Читать книгу The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail - Penny Junor - Страница 20

Charles had been heartbroken when he lost Camilla, but however strong his feelings for her, life had to go on. He was a romantic, but he was not the first man to have been disappointed in love and not the first to have had to learn to live with it. He was young, he was attractive, he was eminently eligible and he took out a succession of pretty girls, some of them suitable, some not – and some too sensible to want a future under the spotlight. He proposed to Amanda Knatchbull. Mountbatten had been urging his granddaughter on Charles since she was a teenager, but they knew each other too well. She turned him down. He wasn’t surprised; he knew that any girl he married would have to make huge sacrifices. Even those he dated risked having their past raked over in the tabloids. The press were obsessed by his love life: they chronicled every sighting, every dinner date, every holiday companion, every girl who showed up to watch him play polo. One newspaper exclusively reported his engagement to Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, whom he had never even met.

He hated it. He resented the intrusion and he despaired of ever finding someone. He knew she would have to meet the strict and increasingly rare criteria his position demanded. 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 1975, he had said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married.’ But he had made the mistake of saying he thought thirty might be the right age to settle down. As he approached the magical age, the scrutiny and the madness and his despair intensified.

If he was seen with women married to his friends, however, or old girlfriends who were now married, no one seemed to turn a hair. Not unlike in Edwardian times, they slipped beneath the radar, and although the press had their suspicions about some and were certain about others, they never pursued them in the way they pursued single women. One of those was Dale (later Lady) Tryon, a vivacious Australian he’d met at a school dance at Timbertop in Australia when they were both seventeen. He’d nicknamed her Kanga. She was the daughter of a rough and ready Melbourne printing magnate, so she was rich but not marriage material. She moved to London and in 1973 married the merchant banker Anthony Tryon, one of the Prince’s oldest friends and sometime financial adviser. He was ten years older than Dale, a far more sober character who would become the 3rd Baron Tryon. His father had been Keeper of the Privy Purse, a key member of the royal household and, like Andrew Parker Bowles, a page boy at the Queen’s coronation. Charles became godfather to their elder son, also named Charles, born in 1976. They had another son and two daughters. As well as a house in London, they owned a 700-acre estate in Wiltshire and rented a fishing lodge in Iceland. Charles was a frequent visitor to all three. Dale called him the ‘Bonny Prince’ and whenever he telephoned to say he was on his way to see her, she cleared the house.

One year, Anthony had gone ahead to Iceland with a mutual friend, Timothy (later 5th Baron) Tollemache. Dale and the Prince flew separately in an Andover of the Queen’s Flight and were so engrossed with each other in the private compartment, where they had asked to be left undisturbed, that they failed to notice the plane had landed at Reykjavik and that outside a red carpet and a civic reception awaited, complete with Icelandic military band. Kanga kept their affair secret from no one and had an open line to Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail’s famous gossip columnist, who was a fellow Australian. She started up a fashion label in 1980, selling one-size-fits-all dresses, and constantly promoted them and herself by selling stories about her royal connections.

In the end this was her undoing. Charles started ignoring her, and she became almost demented with the pain of losing him – and she hated Camilla, whose star was in the ascendant. ‘Kanga adored him,’ says a close friend in the fashion industry who helped launch her brand. ‘Whenever he rang the office she would disappear. She was very funny and completely outrageous and unbelievably naughty sexually. When she was nice she was fantastic and when she was nasty she was horrendous. She was like a spoilt child, living on the edge, everything was extreme and there was always drink in the equation.’

Camilla was none of those things. Charles spent many a weekend with the Parker Bowles family. It was inevitable that they would continue to see one another. They had so many friends in common, and they went to so many of the same sporting and social gatherings. And, of course, there was polo. Charles and Andrew still played in the same team and were friends, and since a lot of the matches were held in the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire area, it was logical for Charles to stay the night at Bolehyde, when as often as not Camilla would get together a party of his friends for dinner. Because of Andrew’s royal links, there were often invitations from the Queen and the Queen Mother as well as from the Prince himself. The couple went to stay at Sandringham and Balmoral, they went racing at Ascot and Cheltenham, and they were always invited to the lavish parties the Queen Mother used to throw at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park or to her Scottish homes, Birkhall and the Castle of Mey, way up in the north. Andrew was a great favourite of the Queen Mother, and she approved of his new wife. So did the Queen; Camilla got on famously with Elizabeth. Their mutual love of horses and dogs was a winning formula.

When Tom was born, Andrew and Camilla asked the Prince to be their son’s godfather, which further cemented the relationship between them all. The christening took place at the Guards Chapel, and they specially arranged the date to fit in with the Prince’s naval schedule so he could be there. Charles left the Navy in 1977 having commanded his own ship, HMS Bronington, hunting mines in the North Sea. It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and the beginning of his full-time royal duties.

It was also the year he dated Diana’s eldest sister, the fiery, red-haired Lady Sarah Spencer. They had met at Windsor Castle, whither she’d been invited by the Queen for Royal Ascot. The Parker Bowleses had also been invited – Camilla was pregnant with Laura for most of that year. And it was while Charles was shooting at Althorp, the Spencer family’s estate in Northamptonshire, in the autumn, that he first consciously met Diana, who was just sixteen and home from boarding school. She said later, ‘I kept out of the way. I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady but I made a lot of noise and he liked that and he came up to me after dinner and we had a big dance … for someone like that to show you any attention – I was just so sort of amazed. Why would anyone like him be interested in me? And it was interest.’

That was the moment when she first started to dream about marrying the Prince of Wales. Her sister’s relationship with Charles came to an abrupt end. ‘He is fabulous as a person,’ announced Sarah, ‘but I am not in love with him. He is a romantic who falls in love easily … Our relationship is totally platonic. I do not believe that Prince Charles wants to marry yet. He has still not met the person he wants to marry. I think of him as the big brother I never had … I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’

Publicly bruising comments like that did nothing for the Prince’s fragile ego. And where better to seek solace for life’s knocks, setbacks and dilemmas than with Camilla, who might laugh and tease him but would do so gently and kindly, almost in a maternal way, and who was loyal to her bootstraps. He would speak to her on the phone for hours, pouring his heart out, or write her long expansive letters – all of them handwritten with a fountain pen in black ink. His head was always buzzing with ideas and torturous thoughts about life and his curiously ill-defined role in it. They always had plenty to talk about, as they always would; conversation came easily between them and they shared the same sense of the ridiculous. She didn’t falsely flatter him, she wasn’t angling for anything, and she was one of the few people who’d never been in awe of his status. She treated him like a normal person, as she had when they were together, and if ever he behaved badly, or was selfish or thoughtless, she wasn’t afraid to tell him so. She was a proper friend.

When they’d first known one another, Charles didn’t hunt, but in the intervening years he had discovered the sport and found it thrilling. The Queen never hunted – her interest, like her mother’s, was racing – but her father, King George VI, had been a great enthusiast, as was his father, and on back through the generations. Charles on the other hand had grown up playing his father’s game, polo. He absolutely loved it, but it is a summer sport; and so, encouraged by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, the Queen’s Crown Equerry, he wrote to the Duke of Beaufort in 1974, asking if he could join his famous hounds for a day.

The Duke of Beaufort’s foxhounds are one of the few remaining private packs of hounds in the country, although since the ban in 2004, they now set out to follow trails and not foxes. They are also the most prestigious. They live very luxuriously in kennels on the Badminton House estate, the Duke’s magnificent ancestral home in Gloucestershire, where hounds have been kennelled since 1640, and have pedigree records dating back fifty-four generations to the mid-1700s. They hunt over 760 square miles of south Gloucestershire and north Wiltshire, much of it owned by the Duke – and while they are deadly for a fox, they are some of the softest animals you will ever come across.

The 10th Duke laid on an extra meet with some friends specially for the Prince’s benefit. He found it ‘exciting’, ‘challenging’ and ‘dangerous’, an ‘extraordinary thrill’, and became passionate about it. The Queen’s advisers were anxious he would upset the anti-bloodsports lobby, but she thought him old enough to make up his own mind, and so Charles continued to hunt. After the ban in England and Wales, neither he nor Camilla, nor his sons, could be seen to break the law and none of them has hunted since. But for many years before that, he and Sir John travelled the country in search of the best packs to ride out with – always unannounced. He didn’t want to antagonise the saboteurs, so he seldom attended the meet. He would make arrangements with the Master to join the hunt five or ten minutes after they had moved off, and rather than jostle alongside the rest of the field, he would get special dispensation to ride up at the front with the huntsman.

The polo season was all over by September, when the polo ponies were turned out to grass for a well-earned rest, and the hunters that had spent the summer idly munching grass were trotted round the lanes to get them fit for the hunting season. This started with cub hunting in August, which allowed the huntsmen to train inexperienced young hounds to follow the scent. Proper hunting began in October and ran through the winter until March or April, leaving just a month before the polo season began again.

Hunting is a highly dangerous sport and because of that inspires great camaraderie, so that even if Camilla went hunting alone she would always be amongst friends, everyone looking out for one another. Horses are heavy, strong and unpredictable. A hundred and one things can go wrong, and it takes just one to consign a rider to a wheelchair for the rest of their days, or worse. It’s no wonder they start the day with a stirrup cup of sloe gin before moving off. And there is a social side to hunting that has nothing to do with horses; it includes an annual hunt ball, which is the highlight of the season and an opportunity for great drunkenness and for all the simmering sexual tension built up in the saddle to find an outlet.

Camilla is a highly competent horsewoman. She has no fear on a horse, she is completely at one with the animal and apart from once falling and breaking her collar bone, she has never had any serious accidents, but she’s never been a risk-taker. As in life, so in hunting. She would take the day at a gentle pace and never leap blindly over any obstacle that presented itself. She jumped if it was necessary, but if something looked dangerous and there was the option of an open gate instead, she would take it. And she only ever hunted one horse, so she would go home when her horse was tired, usually in the early afternoon.

Charles was a very different rider, as men often are. He rode his horses hard, pushing himself and his mounts to the limit. He went for the biggest and most difficult jumps, and because he came to the sport so late in life, he took a lot of falls in the early days. He needed to feel the fear and worked off a lot of his demons on the back of a horse. He invariably had a fresh animal waiting at the rendezvous point halfway through the day, by which time his first horse would be very tired.

Charles rode his polo ponies in the same way, taking risks and sometimes suffering terrible falls. And on the ski slopes he was no different. He always went for the most difficult routes down a mountain, pushing himself to the limit – only feeling truly alive, perhaps, when the adrenalin was pumping. It is all part of his complexity. He is who he is by accident of birth; he is famous, he is revered, he attracts crowds of people wherever he goes, but not because he’s the fastest man on earth or the highest jumper, the most talented actor, the most gifted singer or the most astonishing chef. He is famous because he is the Queen’s son and he will one day be King, and no matter what he does with his life, he will be remembered in history books and studied in centuries to come. He happens to have done a huge amount of good in his adult life – building Poundbury is just one small part of it – and there will be plenty to fill those history books, but that is not why he is famous. His fame is entirely vacuous – that is his curse – and something with which he has always struggled to come to terms and one of the reasons, no doubt, why he has constantly sought approval.