“Well, I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”
These, Princess Diana claimed, were the extraordinary words with which Prince Charles dismissed her when she confronted him about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
They take on new meaning in the context of The Daily Beast’s revelations this week about the efforts of Prince William’s lawyers to suppress reporting of rumors of an affair between William and his Norfolk neighbor, Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley).
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But Charles was only following the guidance of his father (a noted ladies’ man himself), Diana claimed. Prince Philip, Diana alleged, had told his son ahead of his wedding—apparently to help cure cold feet—that it was perfectly acceptable for him to “go back” to Camilla after five years of marriage if things “didn’t work out.”
The women weren’t much better either. When Diana went, sobbing, to the Queen to ask her advice on how to deal with Charles’ infidelity, she replied: “I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.”
The tolerance of male infidelity in royal marriages is as old as the history of the monarchy itself (female infidelity, as Anne Boleyn could attest, is a whole other thing).
It wasn’t until Charles broke up with Diana, and it was revealed that he had been cheating on her for years with Camilla, that the royals had to face any serious condemnation when it came to the small matter of cheating on spouses on an industrial scale.
Diana, as she confessed, cheated on Charles in return, but most observers believed Diana when she said that she had only sought solace outside the relationship after learning of Charles’s antics.
But for Charles, there was an instant and furious reaction to Diana’s revelation in a devastating TV interview that, with three of them in the marriage, it was “a bit crowded.”
Like any parent, Diana had sought to shield her children from the truth, but in the end her desire for revenge on Charles was stronger.
When she dropped her TV bombshell, Prince William saw it the same way and at the same time as the rest of us: on the BBC’s Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.
William’s housemaster at Eton allowed him to watch the interview, at Diana’s request, on a TV in his office on the master’s side of his boarding house. No one had been forewarned by William’s mother what she was about to say, and William was devastated and humiliated by it.
He was shielded to some extent by the fact that most boys at the school had no access to TV, but newspapers were delivered to every boy in the school the next day, and they all ran the story of Diana’s interview on their front pages.
William knew his parents’ relationship was a mess, but he was incandescent with rage at his mother for doing what she did so publicly.
Diana’s friend Simone Simmons said: “William was absolutely livid. The weekend after it went out they had a big row at Kensington Palace. William was furious and Diana was distraught. It was the most angry I had ever seen him at his mother.”
William’s ringside seat at the dissolution of his parents’ union, and his firsthand experience of the pain that infidelity can cause, makes the unsubstantiated rumors now circulating about his own marriage even more strange and disconcerting to read.
When the relationship between Charles and Diana collapsed, it shook every area of royal life. His love for Camilla set off a multitude of chain reactions.
It’s a sobering thought experiment to ask yourself what British public life might look like today if Charles had never cheated on Diana, and she had never returned the favor.
Instead, of course, we are where we are.
The palace has done a masterful job in the 22 years since Diana’s death of rehabilitating Charles, but one of the great dangers of the current scandal is that it reminds everyone all over again of the dark stain that Charles’ infidelity left on the monarchy and triggers the thought that the Windsors aren’t so special after all.
Maybe they’re just another messed-up family that has, somehow or other, just about muddled through.
