Royals

Expect Plenty of Diana and Prince Charles Gossip from Camilla’s Biography

A royal biographer takes on Prince Charles’s second wife.
three royals walking
Prince Charles, Lady Sarah Keswick, and Camilla Parker-bowles in 1979.by Tim Graham/Getty Images.

Prince Charles’s second wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has found herself at the center of a new biography, The Duchess: The Untold Story. It’s by Penny Junor, who’s written controversial life histories on most of the royal family, including Prince Charles, Diana, and, more recently, their sons. Junor’s latest book is pegged to Camilla’s 70th birthday this July, and as a pre-birthday treat, the Daily Mail is releasing excerpts this week.

Much of Camilla’s biography is dedicated to Charles and Diana’s relationship, which began in earnest in 1980 before they were married the next year. The book compiles a laundry list of mistakes that Charles made in his marriage to Diana (Junor writes that he was the “architect of the disaster”) and trades in much of the salacious gossip that dogged Charles, Camilla, Diana, and more for over a decade: the prince and the duchess’s affair, Diana’s bulimia, and one new tidbit about Charles and Diana’s honeymoon.

During their honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean, Junor writers, “when Charles was painting on the veranda deck of Britannia, he went off to look at something for half an hour. He came back to find [Diana had] destroyed his painting and all his materials.” The author chalks up the episode, the source of which she doesn’t reveal, to Diana’s desire for attention.

The Duchess attributes many of their issues to a sensitivity chip that the prince seemed to lack. For example, an anonymous friend of Charles said, “He’s very interested in objective things, but not subjective, so he couldn’t have understood the complexities of her feelings. He reads essays, history, no novels. He loves Shakespeare and that teaches you something, but I think if you are in a position like him, novels would be a great antidote to your isolation.” In Great Britain, see, one solves for emotion with a bit of E.M. Forster.

Still, Diana isn’t written as a straightforward victim of Charles’s misunderstanding. Over the course of the excerpt, Junor compiles a list of things that Diana allegedly “hated.” They include but are not limited to: the countryside, Charles’s “wretched books,” Charles’s job, his family’s love for dogs and horses, rain, Balmoral (the royal family’s Scottish home), and being alone. She doesn’t often come across as sympathetic in Junor’s world.

But if you thought this book was an excuse to trot out marital gossip about the prince and late princess, you’d only be partially correct. Camilla is cast as Prince Charles’s savior from his mercurial wife. The two, who had met prior to his and Diana’s meeting, and had an affair in 1978 or 1979 after Camilla’s daughter with husband Andrew Parker Bowles was born. They broke it off when Charles married Diana in 1981, but five years later, friends of Charles encouraged the duchess to call him. They noted he was depressed, and after that phone call, he and Camilla renewed their affair. “What he needed was someone who was on his side,” Junor writes, “who understood him, liked him, loved him even, who wouldn’t make demands or be moody or temperamental, who was kind and warm, who would make him feel safe, boost his morale, restore his confidence and make him laugh again.”

Someone, it would seem, like . . . Camilla. Charles and Diana separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996, and she died a year later. Charles and Camilla were then married in 2005.