Prince Rainier outlived his wife by nearly twenty-three years. During the last three years of his life, he struggled with numerous health issues and was hospitalized for coronary problems in 2004. He died on April 6, 2005, at the age of eighty-one, and was succeeded by their only son, Prince Albert.
CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES B. 1948
and
LADY DIANA SPENCER
1961-1997
married 1981-1996
and
CAMILLA PARKER BOWLES
b. 1947
married 2005-
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
—Diana to Martin Bashir, Panorama interview, November 1995
ON JULY 29, 1981, THE ENTIRE WORLD WATCHED AS nineteen-year-old Lady Diana Spencer walked down the carpeted aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral to wed the thirty-two-year-old Prince of Wales, heir to the English throne.
The bride was wearing a puff-sleeved, full-skirted ivory confection that would be copied for years to come by wannabe princesses, even though the designers apparently forgot that Diana’s twenty-five-foot train would somehow have to be stuffed into the glass coach that brought her to the cathedral.
Nor did anyone realize at the time that when Prince Charles spoke the words “forsaking all others till death us do part” before the Archbishop of Canterbury, his family, friends, and much of the rest of the known universe—he never intended to keep his vow.
So who was the tall shy blonde inside the voluminous, and somewhat wrinkled, dress? And what journey had her life taken before that fateful trip to the altar and—to all but the key players—a storybook wedding?
Born the Honorable Diana Spencer, she boasted a better pedigree than Prince Charles. The House of Windsor is a twentieth-century creation that evolved from the German houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Hanover. The first Hanover to sit on the English throne was George I, whose reign began in 1714.
Diana, however, could trace her aristocratic lineage to the reign of James I (1603-25), who created the 1st Baron Spencer. The title was upgraded to an earldom by George III in 1765. She was the third daughter of Viscount Althorp, who became the 8th Earl Spencer on the death of his father in 1975, and his wife, the former Frances Roche, the younger daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy. Their 1954 nuptials had been considered “the society wedding of the year.” But when Diana was six years old her parents’ marriage collapsed after Frances fell in love with a married businessman, Peter Shand Kydd, and left her young family, eventually marrying her lover on May 2, 1969. Frances and Johnnie Althorp endured an acrimonious divorce battle. Because Johnnie was a powerful nobleman, he gained custody of their four children; however, Johnnie was not exactly a hands-on father, and the two youngest Spencer children, Diana and Charles, often cried themselves to sleep, missing their mummy.
Diana was educated at various boarding schools, never excelling academically. She twice failed her O levels, the most basic high school exams. But she was praised for her artistic talents, and won awards for her impeccable care of various guinea pigs. She also had a natural aptitude for relating to seniors, younger children, and the infirm, which formed part of the schools’ community outreach programs.
During her teenage, pre-Charles years, Diana’s chums described her as “A strong character, buoyant and noisy.” She also loved to eat.
A stint at a Swiss finishing school proved a bust because Diana got nothing out of it, so she convinced her parents they were wasting their money and returned to England. By then, she was beginning to blossom. According to her brother, “Suddenly the insignificant ugly duckling was obviously going to be a swan.”
She tagged along with her oldest sister’s social set, harboring crushes on Sarah Spencer’s cast-off boyfriends, never really having one of her own. Her innate sense of destiny told her that she “had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.”
The Spencer children’s step-grandmother was the romance novelist Barbara Cartland, and, according to the princess’s biographer Tina Brown, the teenage Diana devoured Cartland’s books, especially the ones where the plot revolved around marrying a prince or a king. As ambitious as she was naïve, Diana craved the same fate. Ironically, even though most of Sarah’s former beaux didn’t give her a second look, Diana would eventually end up wedding one of them.
Charles Philip Arthur George, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland was born on the night of November 14, 1948, to the Princess Elizabeth, who stood next in line to the English throne. His father is Elizabeth’s fourth cousin, the Greek-born Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the title he was granted on his wedding day. Queen Elizabeth made her husband a Prince of the United Kingdom in 1957, and although he is Her Majesty’s consort because he is her spouse, and is styled “His Royal Highness,” he does not bear the title “King Consort” or “Prince Consort.” Philip’s mother, a descendant of Queen Victoria, was known as Princess Alice of Battenberg, but in 1917 the family anglicized its name to Mountbatten, and England’s current ruling family is occasionally referred to as the Windsor-Mountbattens, or even as the Mountbatten-Windsors, although by royal decree they are the House of Windsor.
When Charles was just three years old, his mother acceded to the throne on the death of his fifty-six-year-old grandfather, George VI, in February 1952. This left the twenty-five-year-old queen with little time to devote to her young family.
Prince Philip was a stern figure and rebuked Charles for what he perceived to be a lack of rigor and robustness. As a child, Charles attended the Cheam preparatory school, where he would cry himself to sleep. And at thirteen, in 1962, he was enrolled in his father’s alma mater, Gordonstoun, a rigid academy on Scotland’s northeast coast. Charles was utterly miserable there. His schoolmates made sucking noises whenever he walked by. Anyone who befriended him was considered a brownnoser and teased mercilessly, so the young heir found himself utterly alone. He begged to come home, but his father was intent on making a man of him.
At Gordonstoun Charles had been deliberately kept extremely sheltered from the opposite sex, lest there be any embarrassing scrapes involving unsavory or overly ambitious young ladies. No surprise then that according to Penny Junor, one of his biographers, Charles “had a number of girlfriends” after he reached adulthood, “. . . but the relationships were mostly platonic. Not a natural womanizer, he was far more likely to present a girl with some hideous practical joke—like the envelope he gave to one which exploded with rubber bands when she opened it—than a single rose.”
On July 1, 1969, the twenty-year-old heir was formally invested as Prince of Wales. After a tour of his new realm he returned to university, eventually completing four terms at Trinity College.
In 1970 a seemingly insignificant event took place; however, it was the proverbial tremble of a butterfly’s wing that culminates in a tsunami. Charles met the woman who would become his great love—Camilla Shand.
Camilla was the daughter of the Hon. Rosalind Cubitt and Bruce Shand, a World War II hero and an educational films representative who spent the better part of his time playing the country squire, indulging his passion for horses and hounds. Unlike Charles, who had to greet his mother with a handshake, and Diana, whose parents were both absentees, Camilla grew up in a loving family environment.
Camilla bravely toughed out Dumbrells, a boarding school known for its Spartan atmosphere and positively Victorian deprivations. And as she navigated the shoals of adolescence Camilla also proved herself quite sexually precocious, according to royal biographer Christopher Wilson. Homely, but voluptuous, she was a daring athlete who cheerfully wore dowdy tweeds and twinsets when her girlfriends flashed their thighs in Mary Quant miniskirts. She had a confidence, an “inner glow” as her friends described it, that made her extremely attractive and very likable among her posher pals—as well as with the boys.
But
Camilla’s real claim to fame was the way in which she introduced herself to Prince Charles. At a party at Smith’s Lawn following a polo match at the Royal Horse Guards’ Polo Club in Windsor, Camilla sauntered up to the prince and purportedly announced, “My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers—so how about it?”
Camilla’s scandalous ancestress was Alice Keppel, nicknamed “La Favorita” by royal insiders. For the last dozen years of his life she was the royal paramour of Queen Victoria’s son “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII. She was even at his bedside, much to the annoyance of his wife, Queen Alexandra, when he died in 1910. Mrs. Keppel remained married throughout her royal affair; her husband, George, was thought to be completely at ease with the arrangement, the ultimate mari complaisant.
According to Kevin Burke, to whom Camilla lost her virginity in 1965, her debutante year, she was obsessed with following in Mrs. Keppel’s footsteps. “She was always mentioning it, as if it were something almost talismanic.” So when her path crossed Prince Charles’s, Camilla seized what she considered to be her birthright. With the tenacity of one of her Jack Russell terriers, she never let go. People who saw Camilla and Charles during that first meeting described their attraction as a coup de foudre, a blazing spark of passion and sexual chemistry. The intense magnetism they shared, even from across a room, was apparent to even the most casual of onlookers.
There would be three people in that relationship as well.
Before she met Charles, Camilla had dumped Burke for her Grand Passion. She had fallen hard for Andrew Parker Bowles, a Roman Catholic army officer eight years her senior who was handsome, dashing, and, according to biographer Christopher Wilson, as much of a rake as Camilla was boy crazy. But when Andrew was posted to Germany, Camilla consoled herself at home by hanging out at the Guards’ Polo Club at Windsor. Fate and proximity combined to place her in the right venue at the right time to continue what her ancestor had begun.
In the autumn of 1971, duty called and Charles began his career with the Royal Navy, embarking on five years of military service that precluded his presence on English soil for many months at a stretch. Camilla got on with her life, finally marrying Andrew Parker Bowles in July 1973.
So, if the Prince of Wales was so passionately enamored of Camilla’s charms, why did he never pop the question when he had the chance? The answer is that he couldn’t ask Camilla to be his bride.
It might have been the early 1970s in the rest of the world, but the House of Windsor was stuck in a time warp, partly of its own making and partly because even if it wanted to, it was bound by existing laws governing the monarchy. Tradition dictated that the Prince of Wales had to marry a virgin. And Camilla had a sexual past that could not be overlooked. Also working against her was the fact that she wasn’t quite blue-blooded enough, although she had attended some of the best schools and her father was a courtier, in service to the crown. There was another factor, too. The suits at the palace knew that Camilla’s looks would be a very tough sell to the British subjects, who wanted a beautiful “fairy-tale-princess” face to adorn their commemorative plates, shot glasses, and tea towels.
But Charles and Camilla were not ready to part ways. And in the future his relationship with her would be termed “nonnegotiable,” whether Charles was dealing with Machiavellian palace courtiers (“the men in gray,” as Diana called them), his mother, or his wife.
From 1972 to 1980, while he was supposed to be seeking a bride, the prince enjoyed a romantic rootlessness, dating several women, some of whom from time to time were heralded by the Fleet Street press as the future Princess of Wales. But something always happened. The sexually experienced women self-eliminated. The virginal aristocrats had plans for their own futures that did not include gilded cages and tiaras or grew quickly disenchanted with Charles’s self-centered manner born of privilege and honed with noblesse oblige. Yet for all his playing the field, the prince didn’t seem to be having much fun. Women who knew him then and bothered to take his measure described him as lonely and melancholy.
Camilla, meanwhile, was keen to have it all. As desperate as she had been to marry Andrew Parker Bowles, she wanted to retain her status as royal mistress. She and Charles rekindled their affair soon after the Parker Bowleses wed.
Occasionally, members of the press caught Charles and Camilla together during the mid-1970s and printed tart implications about their relationship, but it never became a subject of much scrutiny. At the prince’s request Camilla brazenly accompanied him as his “official escort” when he traveled on business overseas. Referring to the prince’s tour of Zimbabwe, a Foreign Office source conveyed his utter disgust that everyone there knew “the royal family’s envoy had brought his popsy along with him. The lack of tact was indescribable. It just made a joke out of the whole thing.”
Camilla was the prince’s confidante in every way, privy to his most intimate frustrations, joys, and sorrows. She vetted his girlfriends as future princess material and knew what moves Charles intended to make long before the hapless women did.
Resigned to his responsibilities, Prince Charles told the media, “I think one must concentrate on marriage being essentially a question of mutual love and respect for each other. . . . Essentially you must be good friends, and love, I’m sure will grow out of that friendship. I have a particular responsibility to ensure that I make the right decision. The last thing I could possibly entertain is getting divorced.”
He neglected to mention that his married lover was helping him choose someone who would never prove a threat to their liaison.
Her Majesty was not the slightest bit amused by Charles’s adulterous philandering, and despite her son’s protests, refused to meet Camilla or ever to be in the same room with her. The monarch is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which does not condone adultery. By 1980 Prince Philip, too, had had enough. Charles had agreed to settle down and choose a bride when he turned thirty, a milestone he’d passed two years earlier. What was he waiting for? They were running out of well-bred Protestant virgins. It was time to grow up and do his duty.
The Prince of Wales first met Diana Spencer in 1977 on the Althorp estate when he was dating her older sister, Sarah. His first impressions of her were that she was “a very jolly and amusing and attractive sixteen-year-old, full of fun.”
Yet Diana’s gut reaction to the prince was less salubrious. “What a sad man,” she observed. She “kept out of the way” at a dance the Spencers hosted that weekend. “I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady, but I made a lot of noise and he liked that.”
Charles fancied Diana’s boisterous behavior enough to ask her to give him a tour of the Spencers’ illustrious picture gallery, but the competitive Sarah edged her out of the way. Lest readers form the impression that Charles would carnally know two of the three Spencer girls, in interviews Sarah insisted that her relationship with Charles had been “totally platonic. I think of him as the big brother I never had.”
Sarah was scratched from the royal scorecard, but Charles kept her younger sister in his sights. In 1978, Diana was surprised to receive an invitation to the prince’s thirtieth birthday party. And in February 1979, when she was living in a flat in London’s Colherne Court with a passel of female roommates and working as a kindergarten teacher and part-time cleaning lady (whose clients included Sarah), Diana was invited to join a royal house party at Sandringham.
Lucinda “Beryl” Craig, one of Diana’s roommates, teased her about the possible outcome of the event. “Gosh, perhaps you are going to be the next queen of England.”
Diana, who at the time was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor, looked up from her rag and replied, “Beryl, I doubt it. Can you see me swanning around in kid gloves and a ballgown?”
Well, yes, actually.
It was a classic Cinderella moment.
In July 1980, Diana was invited to a house party by Philip de Pass, the son of two close friends of P
rince Philip. At the last minute, she was told that Prince Charles would be there as well. “You’re young blood, you might amuse him,” Philip de Pass told her.
Charles had been devastated by the recent assassination of his great-uncle and mentor, Lord Mountbatten, whose sailboat had been blown apart by an IRA bomb. After a polo match that weekend, sitting on a hay bale beside the prince, the intuitive Diana ventured to share her reaction when she saw him at his “uncle Dickie’s” funeral. “My heart bled for you . . . it’s wrong, you’re lonely, you should be with someone to look after you.”
For a brief moment Charles forgot about Camilla Parker Bowles, and saw the solicitous Diana Spencer in a new light.
In Diana’s words, Charles “was all over me” that weekend. “I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t very cool’—I thought men weren’t supposed to be so obvious. . . . The next minute he leapt on me practically . . . and I wasn’t sure how to cope with it.”
But pawing her at the de Passes was one of the few times that Charles ever did make an effort to romance Diana.
Over the next few months the prince embarked on a whirlwind, if tepid, courtship. Diana was put through the gauntlet of royal trials—including the obligatory visit to Balmoral and the sailing excursion to Cowes aboard the royal yacht, Britannia. The starry-eyed press, eager for a royal wedding, practically had them married already. Although Diana admitted in Andrew Morton’s revised biography that her experience of men was practically nil, she was certainly aware that she was not being wooed in anything resembling the customary fashion; she and Charles were never alone. They were always accompanied by members of his family or his closely knit circle of friends several years her senior, which invariably included Camilla and Tom Parker Bowles. Camilla was convinced she had found the perfect royal bride, cheerfully telling a friend, “She’s like a mouse.”
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 50
