August Annotations

A Treasury of Royal Scandals - By Michael Farquhar
The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest,
Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors

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Part IX, Chapter 7: Death Be Not Dignified

When a king of France died, he was subject to a fairly rigorous post-mortem. His body was sliced open from throat to hips, after which his internal organs were removed and preserved. This ritual wasn’t so bad. After all, it was part of an old tradition going back to the ancient Egyptians. The procedure took and odd twist with Louis XIV, however. While the hearts of most French kings were placed in gilded urns to rest for eternity, the Sun King’s ended up in the stomach of an English eccentric. Or so the story goes.

Blame it on the French Revolution. Sure, Louis XIV had been dead for decades before the popular uprising even started, but he was royal, and as his descendant Louis XVI discovered on the guillotine, royalty wasn’t going over very well at the time. Even dead royalty. At the Cathedral of St. Denis, an angry mob raided the tomb of the king who had gloriously wallowed in absolute monarchy for more than half a century. They stole his embalmed heart.

The organ was then sold to an English nobleman, Lord Harcourt, who in turn sold it to the dean of Westminster, Rev. William Buckland. When the good dean died, the heart passed by inheritance to his son, Francis Buckland. Frank, as he was called by his friends, was a scientifically minded man, but nevertheless a bit bizarre. He was among the founders of the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals in the United Kingdom, whose goal it was to import and raise exotic animals to increase the national food supply.

For a while Buckland was satisfied devouring kangaroo, ostrich, and the like, but soon his palate became more adventurous. Almost anything organic would do. And here’s where Louis XIV’s heart came in. According to one report, Buckland produced the dried organ at dinner one evening. “I have eaten many strange things in my lifetime,” a startled guest recalled him saying, “but I have never before eaten the heart of a king.”

In a few gulps, the Sun king became a gourmet snack.

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It Doesn’t Take An HRH To Be Prince of My Heart
By Jerramy Fine, author of “Someday My Prince Will Come”

I was only 6-years-old when I fell in love with Peter Phillips. Like always, I was up to my knees in royal library books (I was a royal-watcher from a very early age!) when I found him in the Windsor family tree.

At that point, my #1 career goal was to be a princess, so when I saw that Peter had been born in 1977, just like me – I knew it was a match made in heaven. Peter was the only eligible male royal on the planet that was my age – and to my 6-year-old self, that made him my true love.

Back then, I had no idea that marrying Peter wouldn’t automatically make me a princess. My precocious young mind was only just learning about the rules of hereditary titles, and it never once occurred to me that as the son of a princess, he wouldn’t be a prince.

Yet Peter was the first royal baby to be born without a title in over 500 years. Little did I know that royal titles only pass through the male line, and since Peter is a descendant of Princess Anne, he was not entitled to become an HRH. (It is widely believed that the Queen offered to make Peter a prince, but Princess Anne declined the proposal, not wanting her children to be unnecessarily burdened. Moreover, Peter did not inherit a courtesy title from his father, because Captain Phillips also declined a title from the Queen upon his marriage to Princess Anne.)

But as I grew older and as my royal crush grew stronger, none of this newfound hereditary knowledge made the slightest bit of difference to me. The heart wants what the heart wants – and my teenybopper heart wanted the Queen’s oldest grandson.

That said, I wonder if by opting not to bestow her children with titles, if Princess Anne actually spared Peter (and his younger sister Zara) from anything. Both Master Peter and Miss Zara will always be “royal” and that is something neither can ever escape. They will always be direct descendents of the monarch, they will always appear in royal family photographs, and they will always have royal-fanatics like me writing about them on royal blogs! I’m not sure life would be any more difficult, or if they would be treated anymore “normally,” if they merely had different prefixes attached to their names.

Look at Diana, Princess of Wales. After her divorce, she was stripped of her HRH, yet as Earl Spencer so aptly observed at her funeral, Diana “needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.”

The same can be said for Charlotte and Andrea Casiraghi. They may be title-less (at their mother’s request) just like Peter and Zara, but these Monegasque beauties still grace the pages of the royal magazines month after month. So does Kate Middleton for that matter – and she doesn’t have a single royal parent to her name!

In this day and age, an HRH is increasingly irrelevant. What matters is one’s proximity to the monarch, one’s place in the line of succession and most importantly, how much the world’s media loves you.

But as Peter has learned, your place in the line of succession can change – or be removed entirely. Back when I found Peter in that library book, he was 7th in line to the British throne. But with the subsequent births of HRH Princess Beatrice, HRH Princess Eugenie, and Lady Louise, Peter has since moved to 10th place in the line of succession. (Please note how Prince Edward also tried to give baby Louise a life of “normality” by removing her HRH.)

When the Countess of Wessex has her next baby, Peter will move to 11th place. But this won’t last for long – for when he marries his Catholic fiancée Autumn Kelly (not only will my heart be broken!) but Peter will have relinquished his succession rights forever. As the Act of Settlement 1701 prohibits anyone who has married a Roman Catholic from succeeding to the throne, only Peter’s children will be able to retain their rights to succession. And after all this “normality,” I wonder if Peter will bother to spare them from the “burden” of an HRH.

Someday My Prince Will Come will be published January 10th.
www.jerramyfine.com

© 2007 Jerramy Fine

Diana – by Sarah Bradford

Sarah Bradford is once again brilliantly articulate in her writing and is sensitive to Diana’s personal story. Diana wasn’t the nicest person in the world, but Bradford gently reminds us of the Princess’ unhappy childhood and how she became emotionally-stunted. It is a story that arouses deep pity for Diana but makes no apologies for her terrible behavior.

It was Diana’s need to be accepted and loved – things which she felt she lacked in her own family – that drove her to perform her camera-ready acts of kindness. In person, Diana worked her charm to draw people to her, trying to please so that they would like her just as much in turn.

Diana’s friends would tell you that she was a kind woman, but if you told her something she didn’t want to hear, she froze you out for years. She was unforgiving as much as she was needy. Such was the temperamental and complex nature of Diana Spencer.

Bradford also keeps her portrayal of the royal relationship even-handed, but makes an important point that, while Prince Charles was no saint, his reactions to his wife stemmed mostly from the fact that he did not understand her inner problems. Diana’s type of emotional instability was never seen before in the Royal Family. Everyone held their stiff upper lip and gave themselves to the country rather than express their emotions, an act that was viewed as being selfish.

In return, Diana did not understand the ‘Country before self’ mantra of the Royals and reacted by behaving outlandishly.

From the crisis of her parents’ divorce to the chaos of her own marriage, the Princess’ journey to sort herself out was rocky indeed. Sarah Bradford lays bare the painful truth of all that occurred.

Turbulent Beginnings

Edward John Spencer, Viscount Althorp and heir to the Spencer Earldom, was a jovial man known casually as ‘Johnnie’. In private however, he drank far too much and had a terrible temper to boot.

That temper was not made any better by the fact that he had two children and neither one was a boy. He and his wife Frances had been longing for a son for many years, and the result of the efforts were two daughters instead: Sarah, the eldest, and Jane. Johnnie would fly into a drunken rage and beat Frances, blaming her for not being able to produce the all-important male heir for the Spencer line. To add insult to injury, Johnnie would then send Frances to have humiliating medical exams to try and ‘cure’ her of the inconvenient tendency to have female children.

When Frances finally did give birth to a boy, the baby’s lungs were so underdeveloped that he died. Johnnie was not pleased. With great effort they tried again, and in July of 1961 Diana made her debut.

When Frances delivered Diana, she was disappointed in that she knew she would have to try yet again for a son. Three daughters were not good enough for Viscount Althorp. Diana herself became well aware of the importance of primogeniture within her family, and admitted that she knew she ‘was supposed to be the boy’. Her feelings of inadequacy took root.

Finally, Charles Spencer, their last child, was born. By this point the Spencer marriage was in tatters, and by the time Diana was six years old, Frances left. She began an affair with a married man named Peter Shand Kydd, the heir to a wallpaper company fortune. Diana, now bereft of a mother and taking the brunt of the stress, was left to look after her little brother Charles. Diana’s sisters Sarah and Jane were at boarding school most of this time and mercifully avoided a lot of the acrimony.

Frances would eventually marry Peter Shand Kydd after he divorced his wife. Happily, Shand Kydd proved to be a kind stepfather to Diana and her siblings. That happiness was a ray of light in a chaotic world where Diana felt pulled in opposite directions by both of her parents, who tried to outdo each other for the children’s affections. She already suffered from their tumultuous divorce, and now the subsequent custody battle was to begin.

Both Frances and Johnnie fought long and hard to gain full access to the children. The bids for sympathy began, to which Diana was a witness. She became schooled in the ways of playing on emotions.

Frances sued Johnnie for divorce, an action that earned the rancor of her mother, Lady Ruth Fermoy. Ruth was vicious when it came to cultivating connections with nobility, and her snobbery knew no bounds. She knew what it meant to marry well, and to leave a titled husband for a commoner was abhorrent.

Ruth was of modest birth, and as she grew older she showed a great aptitude for music. She had a promising career as a pianist and may have made a name for herself, but it was a talent that she would willingly set aside to marry Edmund Maurice Roche, the 4th Baron Fermoy. The much older Fermoy was a Conservative Party politician and, most importantly to Ruth, he was titled.

As a mother, Ruth was just as anxious that her daughters marry well. Enter Johnnie Spencer, whose name was even nobler than that of Fermoy. Ruth was quick to orchestrate a meeting between her younger daughter Frances and Johnnie, who would one day become Earl Spencer. It has even been rumored that many years later Ruth, with her friend Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, arranged the marriage between Prince Charles and her granddaughter Diana.

When Frances divorced Johnnie, Ruth was furious and let her voice be heard in testimony against her daughter in the Spencers’ child custody battle. Ruth herself blamed Frances for “bolting” from her family. The testimony was a deciding factor, the Spencer children would be permanently removed from their mother’s custody. The fact that the four would remain with their father in the regal residences of Park House and Althorp Estate pleased Ruth. Frances moved away with Peter Shand Kydd to the Isle of Seil in Scotland.

Diana and Charles were affected the most. The little boy cried endlessly for his mother in the night, and poor Diana didn’t know what to do, wondering if she had caused it all somehow.

What Diana did learn was that familial ties are volatile. Frances never forgave Ruth, and their relationship became non-existant. Later, Diana’s relationship with her mother proved to be almost as brittle.

A few years later, Johnnie would anger his children by courting Raine, Countess of Dartmouth. Unlike Peter Shand Kydd, the still-married Raine incurred the wrath of all of the Spencer offspring.

Like Ruth Fermoy, Raine was a social climber. She was inspired by her mother Barbara Cartland’s flamboyant romantic ideals, and even though she had obtained the title of Countess through her marriage to Gerald Dartmouth, she was never quite happy with it. Earl Spencer was charming and his title was even more so. A marriage to him meant that Raine would be a “Countess”, rather than a “Countess of”. This seemingly insignificant difference to us was of great importance to Raine – it was higher on the social ladder.

Diana never liked her and did her best to ignore her while Sarah, the most fiery and outspoken sister, made a point to tell the press just how unhappy they were over Raine’s intrusion into their lives. Johnnie’s marriage to Raine was viewed as a betrayal to his children, and the relations between five of them would never be the same again. For many years they did not speak to their father.

Several years later in 1992, Johnnie died. His death occurred during Diana’s separation from Prince Charles and their ensuing media battle. She was devastated, but thankfully the Princess had reconciled with him before his passing. The same could not be said for Diana and Frances.

Frances and Diana’s latest quarrel had been about an interview Frances had given to Hello! Magazine in May 1997. Diana accused her mother of disclosing personal details about her and refused to speak to her, returning many of Frances’ letters unopened. This estrangement would be permanent. Diana died a little over three months later in the Paris car crash.

The Ultimate Triumph for the Spencers

The irony is that Diana, the little girl who felt so inadequate, was the one who made the biggest impact in her family as well as on British history. In fact, she had triumphed where the first Lady Diana Spencer (or rather, the powerful Sarah Churchill) had failed.

The first Lady Diana was the daughter of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland. She, too, had a scheming grandmother in the form of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Diana was pushed to marry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was the son of King George II. The Prince was indeed willing to marry Diana since the Duchess had provided over 100,000 pounds for her dowry. However, Sir Robert Walpole got wind of this and stepped in to prevent further intrusion into the royal house by Sarah Churchill.

The Diana Spencer of the 1980s married the future king, Prince Charles, and became the Princess of Wales. She was the highest ranked lady in the land aside from the Queen, and even gave birth to two sons in a row, Princes William and Harry. It was a coup for the Spencers and for Diana herself, who was fast becoming a media darling loved the world over.

By this time in her life, though, the Princess was in no emotional state to deal with actual relationships. She suffered over her failure to be the best in Prince Charles’ eyes, and her fractured friendships were being switched on and off as easily as a lightbulb. To feel appreciated, Diana began to live vicariously through the public and the media.

The appearance – or rather, reappearance – of Camilla Parker-Bowles into royal life had made Diana feel betrayed all over again. Prince Charles was hers, just as her father was hers, only this time Diana felt that she was able to fight for him and win. When she couldn’t, she fell apart.

She constantly accused Charles of an affair, and Charles responded to the allegations as ridiculous. Camilla was his friend, nothing more. However, as we heard the Prince admit in his 1996 interview, he did engage in a relationship with Camilla after his marriage to Diana had broken down. In return, Diana did all she could to win the public’s sympathy.

Things began to spiral out of control for the sad Princess, whose vengeful and immature nature overtook her. She couldn’t comprehend how Camilla, who was Charles’ age and actually shared his interests, could be “better” to him. During this time she slept with several different men to get back at Charles. Many of the men were married, and although she knew it was a hurtful thing to do after seeing the results of both of her parents’ affairs, Diana carried on anyway. She succeeded in upsetting the wives of Will Carling, Oliver Hoare, and arousing suspicions in the Mannakee marriage. These activities were brought to light by journalists, and the public became critical of Diana.

Diana became angrier and more suspicious. She began to accuse Charles of having an affair with Alexandra “Tiggy” Legge-Bourke, nanny to their sons William and Harry. She then turned her fire on the innocent Tiggy, who had already irritated Diana by being so close to her sons and referring to them as “my babies”.

It had been alleged that the Princess was so furious with Tiggy that she started a rumor about the nanny being pregnant and subsequently miscarrying. The ‘father’ was named as Prince Charles. At a staff Christmas party, Diana got her chance to accuse and hurt the innocent girl directly. She sidled up beside her imagined rival Tiggy and cooed, “So sorry to hear about the baby,” and slid away. It was an astoundingly cruel and frighteningly premeditated thing to say. Tiggy instructed her lawyers to take action unless the allegations were withdrawn. They were.

The End Draws Near

Tantrums, confusion, and loneliness hounded Diana until the end of her marriage. She then met Dodi Fayed after her divorce and began a passionate affair. He seemed to lavish on her the right amount of attention she needed. Dodi had been engaged at the time of his meeting with Diana, but he callously dumped his fiancée for the princess. Both Dodi and Diana were labeled needy, and seen to be a good fit for one another.

As the summer holiday with the Fayeds ended, Diana and Dodi stopped in Paris to wine and dine, trying to desperately escape paparazzi. As they were leaving the Ritz to return to Dodi’s apartment for the night, they were pursued by photographers on motorbikes. They never made it back to the apartment, and Diana would not see her sons the next day as scheduled. The hectic and controversial life had come to a close.

It was a lonely life that Diana led, highlighted by the elation of being photographed and being charitable to those in need. She inspired the masses, but it was an inspiration founded on desperation, loneliness, and manipulation. Never has a woman been so admired yet so pitied.
written by: Mandy
© 1998-2007 Mandy’s British Royalty
I Rate It: 4 stars (out of 5)