For years the British public had learned little about Charles’s ongoing affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. But that year, the prince’s best-kept secret for two decades would be blasted to the four corners of the earth. Diana decided to go public. For months she recorded tapes that were secretly couriered by Dr. James Colthurst from Kensington Palace to the biographer and journalist Andrew Morton. When Morton’s offices were burglarized, it seemed that the thieves were on the hunt for something quite specific, and from then on Diana relayed her thoughts into a device fitted with a scrambler.
On June 7, 1992, the first installment of Morton’s sensational tell-all, Diana, Her True Story, was serialized in the Sun and Diana’s allegations of her husband’s marital infidelity were published. The cathartic but self-serving text conveniently glossed over the princess’s own extramarital liaisons.
No sooner had the news hit the stands than Charles sped up to Windsor to discuss the consequences of divorce with his mum and dad.
Faced with an explosion too loud to ignore, the following day the Waleses sat down in Kensington Palace to talk about their marital future and the potential repercussions of a separation. Diana later said that she felt a “deep, deep, profound sadness. Because we had struggled to keep it going, but obviously we ran out of steam.”
The Morton exposé had instant, and seismic, repercussions. Camilla, who had gotten away with much for decades, was finally subjected to the painful sting of tabloid headlines and the harsh glare of paparazzi flashbulbs. It also ended up creating a thick set of battle lines within the royal ranks. Diana (and Morton) immediately felt the backlash from the palace and the Establishment. Publicly airing one’s royal unmentionables was just not done. The already radioactive Diana had now committed the ultimate transgression. Adultery: okay. Talking about it: taboo.
Diana’s and Charles’s friends formed armed camps around their principals. Charles’s circle, who described Diana, Her True Story as “the longest divorce petition in history,” advised him to go through with it. And in the summer of 1992, Diana herself asked her husband point-blank, “Why don’t you go off with your lady and have an end to it?”
But duty triumphed over hypocrisy. The subject of Charles’s divorce was (as his marriage had been) in the hands of a higher authority: his mother the queen.
After another meeting at Windsor Castle, Charles’s parents declared that any notion of a formal separation was off the table. The Waleses were sent home to try again, and Diana and Charles reluctantly agreed to spend the next few months endeavoring to iron out their differences. But the palace didn’t hold up its end; Prince Philip pointedly snubbed his daughter-in-law when she passed him in the royal box at Ascot and sent Diana four extremely vicious letters during the following few weeks. Even courtiers were frosty to her.
Diana had long thought her phones were tapped, but by now she was not the only royal to have become paranoid. The Firm, as the upper echelon of the ruling family called themselves, were extremely concerned about conspiracies and wondered almost daily what fresh hell awaited them. There was suspicion not only about tapped phones but about purloined documents and MI5 involvement.
Perhaps the paranoia was not so unfounded. What happened next made Diana’s published confessions regarding a sham marriage and the royal family’s rampant hypocrisy and insensitivity appear banal.
December 1989 had been a banner month for the recording of compromising phone conversations. Transcripts and voice recordings were made from what were believed to be two separate calls, one between Charles and Camilla and the other between Diana and her lover at the time, James Gilbey. The tapings were traced to, or pinned on, individual ham radio operators; but investigators later substantiated that it would have been nearly impossible for these individuals to have made such sophisticated recordings. In fact, the purported call between Diana and Gilbey turned out to be a seamless patch of two different conversations conducted at two entirely different times. The exchange between Charles and Camilla was also revealed to be a clever collage of several phone calls made in the months around December 1989.
More frightening was the discovery that numerous calls involving many members of the royal family had been recorded, including twenty-eight conversations between Charles and Camilla and a phone call made from Prince Andrew to his wife, the Duchess of York, while he was aboard his ship, the HMS Camperdown. It’s phenomenally unlikely for a ham amateur to have been able to record Andrew’s call, but to date, no culprit has been discovered.
The first transcribed phone call to make the presses was the one between Diana and Gilbey, ostensibly conducted on New Year’s Eve 1989. The scandal became known as “Squidgygate” because Gilbey affectionately called Diana either “Squidge” or “Squidgy” several times during the conversation. It cost the princess whatever public relations points she had won by “outing” Charles’s relationship with Camilla in the Andrew Morton book.
But in January 1993, any sympathy Charles might have gained from the Squidgygate tarnishing of Britain’s goddess was utterly lost when the transcript of an eleven-minute fragment of a phone call allegedly made to Camilla on December 18, 1989, made its way into tabloids worldwide. Rife with sexual innuendo and mutual, passionate declarations of love, the conversation includes a joke about reincarnation in which Charles would come back in his next life as his lover’s tampon. This episode, which embarrassed the House of Windsor more than any of Diana’s betrayals and transgressions, whether actual or imagined, was dubbed “Camillagate.”
The mockery of a royal marriage had to stop. The queen consulted with Prime Minister John Major and the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding any potential barriers to Charles’s eventual accession should he divorce Diana. The PM assured Her Majesty that there were no legal ramifications and it would have no effect on the governance of the kingdom.
Diana was most concerned about how a formal separation would affect their sons, who, after Charles, stood second and third in line to the throne. The line of succession would remain unchallenged, she was told, but the boys would have to be raised within the court, according to centuries-old royal protocol. That meant that any plans Diana might harbor to live abroad in the future would not include her sons.
On December 9, 1992, an official statement was released announcing the Waleses’ formal separation. Princes William and Harry were in school but Diana made sure they were informed a week earlier to prepare them for what was ahead.
From the highest levels, pressure was applied on Charles to give up Camilla, but he stubbornly made it clear that their relationship was “nonnegotiable.” Diana might be out of the picture, but Camilla remained firmly in the foreground, at least as far as the prince was concerned.
Like any separating couple, Diana and Charles divided their possessions and immediately set about redecorating their homes. All traces of Diana’s existence disappeared from Charles’s beloved Highgrove. She got rid of her husband’s military and architecture paintings and added a woman’s touch to Kensington Palace—soothing pastoral landscapes and images of dancers and flowers. Then she decorated the bathroom with satirical cartoons about Charles.
Having remade her residence, it was time for the princess to re-invent herself. She wanted to become a roving ambassador for international causes, but the Firm still regarded her as a ticking time bomb and suddenly she found her public appearance requests curtailed. On Friday, December 3, 1993, at a charity luncheon, Diana announced that she was retiring from public life. From then on, her first priority would be her children. Charles’s first reaction was that his estranged wife—still a royal—was selfishly indulging in an apparent dereliction of duty.
Diana compromised by making the official appearances that were required of her, but it was evident that the Waleses’ marital separation would never end in a rapprochement. Eventually, Charles and Diana brought their respective cases to the press, each of them eager to sway the tide of public opinion.
In an interview on June 29, 1994, with t
he BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles admitted his infidelity during their marriage. But he immediately issued a disclaimer, 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.”
On November 20, 1995, journalist Martin Bashir’s interview with Diana was broadcast on a current affairs television program called Panorama. The princess aired the royal couple’s dirty linen and accused the Windsors, and most pointedly Her Majesty, of being out of touch with the times. It was then that Diana, her eyes uncharacteristically rimmed with thick black liner sure to smear ostentatiously at the first sign of tears, uttered her famous line, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She also cast aspersions on her husband’s fitness to be king.
The palace had had enough. After securing the concurrence of the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the queen sent a separate letter to each of the Waleses, commanding them to divorce.
On Wednesday, February 28, 1996, Diana agreed to an uncontested divorce. Although she would walk away with a “compensation package” worth more than £17 million, she described it as “the saddest day of my life.” The Waleses’ marriage was dissolved on August 28, 1996, with the issue of the decree absolute.
Diana chose to retain her involvement in just five charities and reintroduced her idea of becoming an international humanitarian ambassador. As she began to find her footing as a newly single woman, her self-confidence returned and she even saw her rival in a rosier light, gradually coming to admire Camilla Parker Bowles’s loyalty to her former husband and the discretion she exercised when it came to their affair. It was Charles who had rubbed her face in it, not his lover. “He won’t give her up and I wish him well,” Diana once confided to a friend. “I would like to say that to his face one day.”
Camilla and Tom Parker Bowles had divorced in 1995, in part due to the fallout from the Waleses’ television interviews. They had been living apart for the previous three years, but during their marriage Tom was as unfaithful as his wife had been, even rekindling his own royal romance with Princess Anne around the time of her 1992 divorce from Mark Phillips.
Finally, the press began to pay attention to the Charles and Camilla story and the public was appalled to learn from a former valet of the prince’s that he had to scrub the grass stains from the knees of His Highness’s pajamas after he’d spent the night shagging his lover on the lawn at Highgrove, and that on some nights Charles had even bedded Camilla as Diana slept upstairs. The Britons were even more disgusted to discover that their tax dollars had been footing the bills for the Prince of Wales’s mistress.
In 1995, Camilla’s grocery shopping for her new Wiltshire estate was performed by Charles’s Highgrove butler. The invoices were sent to the Prince of Wales’s account. And after Charles divorced Diana and Camilla was acknowledged as his paramour, he awarded her a wardrobe allowance. Charles eventually covered her £130,000 debt at Coutts bank and gave her an annual stipend of £120,000, which over time increased to £180,000 per annum. In a particularly sentimental and romantic gesture, he also made a point of tracking down and purchasing the jewelry that his great-great-grandfather Edward VII had given to his lover, Camilla’s royal mistress-ancestress Alice Keppel, so that he could repeat the gesture by bestowing it on Alice’s descendant.
During the summer of 1997, Diana embarked on a relationship with Emad “Dodi” Al-Fayed, the forty-two-year-old son of the Egyptian-born Harrods department store owner Mohamed Al-Fayed. Dodi was known primarily as an international playboy with a few choice credits as a film producer. Their romance blossomed with astounding velocity; after knowing him for just a few weeks, Diana gave Dodi an extraordinarily sentimental gift—a pair of cuff links that had belonged to her father. Dodi’s friends, and his father, were convinced they would soon be headed for the altar.
But on August 30, 1997, after a six-week courtship, the couple perished in a speeding sedan during an attempt to evade a hellish cavalcade (two motor scooters, three motorcycles, and five automobiles) of aggressive paparazzi. Ironically, that which made Diana so famous and so iconic—her talented collusion with the press—is what ultimately killed her, although who knows what might have happened had their chauffeur’s blood not been filled with a lethal combination of liquor and pills.
Diana’s death shocked the world, eliciting an unprecedented outpouring of public grief. Her September 6, 1997, funeral may have been watched by as many people as witnessed her royal wedding, but even then the Windsors and the Spencers argued down to the final hour about who would walk behind her coffin and where Diana would be laid to rest. Diana had wished to be placed in the family crypt near her father and beloved paternal grandmother, whom she believed had always watched over her from Heaven. Instead, her younger brother, Earl Spencer, insisted that her body be interred on a remote island on the Althorp estate, where she reposes like a character out of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Diana’s tragic end put the spotlight once more on Charles’s infidelity. Many people believed 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.
After learning of Diana’s death, the thought had even occurred to Charles himself. The prince told his private secretary, Stephen Lamport, “They’re all going to blame me.”
People had also found a way to condemn Camilla as the temptress and interloper who didn’t do the noble thing by allowing her former lover to be a faithful husband. After the Camillagate tapes were released in 1993, she was pelted with rolls outside a Sainsbury’s supermarket, lobbed by angry women who thought she was evil incarnate and who blamed her for the destruction of the prince’s marriage.
To the mortification of the House of Windsor, Diana’s death effectively deified her. And in the months following the tragedy Camilla receded from the spotlight. Public opinion, never in her favor, was even more strongly against a potential marriage to Charles, and Britons vehemently opposed the idea of her ever becoming his queen.
Although there is no doubt Charles mourned Diana, he discreetly continued his affair with Camilla until the negative light in which her fellow Britons perceived her had noticeably waned.
In 1997 Charles finally “outed” his relationship with Camilla when he hosted a fiftieth birthday party for her, but the event was a private affair. Not until 1999 did she and Charles appear together publicly as a couple. It took another year for the queen to acknowledge Camilla’s relationship with her son by attending an event at which Mrs. Parker Bowles was also present—and that was only because the occasion was the queen mum’s one hundredth birthday celebration. Three years later, in 2003, Camilla moved into the prince’s residence, Clarence House.
In 2002, the Church of England finally ended the centuries-old practice of prohibiting divorced persons with surviving ex-spouses from being married in the Church. 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. In the intervening years since Diana’s tragic death, the tide of public opinion had begun to flow in Camilla’s favor, with the dawning acknowledgment that the real Cinderella story belonged to her and Charles. He had loved her passionately for thirty-five years. Poor Diana had been savaged by it, but now her memory could remain 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 ceremony at the Guildhall in Windsor. At the time, public sentiment remained very
much against the title of Princess of Wales being bestowed on the woman who shattered Diana’s hopes for wedded bliss. So Camilla became Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall.
Charles’s mother was not present at the Guildhall ceremony; for the queen to attend a civil wedding is not in keeping with her position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Later that day Her Majesty did put in an appearance at the blessing of their union in St. George’s Chapel.
If Charles becomes king, because she is his wife Camilla will in fact be Queen of England. However, according to a statement from Clarence House, it has been agreed upon that Camilla’s official title would be HRH The Princess Consort.
In the spring of 2008, Charles and Camilla purchased a three-bedroom country residence in Wales, Llwynywormwood Estates, surrounded by 192 acres of organic farmland. The three-feathered crest of the Prince of Wales hangs over the fireplace. Eco-friendly washing powder was spotted by an ecorazzi.com reporter on the kitchen draining board and the residence boasts a number of green elements both inside and out. And for those who want to live like a prince, the building is also registered as a B&B and is available for rental when its owners are not in residence.
As Prince of Wales, Charles has involved himself over the decades with a number of nonprofit charitable entities, and has spoken extensively on his two passions: architectural preservation and organic farming. The Prince’s Trust, primarily known for sponsoring pop concerts, funnels dozens of millions of pounds into improving the futures of Britain’s underprivileged youth.
But all of Charles’s philanthropic work, his advanced views on agriculture, and his retrograde opinions of British architecture will likely represent a fragment of his legacy as Prince of Wales. What people will remember most is his personal life and how he chose to live it. Time and history will tell whether he (and Camilla) will be forgiven for their moral turpitude and for the years of emotional and psychological pain they inflicted on the Princess of Wales. Charles’s ludicrously ineffective characterization of his marriage to Diana as a “business arrangement,” where she knew the score from the start, neither excuses nor condones his behavior.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 52