Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne by Christopher Andersen
Authors: Christopher Andersen
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think she’ll be causing any trouble.” (“How wrong can you be?” Tryon laughed when she recounted the exchange years later.)
After the Prince’s two mistresses named Diana as their top pick for a royal bride, Diana’s name was added to the royal calendar. Charles and Diana’s first date was a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall followed by a cold buffet in Charles’s private quarters at Buckingham Palace. Later, Charles invited Diana to spend a weekend of sailing at Cowes, the picturesque seaport town on the Isle of Wight, followed by the mostprized invitation of all: the chance to join the Prince for fishing, hiking, and other country pursuits at the Royal Family’s favorite and decidedly most rustic venue, Balmoral Castle.
For all their considerable powers of persuasion, Charles’s mistresses at first could not convince him that the shy girl with the upward glance was the one. They got some assistance in the unlikely form of two key figures whom Diana would ultimately come to view as her mortal enemies: the Queen’s private secretary Robert Fellowes, who was married to Diana’s sister Jane, and the Queen Mother, whose most trusted lady-in-waiting was Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy.
Unlike nearly all other candidates for the position, Diana possessed what was regarded as the most important qualification. “All my friends had boyfriends but not me,” she later said, “because I knew that I had to keep myself tidy for whatever was coming my way.”
“First on the list was virginity,” Brooks-Baker said of three basic requirements a royal bride would have to possess. “Second was the ability to do the job. Third, she must be seen to have the potential to bear heirs to the throne.” Those heirs, descended from one of England’s oldest families, the Spencers, would turn out to be more authentically British than the Teutonic Windsors.
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FOR MONTHS, CAMILLA HAD BEEN worried about the psychological toll all the pressure to wed an heir was having on the man she loved. Philip routinely harangued his son about the immediate need to produce an heir, and after each tension-filled conversation with his father, Charles turned to Camilla for consolation. Camilla was the woman he loved, he told her, and she was thewoman he wanted to marry. Certainly Parker Bowles, who was now seventy-six hundred miles away in Rhodesia to assist in that country’s transition to full independence as the state of Zimbabwe, had given Camilla grounds for divorce. In his short time in Africa, Camilla’s faithless spouse had already cheated on his wife with two different women—affairs that were duly chronicled in Britain’s unslakable tabloid press.
Charles urged Camilla to leave her husband—the first step, perhaps, in a process that might somehow eventually lead to marriage for “Fred” and “Gladys.” They both knew, of course, that this was impossible. Camilla also had her own interests in mind. While she held no place at court—the Queen and her mother heartily disapproved of Charles’s “friendship” with Mrs. Parker Bowles—Camilla did not wish to be seen as another Wallis Simpson coming between a future king and his destiny.
Nevertheless, Charles continued to stall, leaving a bewildered Diana to wonder if he would ever pop the question. Hounded by reporters, Diana became increasingly desperate. “She came through the door one day and burst out weeping,” one of her roommates recalled.
“He won’t ask me,” she cried. “I don’t understand. Why won’t he ask me?”
Convinced by Camilla that Diana was too young and unaffected to suspect anything—and that if Diana did find out about their affair she would simply accept it as a fact of royal married life—Charles asked the Queen for her approval. Elizabeth, evidently unaware of all the behind-the-scenes intrigue, was delighted; she and the rest of the Royal Family were fond of Diana, and particularly impressed with how she had
After the Prince’s two mistresses named Diana as their top pick for a royal bride, Diana’s name was added to the royal calendar. Charles and Diana’s first date was a performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Royal Albert Hall followed by a cold buffet in Charles’s private quarters at Buckingham Palace. Later, Charles invited Diana to spend a weekend of sailing at Cowes, the picturesque seaport town on the Isle of Wight, followed by the mostprized invitation of all: the chance to join the Prince for fishing, hiking, and other country pursuits at the Royal Family’s favorite and decidedly most rustic venue, Balmoral Castle.
For all their considerable powers of persuasion, Charles’s mistresses at first could not convince him that the shy girl with the upward glance was the one. They got some assistance in the unlikely form of two key figures whom Diana would ultimately come to view as her mortal enemies: the Queen’s private secretary Robert Fellowes, who was married to Diana’s sister Jane, and the Queen Mother, whose most trusted lady-in-waiting was Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy.
Unlike nearly all other candidates for the position, Diana possessed what was regarded as the most important qualification. “All my friends had boyfriends but not me,” she later said, “because I knew that I had to keep myself tidy for whatever was coming my way.”
“First on the list was virginity,” Brooks-Baker said of three basic requirements a royal bride would have to possess. “Second was the ability to do the job. Third, she must be seen to have the potential to bear heirs to the throne.” Those heirs, descended from one of England’s oldest families, the Spencers, would turn out to be more authentically British than the Teutonic Windsors.
----
FOR MONTHS, CAMILLA HAD BEEN worried about the psychological toll all the pressure to wed an heir was having on the man she loved. Philip routinely harangued his son about the immediate need to produce an heir, and after each tension-filled conversation with his father, Charles turned to Camilla for consolation. Camilla was the woman he loved, he told her, and she was thewoman he wanted to marry. Certainly Parker Bowles, who was now seventy-six hundred miles away in Rhodesia to assist in that country’s transition to full independence as the state of Zimbabwe, had given Camilla grounds for divorce. In his short time in Africa, Camilla’s faithless spouse had already cheated on his wife with two different women—affairs that were duly chronicled in Britain’s unslakable tabloid press.
Charles urged Camilla to leave her husband—the first step, perhaps, in a process that might somehow eventually lead to marriage for “Fred” and “Gladys.” They both knew, of course, that this was impossible. Camilla also had her own interests in mind. While she held no place at court—the Queen and her mother heartily disapproved of Charles’s “friendship” with Mrs. Parker Bowles—Camilla did not wish to be seen as another Wallis Simpson coming between a future king and his destiny.
Nevertheless, Charles continued to stall, leaving a bewildered Diana to wonder if he would ever pop the question. Hounded by reporters, Diana became increasingly desperate. “She came through the door one day and burst out weeping,” one of her roommates recalled.
“He won’t ask me,” she cried. “I don’t understand. Why won’t he ask me?”
Convinced by Camilla that Diana was too young and unaffected to suspect anything—and that if Diana did find out about their affair she would simply accept it as a fact of royal married life—Charles asked the Queen for her approval. Elizabeth, evidently unaware of all the behind-the-scenes intrigue, was delighted; she and the rest of the Royal Family were fond of Diana, and particularly impressed with how she had
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