenly found her a raving beauty, but she did pick up some hair, makeup, and wardrobe tips. The clothing allowance probably helped. Her appearance morphed from what-to-wear-while-mucking-out-the-stables to one of appropriately matronly elegance (ridiculous hats aside). What seems to have happened was a combination of time’s ability to heal all wounds and the public’s realization that the real Cinderella story was Charles and Camilla’s. He had loved her passionately for thirty-five years. Yes, poor Diana was savaged by it, but now her memory could remain enshrined as immortal and beloved while Camilla and Charles became the poster children for Love Conquering All, giving hope to dowdy middle-aged singletons in every corner of the earth.
On April 9, 2005, the romance that Diana viewed as a nightmare and Charles saw as a fairy tale had a happy ending for him when he wed Camilla in a civil service at the Guildhall in Windsor. The Archbishop of Canterbury had gone so far as to bless their marriage, averring that their union in no way prohibited Charles from becoming King of England, or the titular head of the Anglican Church. (After all, known adulterers have done so for centuries; why should twenty-first-century hypocrisy be any different?)
Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, did not attend the Guildhall ceremony. It sounds like grist for the gossip mill, but the queen averred that to attend a civil wedding was not in keeping with her position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The civil ceremony was followed later that day by the blessing of their union in St. George’s Chapel, at which Her Majesty did put in an appearance.
At the time, public sentiment—however it may have changed in Camilla’s favor since the death of Princess Diana—would likely not have withstood the title of Princess of Wales bestowed on the woman who shattered Diana’s hopes for wedded bliss. On her marriage to Charles, Camilla was made Duchess of Cornwall. But if Charles becomes king, because she is his wife, Camilla will in fact be Queen of England unless a public outcry compels the British cabinet to raise an objection and insist that the marriage be considered morganatic. A morganatic marriage would mean that Camilla’s status or rank as a commoner would remain unchanged, even if Charles were to accede to the throne, and she would not become his queen consort in any formal or officially recognized way. In other words, Camilla would still be Charles’s legal wife of course, but she would not be his queen.
However, according to a statement from Clarence House, it has been agreed upon that should Charles ascend the throne, Camilla’s official title will not be queen, but HRH The Princess Consort.
Still, the effects of Camilla’s long-term adulterous liaison with Prince Charles extend beyond the prurient interests of the curious reader of Hello magazine. For one thing, many still regard her as the interloper who made life hell for the martyred Princess Diana. As of June 2007, 73 percent of Britons did not want to see Camilla as their queen. Indeed, two-thirds of them would like their next
king to be Prince William, the elder son of Charles and Diana, who stands next in line to his father.
Whether Charles chooses to ascend the throne after Elizabeth II is his decision, but one that may have lasting implications on the state of the British monarchy, its relevance, and its official stewardship of the Church of England. While British royal history is rife with adultery, if Charles were to become king, he would be the first divorced English-born monarch ever. Henry VIII, after all, technically, had his marriages annulled.
Then again, despite vociferous public outcry at the time, England’s monarchy successfully survived the sexual excesses of such serial adulterers as Henry VIII, Charles II, George IV, and Edward VII. And from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Catherine of Braganza to Princess Alix of Denmark to Diana, Princess of Wales, royal consorts have fruitlessly begged their husbands to relinquish their mistresses and give them a cuddle instead.
But it is a truth universally acknowledged that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to my editor, Claire Zion, for giving me the opportunity to dive head-first into the field of historical nonfiction. To my agent, Irene Goodman, I owe perpetual thanks; and I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to thank my fifth-grade teacher, Barbara Thatcher (wherever she is), for turning me into a history geek. Thanks are also due to the members of the Beau Monde, the Romance Writers of America’s subset of Georgian- and Regency-era writers, whose individual and collective encyclopedic knowledge of the periods is just as valuable to a historian as to a novelist. Merci to Mme. Cecile Droz at my alma mater, the Fieldston School, who translated George I’s last words. Finally, I must acknowledge the New York City Public Library system, which made a daunting amount of research more manageable. I’ve never been happier to see my tax dollars at work.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 39