Sex with Kings by Eleanor Herman Page B

“My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress,” she said. “How about it?” 12
    Camilla, indeed, possessed many of the qualities that had made her great-grandmother a successful royal mistress. Though neither was classically beautiful, both had a colorful personality, dry wit, kindness, and intelligence that attracted more than high cheekbones or full lips. Both were fiercely loyal to their royal lovers, reassuring, calm, capable, and—rare in a world of scepters and crowns—unpretentious. Both were described by their contemporaries as exuding a raw sex appeal that cannot be captured in photographs.
    Charles was immediately intrigued. Camilla was already an experienced woman of the world with the reputation of being a sizzling sex partner; the prince was comparatively inexperienced. The two of them dated for nearly three years, Charles wanting desperately to marry her. But the royal family was not amused—though from a proper English family, Camilla was no virgin. Nor was Camilla herself very interested in living in the fishbowl of Buckingham Palace. While Charles was in the Royal Navy,Camilla married her old flame Andrew Parker-Bowles. Hearing the news, the prince locked himself in his cabin for hours and emerged red-eyed.
    They remained friends, however, and became lovers once again in 1980 as Camilla’s marriage gracefully deteriorated. Camilla, always on the lookout for a potential royal bride, pushed Charles into the arms of Diana, Lady Spencer. Camilla felt Diana was young and pliable enough to mold herself to Charles and palace life. She was from a noble family and boasted that most vital prerequisite of a princess bride: an unpenetrated hymen. Charles, deeply in love with Camilla, had serious doubts; his wooing of Diana was halfhearted and lackluster. He had been raised, however, to do his duty for his country and so allowed himself to be pushed down the path to the altar.
    According to the prince’s valet at the time, Stephen Barry, just before his engagement to Diana was announced Charles said, “I’m making an awful bloody mistake.” 13 Days before the wedding, Barry said, “He told myself and Lord Romsey that Camilla was the only woman he had ever loved. He told us: I could never feel the same way about Diana as I do about Camilla.” 14 In the eighteenth-century tradition, family friend Lord Romsey assured Charles that in time his feelings would change and he would grow to love Diana.
    Diana, though only nineteen, quickly picked up on Charles’s love for Camilla and began to detest her. Though Camilla was invited to the wedding, Diana struck her name from the guest list for the wedding breakfast and the reception. A few days before the wedding, Diana found a wrapped gift from Charles to Camilla on the desk of his assistant. She opened it and found a bracelet. Diana felt it was highly inappropriate for Charles to give an old girlfriend such a gift days before his wedding. She almost canceled the wedding of the century.
    Diana certainly would have canceled had she known that the night before the wedding, while she was keeping a virginal vigil, her prince was rolling in bed with Camilla. He intended to be faithful to his wife, but wanted to get in one last night with his mistress as a single man.
    Charles was caught between the pincers of Baroque traditions and modern values. His marriage for dynastic purposes to a woman he did not love—no matter how beautiful—was just as much a sacrifice as Louis XIV’s to the dwarflike infanta of Spain. Diana, on the other hand, was living in the late twentieth century—not the seventeenth—fully believing Charles was marrying her for love. She had not been raised at a court where royal mistresses were an accepted convention that unloved royal wives were expected to endure with dignity. Worst of all, she had hoped that Charles was the solution to her life of aimless