Prince Harry’s love life is back in the news after he was spotted with 23-year-old blonde beauty Cressida Bonas at a London nightclub last week.
Although it can sometimes seem like Prince Harry is a modern-day Lothario, he has in fact had very few relationships, compared to his notorious Uncle Andrew, his father, and even, whisper it, his saintly mum.
Folowing our first installment on the sex lives of the British royals focusing on historical kinks, news of Harry’s new flirtation prompted the Royalist to bring things bang up to date.Prince Andrew
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Speaking of Prince Harry, it’s always well to recall that there was a time in the 1980s when Prince Andrew occupied the role currently reserved for Prince Harry in the media—the Royal Family’s swinger in chief, lionized by the press for his red-blooded antics.
When he returned from active service in the Falkland Islands conflict he greeted his mother, the Queen, on the dockside with a red rose clenched between his teeth, and promptly embarked on a string of glamorous, headline-friendly romances.
He became known in the press by the nickname Randy Andy for his exploits. (He is now called, less excitingly, Air Miles Andy for his frequent trips in first class at taxpayers’ expense.)
Ingrid Seward wrote recently in the Telegraph that when Prince Andrew tired of romancing a pretty dancer and turned his attentions to Koo Stark, he instructed the Buckingham Palace switchboard not to put the dancer through when she rang.
He was reportedly forced to ditch Koo, after it emerged that she had once appeared naked in a film of dubious quality. His marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986 produced two children, Beatrice and Eugenie, but the couple separated in 1992 and were divorced four years later, although Sarah Ferguson still lives in the family home, Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, when she is in the U.K.
“They live separate lives under the same roof,” a source told the London Times last year. “They eat meals together, but if he is entertaining, she will make sure she is not around.”
Since the separation, it seems Andrew has embarked with renewed gusto on his Lothario lifestyle, having reportedly dated a number of women, including Denise Martell, a former Playboy model from Los Angeles, who claimed to have had a three-day fling with Andrew in the course of which he allowed her to tuck him into bed wearing, somewhat confusingly, boxer shorts. Other reported girlfriends have included PR girls Aurelia Cecil and Caroline Stanbury, and the businesswoman Amanda Staveley, whom he reportedly came close to marrying. In an interview with the Financial Times last year, Stavely refused to confirm or deny that she had “turned her back” on a marriage proposal, saying only that Andrew was a “very considerate boyfriend” and a “very special man.”
One former girlfriend, according to a Vanity Fair profile of the prince, has said that one of his bedroom routines is to model his girlfriends' underwear by way of a joke.
When it comes to love shacks, Andrew has an irresistible aphrodisiac in the form of a suite of three private rooms at Buckingham Palace. Girlfriends are rarely taken to Royal Lodge, the amazing 17th-century mansion he inherited from the late Queen Mother (although Angie Everhart did apparently stay there).
A woman who knows Andrew well told The Times, “[He is] pretty base in terms of women,” she said. “He is a boobs-and-bum man. There is nothing sophisticated about it. One minute you’re having your bum pinched, and the next minute he is reminding you he is Your Royal Highness.”
The most bizarre incident of recent times came when Courtney Love announced on-air during an interview with Russell Brand on Britain's Channel 4 that Andrew had turned up at her house at 1 in the morning, looking “to party."
"He's come to Hollywood to look for chicks. I don't know what he expected at my house; I think he thought it was going to be like a party," Love said.
Andrew’s spokesman was forced to admit the Prince had visited her house, but claimed the prince—teetotal since the age of 19—only had a cup of tea.
Last year, Prince Andrew stepped down from his job as U.K. trade ambassador following a damaging scandal over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire money-manager who was sentenced to 18 months in jail in 2008 after admitting to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. Epstein was alleged to have used his fleet of private aircraft to send underage girls around the world for sex, and a photograph surfaced of Andrew with his arm around the waist of one of these girls, then-17-year-old Virginia Roberts (there is no suggestion Andrew had any sexual involvement with the girl).Prince Philip
A month before his wife, Queen Elizabeth, was due to give birth, Philip was introduced to Pat Kirkwood, “the first of the showgirls with whom he was rumored to have had an affair,” according to Philip Eade in his biography The Young Prince Philip. No wonder Philip was supposedly interested—the critic Kenneth Tynan once pronounced Kirkwood’s legs to be “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Philip had another girlfriend whom he would meet privately at one of the royal houses, according to Eade. A Grenadier Guardsman would serve the couple “gin and orange and beef sandwiches by the open fire.” During these visits, the book says, Philip would use the servants’ entrance and as he left would say to the soldier, “Don’t forget, you haven’t seen me.”
According to Eade, in his youth Philip was a member of a lunch club that enjoyed “rip-roaring stag parties” every Thursday. Other members included editors of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, as well as Kim Philby, Peter Ustinov, and David Niven. Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who provided prostitutes to government minister John Profumo, was also a member.
Eade recounts the rumor that Philip was the mysterious “man in the mask” who had served dinner to Ward’s guests wearing only a small lace apron, and the gossip magazine Private Eye took to calling Philip “The Naked Waiter.”
Before his marriage to the Queen, Philip dated society beauty Osla Benning, a Canadian debutante, whom he met in 1939. She was “invincibly ignorant on all sexual matters” and once “caused a mild sensation in a nightclub when she loudly complained that it was very inconsiderate of her boyfriend always to carry his torch [flashlight, in U.S. parlance] in his pocket as it was so uncomfortable when dancing,” reports Eade.
Just after World War II, immediately after the arrangement for his marriage had been made, Philip was on tour in Australia and was said to have had a couple of flings.
Other women with whom he has been linked include his cousin Princess Alexandra, Italian Countess Bonnie Frescobaldi, actress Anna Massey, and Jane, Countess of Westmorland.
Philip denies all the affair rumors, saying: "How could I? I've had a detective in my company, night and day, since 1947."
Prince Edward
Poor Edward has had to face frequent claims that he is gay, because he has had so few girlfriends. He met his wife, Sophie, in 1994 and the two have been together since.
He did date a model named Romy Adlington in the 1980s, who, according to Ingrid Seward, was given an adjoining room to Prince Edward at Balmoral. During her visit to Scotland, Romy joined a shooting party. “I was so cold,” she said, “I was blue in the face. The Queen Mother came over to me and offered me a large slug of sloe gin: ‘This will warm you up from the inside.'”
Former weather girl Ulrika Jonsson is thought to have had a relationship with Edward. She once said: "He's not gay but I'm not telling you how I know."
Actress and singer girl Ruthie Henshall told BBC's Desert Island Discs presenter Kirsty Young she had dated the prince "solidly for a couple of years, but on and off for five."
"We couldn't quite let go," she added.
During the courtship she would go to Buckingham Palace "quite a lot...because he lived there," she said.
This would usually involved being "smuggled" in in her car because the relationship was not public knowledge.
"It always make me laugh, I'd sort of say, 'I'm going to my boyfriend's tonight.' Nobody knew who he was."
When asked about the romantic notion of "the Prince and the showgirl," she said: "It was very exciting, but I genuinely fell in love with him."
Despite her feelings, she could not see herself becoming part of the Royal family, she said, because she was aware she would not be able to continue her stage career.
"I think I had hopes that we could walk on in our relationship but really and truthfully I think I was very aware that I wouldn't be able to do what I do for a living if I'd have stayed with him."Fergie
Sarah Ferguson was separated from her husband Prince Andrew when photographs were taken of American businessman John Bryan sucking her toes in August 1992. The pictures were printed in the U.K. tabloids, causing a predictable sensation.
The relationship with Andrew was difficult. She once said: “Two weeks after we got married, Andrew went to sea, and then I only saw him for 40 days a year for the first five years of our marriage. I think, once we'd realised we were being kept apart, we should have fought for him to leave the Navy and for him to have become Governor General of Canada. If we had, maybe we'd still be together now.” Prince Charles
Prince Charles has had a varied love life. In 1974, Lord Mountbatten, his godfather, advised him: "In a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for...It is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage."
Robert Lacey, quoting the letter in his book The Queen, sums up this advice as, “Fuck ‘em all, then a marry a virgin.”
He apparently did just that.
Aside from his relationship with Camilla, (“My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather,” was Camilla’s reputed come-on line when she met Charles, “So how about it?”) he also reportedly had an affair with Aussie blond bombshell Kanga Tryon, who met Charles in Australia in 1966 when the Charles spent two terms at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria.
But "the bedded could not be wedded" and she married the merchant banker Anthony Tryon, one of Charles’s oldest friends, in 1973.
A Channel 4 documentary, High Society, claimed that for a time both Kanga and Camilla were Charles’s mistress.Lady Diana
Diana's former butler Paul Burrell has claimed the Princess had nine suitors after her divorce. According to Burrell, they included:
Dodi Fayed, whom she was seeing at the time of her death.
Hasnat Khan, the heart surgeon nicknamed "Mr Wonderful" by Diana. Diana contemplated converting to Islam to marry him.
James Gilbey, the other party in the "Squidgy” tapes, who, during a phone conversation recorded between the pair on the New Year's Eve of 1989, called Di "Squidgy" 14 times.
James Hewitt, the arch-cad, who sold the story of his long-term relationship to Di to the papers.
In 2004, previously unseen video of Diana played on NBC described how she and Charles met only 13 times before they were married, and made love just once every three weeks.Prince Harry
Harry has struggled to find love since separating from his long-term girlfriend Chelsy Davy last year after she reportedly balked at living a public life following the Royal wedding.
He said in a TV interview that he was looking for someone willing to "take on" the job.
Harry has been linked to a number of girls, including Astrid Harbord, whom he took back to Clarence House after a night out, and posh lingerie model Florence Brudenell-Bruce, but none of these romances has led to a lasting relationship. Last year when he was in America, he reportedly courted cocktail waitress Jessica Donaldson, though she denies it.
He was reportedly spotted canoodling with Cressida Bonas in a London club last week, but she has since let it be known that Harry "isn’t really her type."Prince William
William’s sex life is reassuringly unlike either of his parents. He’s been with Kate Middleton since university, and although she is not the only girl he’s ever slept with, the number of William’s sexual partners can be counted on one hand.Kate Middleton
Kate reportedly dated quite a few boys when she was at Marlborough, but, sources tell The Daily Beast, most of these were just “innocent" school romances.
At a recent wedding William and Kate attended, the guests of the bride and groom included Prince William's former girlfriends Rose Farquhar and Olivia Hunt, while Kate's former partners Willem Marx and Henry Ropner were also there.
Farquhar, 28 a singer, who performed at the ceremony, briefly dated Wills after he finished school in 2000. Blonde Olivia Hunt, also 28, had a fling with the Prince before he met Kate at university.
More awkwardly, Henry Ropner, who attended the wedding with his wife, Natasha, dated Kate for a while after she split up with Wills in 2007, and Marx was Kate's first boyfriend.
