The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  While promoting his book in the U.S., he started up the rumor that one of Charles’s servants had witnessed the Prince of Wales having sex with a male aide. The British press was enjoined from publishing the charges but it spread like gasoline fire across the internet.

  Despite his rancor, the butler remained loyal to the Queen. “Long may she reign,” he said. “While she’s on the throne, England is safe.” But after Elizabeth II? “I think Prince William will make a wonderful King. I don’t think we’ll ever see a King Charles III and Queen Camilla on the throne.”

  Three years later he published a second book on the Princess of Wales (The Way We Were: Remembering Diana) and appeared on the British reality show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. Then he testified as a witness at the Diana inquest, claiming he knew “secrets” about her death but he produced none. He lost all public goodwill when he was caught on a U.S. videotape saying he had lied at the inquest. He admitted his testimony had been misleading and incomplete. “I know you shouldn’t play with justice and I know it’s illegal and I realize how serious it is.” The coroner implied that Burrell was tilling soil for a third tell-all book on the Princess. “It was blindingly obvious that the evidence that he gave in this court was not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” By then Burrell had flown to the U.S. to escape testifying further.

  Three years after Diana’s death the Queen finally accepted the relationship between her son and his mistress by attending a birthday lunch at which Camilla was a guest. This public gesture by Her Majesty was heralded as a royal anointment, paving the way for the couple to announce their engagement five years later. Previously, the Queen had not allowed Charles to bring Camilla to family events like the Windsors’ annual Christmas at Sandringham. At the golden jubilee celebrations, Camilla was seated behind Charles, not next to him. But by 2000 the young Princes William, then eighteen, and Harry, sixteen, had come to know Camilla as their father’s greatest supporter. In fact, Charles’s sons probably were more accepting of their father’s mistress than were his future subjects, most of whom despised the divorced woman who smoked cigarettes and chased foxes through the English countryside.

  Sensing the need to repair Camilla’s image, Charles hired public-relations specialists, wardrobe stylists, makeup artists, and hairdressers; then he dispatched her with his two top aides on a trip to Manhattan, where she was received by high society’s doyenne, Brooke Astor, then ninety-eight years old. Charles did not realize that Mrs. Astor was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s at the time. Having lost her usual diplomatic skills, she greeted Camilla by referring to the illicit love affair between Camilla’s great-grandmother Alice Keppel and Charles’s great-great-grandfather Edward VII. “Your great-grandmother would have been proud keeping this mistress business in the family,” said Mrs. Astor. Camilla accepted the gaffe graciously and bathed in the public acceptance of New York City’s reigning hostess.

  Charles had not made an official trip to the U.S. since he accompanied the Princess of Wales to the Reagan White House in 1985, when she captivated America by dancing with John Travolta. The Prince wanted the same kind of acclaim for Camilla, but her trip to the U.S. in 1999 lacked the excitement and glamour Diana had stirred.

  Having brought his young sons around, Charles now spent the next several years brokering his remarriage, with the Queen, the British government, and the Church of England in order to meet the arcane demands of his role as heir apparent. Finally, the wedding day was set for April 8, 2005. Charles, then fifty-six, insisted that his fifty-seven-year-old fiancée be given royal status, but rather than be called H.R.H. the Princess of Wales, as protocol demanded, Mrs. Parker Bowles chose to be known as the Duchess of Cornwall, after one of Charles’s lesser titles, the one that Diana had rejected during her divorce negotiations.

  Since Charles and Camilla were both divorced, and neither was an “innocent party” in the dissolution, they could not marry in the Church of England. So they had a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle followed by a service of prayer and dedication performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in St. George’s Chapel. Then Charles’s office announced that the Duchess of Cornwall would be known as the Princess Consort and upon his accession to the throne she would not be crowned Queen. This was to pacify the hard-core Diana segment within Britain, but anyone who believed that Camilla would not be called Queen when Charles became King believed that corgis flew over the White Cliffs of Dover.

  Conscious of the Queen’s position as head of the Church of England, the palace announced that she would not attend her son’s wedding, but she would attend his prayer service. On the other hand, Charles’s siblings, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward, announced they would attend their brother’s wedding along with his sons, Princes William and Harry.

  At the last minute the wedding was postponed by a day so Charles could fly to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II as the Queen’s representative. As King, Charles will become known as “Defender of the Faith,” which currently means only the Anglican faith. He has said more than once he wants to be anointed as “Defender of all Faiths,” including Roman Catholicism from which Henry VIII separated England during the sixteenth century.

  Having lived his life waiting for his mother to die so that he could assume the only job allowed him by the hereditary principle, Charles tried to make himself look like a man of the people in order to stop the burgeoning movement of Republic, a nonpartisan group pushing for Parliament to end the monarchy upon the death of the present queen.

  “Campaigning for a democratic alternative to inherited power and privilege in Britain,” Republic drew attention to the vast millions of taxpayer monies spent to support the royal family. The group also published polls showing the majority of Britons felt the Windsors should pay their own way. In 2008, the total cost to taxpayers for supporting the royal family was approximately $65 million. Republic’s opinion polls showed:

  80.7% believed Charles should pay the same taxes as everyone else.

  57.4% believed taxpayers should pay less on the royals.

  52.3% believed taxpayers should pay nothing on the royals.

  In the face of raging recession and royal fatigue the Prince of Wales struggled to make himself appear relevant as a farmer, gardener, ecologist, cookie maker, architectural critic, and philanthropist, but each public-relations ploy seemed to backfire, making him look as fusty as mothballs. The writer Christopher Hitchens dismissed him in 2010 as “the Prince of Piffle.”

  Stepping out of his apolitical role in 2002, Charles had protested the war in Iraq and was forced to cancel a trip to the U.S. because George W. Bush felt he might give aid and comfort to U.S. anti-war groups, which would undermine British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for the war. The Prince officially welcomed Bush to London the following year, and months later Charles became the first member of the royal family in thirty-three years to visit Iran. En route, he also visited British troops in Iraq, on a direct order from the Queen, who was said to be furious that her Prime Minister and his cabinet had ignored the country’s soldiers. Later on a visit to Pakistan, the Prince of Wales called for “greater religious harmony.”

  Yet it was the disharmony of religion that disrupted the carefully laid plans for his wedding, with endless press speculation about the Queen’s absence or, as some inferred, her refusal to attend a ceremony outside the church, even for her son and heir. The House of Windsor, historically a bulwark against divorce, looked surprisingly modern on April 9, 2005, when Charles took Camilla to be his bride. He was the first heir to divorce and marry twice. Standing by Charles’s side were his three siblings, two of whom were divorced and one remarried.

  Later at the wedding reception, which the Queen hosted for eight hundred guests, she raised her glass in a toast: “They have come through and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”

  Two months later, Prince William graduated from St. Andrews i
n Scotland and was only the third royal in history to earn a college degree. The Queen attended his graduation, although she had missed the Cambridge graduations of her sons Charles and Edward years before.

  Towering over his father at 6'3", William’s tall blond good looks evoked the memory of his mother and excited the media, which had made an agreement with the palace to hold off covering the Prince until he finished university. Now that he was graduating, reporters were eager to pounce, especially seeing Kate Middleton, the pretty brunette standing by his side, who also graduated from St. Andrews and was one of his housemates.

  The class-obsessed media made much of the fact that Kate’s father was “in trade,” although highly successful running a mail-order business specializing in costumes for children’s birthdays. Kate’s mother, co-founder of the business, was invariably described as “a former airline stewardess,” prompting James Whitaker, commentator on the royals, to comment: “When Mrs. Middleton met the queen she said, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ There’s nothing intrinsically wrong in that, except it categorizes you as from a certain social background.” Kate herself, characterized as “middle class Middleton,” was smart and stylish, and the public followed her courtship by Prince William avidly, but the young man appeared in no hurry to marry. Over the next five years Kate became known as “Waity Katie” after the rush of rumors about a royal engagement.

  After graduating from St. Andrews, William joined his brother Harry at Sandhurst military academy, where both received their commissions. Harry, known as Cornet Wales, sparked outrage when he went out partying, falling in the gutter after drinking too much. At Eton a teacher had accused him of cheating, but Charles’s office denied the charges, saying an Eton committee had found them unfounded. Carelessly, the spare heir visited strip clubs, experimented with drugs, groped a woman in a bar, was photographed receiving a lap dance, and brawled drunkenly with photographers. Two weeks before the Queen led Holocaust memorial ceremonies, he donned a Nazi uniform for a costume party. He later apologized for his lapse of judgment.

  On his twenty-first birthday the red-haired Prince, known as “Dirty Harry,” announced he wanted to fight with British forces in Iraq. “There is no way I am going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country,” he said. He served for ten weeks in Afghanistan and was well-praised for doing so, until stories appeared of him making frequent racist remarks. Referring to a South Asian friend as “Sooty,” he called one cadet “a Paki,” another “a raghead,” and told a black comedian, “You don’t sound like a black chap.”

  In an effort to rehabilitate his bad-boy image, Prince Harry had flown to Africa and started Sentebale (Lesotho for “Forget Me Not”) in memory of his mother’s work with orphans. Sweet pictures of him playing with parentless children reassured the British that dissolute Prince Hal might yet emerge as sublime as Shakespeare’s King Henry V, the shining victor of Agincourt. Soon “Sooty,” “Paki,” and “Raghead” were forgiven, if not forgotten.

  During this time his older brother, William, was searching for work experience and took up employment in a bank in London’s financial district for a while and then in the newsroom of a national newspaper. Hating desk work, he joined the Royal Air Force to get his wings and caused a national uproar when he flew a $15 million Chinook helicopter into his girlfriend’s back garden during an official military exercise. Eight days later he flew another Chinook to London, picked up his brother, Harry, and headed for the Isle of Wight for a stag party. The media piled on the rambunctious royals, until the palace announced that the Princes would mark the tenth anniversary of their mother’s death with a pop concert in her memory.

  “After ten years there’s been a rumbling of people bringing up the bad and over time people seem to forget—or have forgotten—all the amazing things she did and what an amazing person she was,” said William, then twenty-four years old.

  “She was a happy, fun, bubbly person who cared for so many people,” said twenty-two-year-old Harry.

  The two brothers made their first royal engagement overseas together when they visited Botswana, Lesotho, and South Africa in 2010 to support England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup. But as so often happens with the British royals, one step forward usually meant falling two steps backward.

  Just as the monarchy marched into the second decade of the new millennium, looking forward to the royal wedding of Prince William and the diamond jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, the House of Windsor shot itself in the foot—again. This time the self-inflicted wound came from the “Duchess of Dough,” Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Britain’s trade representative, Prince Andrew. At the age of fifty, Fergie, again millions of dollars in debt, was caught in a video sting by the News of the World for selling access to Andrew for more than $750,000 and walking off with a black bag containing a down payment of $40,000 in cash.

  This was not the first time Her Majesty’s relatives had been caught with their hands out, grasping for riches. Financial desperation seemed to be the fault line for the minor royals, including the Queen’s youngest son, Edward, who had resigned from the military because he said he couldn’t hack it. He then limped along, trying to find suitable work, and finally became a television producer, making films on his royal relatives that did not sell. When his crew began following Prince William for an exclusive series, the British media objected, saying Edward was trading on his royal status for access that rightfully belonged to them. For once the palace sided with the press.

  Rumored to be homosexual, thirty-five-year-old Prince Edward had married Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1999, and Sophie, a commoner, became the Countess of Wessex. With cachet but no cash, the bland-looking blonde said she was going to become the first senior royal to be a commercially successful business woman. She started her own public-relations firm and immediately attracted high-end accounts. Eventually the firm fell into bankruptcy after the News of the World caught her on video bragging about her royal contacts, berating British politicians, and denying her husband was homosexual. She also refused to assume the humanitarian mantle of the Princess of Wales as the public expected of her. After the video was made public, The Count and Countess of Wessex immediately “retired” to their forty-seven-room mansion in Surrey to raise their two children. The Queen increased their royal allowance so they could get out of business for themselves and live on the taxpayer teat, further enraging Republicans.

  More than a decade after the stench of the royal son and daughter-in-law had been evaporated, the News of the World struck again. This time the tabloid caught the Duchess of York selling herself for a mess of pottage. At the time, people around the world were transfixed with horror, watching the video of BP’s oil spill forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. Interrupting round-the-clock coverage of the worst environmental disaster in history, Fergie’s video on May 23, 2010, was almost comic relief.

  Days later the disgraced Duchess announced she was going on The Oprah Winfrey Show to explain what had happened. For one long hour she braided herself into knots with a yarn about why she had accepted bribes and sold access to her former husband. She said she grabbed the first bag of money ($40,000) “for a friend of a friend,” who was in financial trouble. Then, seeing how easy that take was, she upped her ante and demanded $750,000 for full and complete access to Prince Andrew.

  Watching the video of herself falling for the sting, she said, “Oh, I feel so sorry for her… Bless her… Oh, she’s completely drunk.” She talked about herself in the third person as if to draw a distinction between the greedy woman on camera and the humiliated person sitting in front of Oprah. Tripping over her rationale, the Duchess got tangled in her convoluted skein about accepting money for “a friend of a friend,” and Oprah, to her credit, said her explanation made no sense.

  Oprah, whose net worth is $2.4 billion, could not fathom why the Duchess hadn’t simply asked the Queen for the $40,000 she claimed she needed “for a friend of
a friend.” Obviously, Oprah’s producers had not told her that the door of Buckingham Palace had clanged shut on Sarah Ferguson in August 1992, when photographs of her romping topless on the Côte d’Azur splashed across the tabloids. She was having her toes sucked by her lover John Bryan, who she said was “just a friend.” He protested he was not sucking her toes: “I was kissing the arch of her foot.”

  After that Sarah got the royal boot and a not-so-royal divorce settlement from the Queen’s favorite son. When Oprah asked if it was true that she had gotten only $20,000 a year in alimony, Sarah should have answered: “No, it’s not true.” Instead, she shimmied. “I wanted friendship with the boss,” she said, leaving the impression that she had given up great gobs of money to remain in the good graces of Her Majesty.

  In fact, Sarah had demanded a lump-sum payment of $10 million, plus $5,000 a month in child support, and her title. She received $750,000 for herself, and a $2.1 million trust fund for her children, and she was stripped of her title, which meant she lost all of her royal perquisites: the royal curtsy, the royal guards, the royal train, the royal yacht, the royal trips, the royal invitations. She also lost her standing in British society.

  So the plucky Duchess came to America and turned herself into a money-making machine. Over the next decade she made (and spent) in excess of $30 million. She hawked herself to the highest bidder, selling exclusive photo shoots for $25,000, exclusive interviews for $50,000 to $200,000. She signed children’s book contracts, including rights for a television series and merchandising opportunities, for $8 million. She signed licensing contracts with thirteen U.S. firms to market souvenirs. She also signed a $3 million contract to write her life story, which she promoted on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Then she signed a $10 million contract with Weight Watchers and traveled the world (all first-class expenses paid) as its spokesperson.