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16
Grim Fairy-Tales
‘It all seemed so perfect… They were so anxious for him [Charles] to get married that they didn’t look
beneath the surface…’
A friend of the royal family
By 1980, with the deaths of Mountbatten and Plunket and the retirement of Martin
Charteris, Elizabeth had lost trusted counsellors who were not only vital links with the
outside world beyond Whitehall but also with her children. The most important question
facing the monarchy for its dynastic future and its survival into the next reign was the
marriage of the heir to the throne, now becoming increasingly urgent. The Prince was
thirty-two and still besotted with a married woman, Camilla Parker Bowles, to whom he
had once again turned for consolation after the death of Mountbatten. Perhaps because
of this the women to whom he had proposed marriage had turned him down. Elizabeth
was aware of the relationship and that the officers of Andrew Parker Bowles’s regiment
were unhappy about it, breaking as it did the convention that no officer should have an
affair with a brother officer’s wife. ‘Ma’am,’ an old friend had told her, ‘the Prince of
Wales is having an affair with the wife of a brother officer and the Regiment don’t like
it.’ She looked down and did not answer; it is doubtful whether she took any action over
it, adopting the family ostrich stance in the face of unpleasant personal situations.
Philip, however, always the most pro-active of the two, put pressure on his son to marry
and produce an heir.
Charles agonized, torn between what he saw to be his duty and his love for Camilla.
The bride, according to Mountbatten’s precepts, would have to be a virgin with no
sexual past – something which automatically excluded his girlfriends hitherto. In the
summer of 1980 the ideal solution seemed to have presented itself in the form of Lady
Diana Spencer, sister of a former girlfriend of the prince, Lady Sarah Spencer. The
Spencers were not only impeccably aristocratic and connected to the great families of
England, but even had royal blood, tracing back to the first Duke of Richmond, the
illegitimate son of King Charles II by his mistress, Louise de Kéroualle. They were rich,
owning acres of Northamptonshire surrounding their stately home, Althorp, and a
palatial London house, Spencer House, filled with superb collections of paintings,
furniture and works of art. The Spencers had had a special relationship with the royal
family and a tradition of being courtiers. Diana’s great-grandfather, the 6th Earl, had