The Duchess: The Untold Story
by Penny Junor Benedict King
BENEDICT KING The Duchess: The Untold Story By Penny Junor William Collins £20 Oldie price £15.16 inc p&p
In the 1970s, Lord Mountbatten advised Prince Charles that he ‘should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitably attractive and sweet-charactered girl, before she met anyone else she might fall for.’ By the end of that decade, Prince Charles was running out of options and time. As Junor says, ‘more than a decade after the advent of the contraceptive pill and the era of free love, the pool of unmarried, aristocratic, Anglican virgins available was diminishing by the day.’
In 1972, Charles was in love with Camilla, but Mountbatten made it ‘abundantly clear that this relationship could never go anywhere in the long term. Camilla was not sufficiently aristocratic… and she was not a virgin, which was a prerequisite.’ In the late 1970s, he got to know Diana, an unimpeachably aristocratic, Anglican virgin. He snatched her up, to great rejoicing in the nation at large, and muted misgivings among his close friends, with all the terrible consequences that ensued.
This book is The Case for Queen Camilla. It may not be authorised, but there has been plenty of cooperation. Some of the photographs can only have come from family photo albums. At issue, implicitly, is whether the role Camilla played in the breakdown of the Waleses’ marriage should preclude her from becoming queen. For Diana, Camilla was the Rottweiler, the third person in her marriage, always there and the cause of its demise. For Junor, Camilla was the blameless old flame, summoned to save the Prince in 1986, as his marriage to a deeply disturbed woman (and his self-esteem) imploded.
Neither version is entirely convincing. Junor’s argument that the mystery blonde on the Royal Train just before the Waleses’ engagement was announced can’t have been Camilla, is weak. Friends’ insistence that Charles must have held strictly to his marriage vows until 1986, because he is deeply religious, is daft, given his premarital affairs with other men’s wives. Camilla’s fascination with her royal mistress great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, doesn’t sit comfortably with the Junor thesis, either. Apparently, before he died, Diana’s father apologised to Charles for inflicting his unbalanced daughter on the heir to the throne. Lady Fermoy knew Diana was unstable, but she wanted her granddaughter to be a queen. Diana had affairs (plural) before James Hewitt Maybe. Perhaps.
Junor is frustratingly discreet on anything interesting about Camilla and desperately dull on her royal life – more ‘rehashed’ than ‘untold’. I suspect Charles and Camilla’s story is more romantic than this book allows. The Camillagate tapes, reprinted here, are touching; Charles and Camilla talking erotic nonsense to each other years after they first met. Surely, they’ve always been in love.
Diana’s mental illness and Camilla’s scheming (if they existed) were not the root of the problem. The country, from the Queen down, held the royal family to a code of conduct that everyone else had ditched. The Waleses’ marriage was a sacramental moment of national hypocrisy. It took a great deal of
very public suffering from Charles, Camilla, Diana and others to bring us to our senses.
Junor paints Camilla, entirely convincingly, as intelligent, funny, loyal and generous. Have we ever been given any serious grounds to doubt that? After all this palaver, it would be appallingly mean-spirited not to give her the title due to the King’s consort. Haven’t we, largely as a result of this tragicomedy, moved on?
The royals are now free to marry into the sexually active lower orders, but we are in danger of forgetting something in the process. Royal marriages will always have some kind of political dimension.
Prince George won’t have to marry an upper-class virgin, but we will have a strong and legitimate interest in his choice. The daughter of a Russian oligarch or Chinese politburo member? I don’t think so. He, like his grandfather, will have to put his duty before his heart. But will we give him a clearer, more sensible sense of where that duty lies?