Bitter fallout over Camilla’s son , the ’bad influence’
ONE of Charles’s closest friends was Hugh van Cutsem, a Life Guards cavalry officer whom he met while an undergraduate at Cambridge.
Hugh and his wife Emilie were to become crucial figures in the lives of William and Harry when the Prince’s marriage was falling apart.
They also provided safe houses for Charles to meet his mistress, Camilla.
But the friendship between the two households later came spectacularly to grief.
During the Diana years, the young Princes often went to Norfolk to stay with the van Cutsems, who had four boys. Emilie, who was a stickler for manners, became a kind of surrogate mother.
Born to an aristocratic Dutch family, she had a certain hauteur, not to mention a strong streak of snobbery.
She forbade William from coming to dinner in jeans and once — when out shooting — gave ‘Willsie’ strict instructions to address her husband as ‘Mr van Cutsem’.
A friend who witnessed that moment approved of her strictness, which he felt was a corrective to Diana’s indulgence and encouragement of over-familiarity.
‘And to be fair to Emilie, she provided the boys with a warm home life,’ he said.
The first cooling of the van Cutsem friendship with Charles came in 2000, after Camilla’s son Tom Parker Bowles was caught taking cocaine. He promised his parents he would never take drugs again.
But over dinner one night, Emilie voiced her concern to Prince Charles that Tom was still using cocaine. She was worried, she said, that he might be a bad influence on William and Harry.
When Charles reported this to Camilla, she was livid. The Dutch woman’s high-handedness had started to annoy her and she felt Emilie could sometimes be too proprietary about the Prince and his sons.
Charles’s long-standing friendship with Hugh van Cutsem cooled.
Then four years later, Charles and Camilla were invited to what was being billed as the wedding of the year — between Edward van Cutsem, one of Charles’s godsons, and Lady Tamara Grosvenor, daughter of the Duke of Westminster.
William and Harry were asked to be ushers.
In keeping with conventions of etiquette and hierarchy, the front pew of Chester Cathedral was designated for the Royal Family. Days before the ceremony, however, Camilla learned she’d been banished towards the back of the congregation on the bride’s side of the church — supposedly to avoid offending the Queen, who was also a guest.
Camilla was so mortified by Emilie’s decree — which included instructions for her to arrive and leave separately from Charles — she announced she couldn’t possibly attend.
Torn between loyalty to his mistress and his old friend, Charles sided with his lover. So neither attended the wedding — a humiliating affront to the groom and his parents.
Despite the van Cutsems’ painful estrangement from Charles and Camilla, William and Harry maintained their friendship with the sons.
Indeed, one of Prince George’s godparents is William van Cutsem, the youngest of the four brothers.
In 2013, just seven weeks before Prince George’s christening in October, Hugh van Cutsem died of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 72.
But before his death he and Charles had been reconciled. The Prince had heard about his illness the previous April and rushed to see him in Norfolk — his first visit in a decade. Charles left in tears.
That September, he attended the funeral with Camilla, William and Harry.