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part, Diana had concluded that she was worthless as a wife for the prince. Why else would her fiancé prefer to make love to an overweight, rather plain middle-aged housewife?
    Correctly recognizing the catastrophe which lay ahead if the marriage were permitted to take place, Charles went to his parents and expressed his doubts. Prince Philip became so angry and abusive that his eldest son fled the room in terror. Looking for sympathy and solace, Charles next turned to Camilla for comfort. He was horrified when her reaction was equally as violent as that of his father. She knew far better than the prince what was good for him, she lectured. Didn’t he trust her to do the right thing for him? Camilla refused to speak to him again until he came to his senses.
    Diana fared no better.
    Just three weeks before the wedding, and almost as a belated twentieth birthday party for Diana, the royals held a formal, white-tie-and-tails banquet at Windsor Castle where the thousand guests were entertained by Elton John. As a clear sign of things to come, Charles did not dance once with Diana, and went to bed early. She danced crazily in the disco until five in the morning, long after the other guests and even the servants had gone home. Then she drove home to her father at Althorp and told him that the wedding was off.
    It would certainly have been more to his credit, and a far more fatherly gesture, had Earl Spencer heeded his youngest daughter’s cry for help, put her happiness first, and called the whole thing off on Diana’s behalf. Instead he spent the weekend convincing her that everything would be alright, that she was doing the right thing, and that it was her duty as a Spencer to return to London and fulfill her destiny.
    Back at Buckingham Palace, where no comment was made by anyone concerning her runaway weekend, Diana invited her sisters to lunch and, just two days before her wedding day, begged for their support in calling it off. Believing her to be exhibiting simple, and very normal, pre-nuptial nerves, they were flippant, but adamant. “Your face is on the tea towels, it’s too late to chicken out now.” Jane and Sarah advised Diana that, in the end, Charles would not let her down.
    They could not have been more appallingly wrong, as Charles himself confirmed five days before the wedding when he visited Broadlands and told Lord Mountbatten’s grandson, Lord Romsey, that Camilla Parker Bowles was the only woman he had ever loved. “I could never feel the same way about Diana as I feel about Camilla,” he confessed.
    Desperately wanting to believe her sisters, Diana, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, put on a brave smile and that night looked radiant standing alongside the Prince of Wales at the head of the grand staircase in Buckingham Palace to receive eight hundred guests at a ball. Nancy Reagan was a guest of honor. Another honored guest, who shared the vintage Krug champagne and was entertained by the then popular group Hot Chocolate, was Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana was determined not to allow her rival to spoil her evening, and was still smiling when she left in the early hours to Clarence House where she would spend her last day as a single woman.
    For his part, Charles had no intention of remaining a single man that night. He returned to his suite in Buckingham Palace with Camilla, and they spent the rest of that night, according to his valet, making love. It was a staggering betrayal—not just of his bride, which was reprehensible, but of the Queen, the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury (who would be officiating at his marriage to Diana in a little over twenty-four hours) and the whole nation, who genuinely believed he was giving himself, in all honesty and in the name of true love, to Lady Diana Spencer.
    It would be many years before Diana found out about Charles’s last, perfidious piece of treachery as a bachelor, but its effect on her was no less painful, the betrayal no