1986: The Affair Between Charles and Camilla Resumes It was a gold bracelet, with a charm engraved with the letters F and G, which stood for Fred and Gladys, Prince Charles and Camilla’s pet names for each other. But according to Princess Diana, the wedding festivities were dampened when, days before the nuptials, she discovered a gift Prince Charles had made for Camilla. On July 29, 1981, Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer before a television audience of 750 million people. 1981: Prince Charles Marries Lady Diana Spencer Every time Charles was out of sight, she thought he was somewhere with Camilla, but she didn’t know for sure,” Seward says.Prince Charles and Camilla in 1979. “She suspected for a long time, and she allowed it to become an obsession. According to a biography of Charles titled The Man Who Would Be King, Camilla did invite Diana out to lunch with “genuinely friendly intentions,” and said that she would “love to see the ring.” However, Seward says that there was antipathy between the two since before Charles and Diana’s wedding, and that Diana had never liked Camilla as she always was suspicious of Camilla’s relationship with Charles. The Crown also depicts Diana and Camilla having a rather awkward lunch in Charles’ absence immediately after their wedding in 1981. But she also thought Diana was someone whom she could manipulate.” In the words of Camilla’s former brother-in-law, Richard Parker Bowles, “ initially encouraged the relationship between Charles and Diana because she thought Diana was gormless… Camilla knew that as a woman with a past she could never be accepted as Charles’ wife. According to Brown, Camilla did not see Diana as a threat. In The Crown, Camilla Parker Bowles is depicted as encouraging Charles to stick with his marriage to Diana. What was Camilla and Diana’s relationship like? “I remember writing about the talk of the dinner tables of London, and that was all anyone seemed to want to talk about,” Seward says. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward recalls the height of the animosity between the Charles and Diana “camps” heightening at around this time, after photographs of the pair visiting people affected by floods in Wales showed that they both arrived and left separately. “What they really need is a holiday from the forever bickering British tabloids,” reported TIME in May 1987, commenting on one of Charles and Diana’s highly scrutinized trips abroad. Intimate phone conversations between Gilbey and Diana were leaked to the press in 1992, in a scandal dubbed “ Squidgygate” for Gilbey’s nickname for Diana. Newspapers also linked Diana romantically to several other men during her marriage to Charles, some of whom were married, including art dealer Oliver Hoare, her bodyguard Barry Mannakee, and a car dealer named James Gilbey. In Charles’ absence, Camilla agreed to marry Andrew in 1973. In reality, it’s unclear whether the royal family actively plotted to separate the couple, but according to Brown, the royals did see Camilla as a “learning experience” for Charles and nothing more. In Season 3 of the show, Lord Mountbatten arranges for Charles to be sent on a Navy mission to separate him from Camilla. As Brown wrote, “My own view is that the love of Camilla’s life was not Prince Charles but the man she married first-Andrew Parker Bowles … Her dalliance with Charles had been fun, flattering and sexy, but her friends knew all along that her consuming passion was Andrew.” Camilla did actually seem to love both Charles and Andrew. Charles’ uncle, Lord Mountbatten, reportedly wrote in a letter to his nephew, “I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.” Diana, by contrast, was at least presumed to be a virgin, in part because of her young age and lack of dating experience: Charles was her first real boyfriend.īut the biggest obstacle for Camilla and Charles’ relationship was Camilla herself. Camilla had dated several men by the time she began seeing Charles, including her future husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.
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