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less callous. Perhaps the princess felt some satisfaction at having had Camilla’s name removed from the list of palace guests at the celebratory breakfast which followed their actual wedding—but it was pitiful revenge for such sickening behavior on the part of Charles and his mistress.

TWO

    “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
    Princess Diana’s unforgettable declaration to Martin Bashir during the Panorama television interview in November 1995 was deliberately intended to throw Camilla Parker Bowles into the public spotlight, and in so doing make her public enemy number one. In both respects it succeeded, demonizing Camilla and, in the process, making Prince Charles the unquestionable villain of the royal marriage collapse.
    It also prompted the queen to order their immediate divorce.
    Diana did not escape the fallout unscathed. Supporters of Charles labeled her a woman in the advanced stages of paranoia, increasingly unstable and suffering from mental illness. But of far more importance to her was that she had made the first move to avenge fifteen years of almost uninterrupted despair and depression—loneliness and misery created uncaringly by her husband and his mistress. Not even the swearing of the sacred vows, made before God and the people during their marriage service in return for the blessing on their union from the Archbishop of Canterbury, had prevented Charles from taking Camilla with them on their honeymoon.
    The newlywed Waleses were barely into their second day aboard the royal yacht Britannia , which they had joined at Gibraltar, when they had their first confrontation. Inevitably it concerned Camilla. Prized photographs of his paramour, which Charles kept in his diary, had fallen out while he was discussing his itinerary with Diana, and when she challenged him to give his reasons for carrying them, he refused even to discuss his friendship with Camilla. It ended in Diana going to bed in tears and Charles sleeping alone.
    Diana blamed this incident for triggering a fresh outbreak of bulimia nervosa—her worst to date. She found herself frantically stuffing herself to capacity four or five times a day before inducing vomiting only minutes later. Far from attempting to comfort her and provide the simple reassurance that she held a special place in his affections, Charles’s almost sadistic reaction was again to emphasize Camilla’s importance to him by wearing her gift of a pair of gold cufflinks, each in the form of interlinked Cs—unsubtle reminders of the powerful and exclusive bond between them.
    Had the marriage not by then been consummated—itself an unmemorable event, she recalled later—she would have refused him the questionable pleasure of exercising his marital rights. She told Andrew Morton, years later, “He was the man I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, and I was willing to jump through any hoop and over any hurdle to win him.” But she was not prepared to be his second choice within her own marriage.
    After their trying Mediterranean cruise they flew to Balmoral to continue a honeymoon that had become as idyllic as an endurance test, two strangers locked in a masquerade of intimacy. The situation would have been glaringly obvious to any other family in the land, but went completely unnoticed by Prince Philip, the Queen and the other members of the royal family on holiday there. The firm family rule on emotion was to “lock it in.” No one was ever supposed to know what any of them was really feeling. “As the latest member of the family I would have been ignored anyway,” Diana herself recalled. “Nothing I had to say was worth listening to.”
    After ten weeks of marriage, Diana was a changed person. Her waist was by now more than seven inches smaller than on the day her engagement had been announced, and she had lost so much weight she resembled little more than skin and bones. Her constant jealousy of Camilla, physically absent