It’s been 14 years since Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles said ‘I do’ at Windsor Guildhall, and since then the royal couple have enjoyed an apparently blissful marriage.
But before their royal wedding in 2005, the Prince of Wales and future Duchess of Cornwall had a decidedly rocky road to romance, filled with adulterous affairs, personal betrayals and public scandals.
WATCH this video to see Princess Diana discuss Charles and Camilla’s affair in 1995:
Perhaps the most sordid situation from the early days of the future King of England and his Queen consort’s unconventional relationship was a phone call from 1989.
According to Express.co.uk, the heir to the throne was caught on tape telling Camilla he wanted to “live inside her trousers”.
The sensational incident – which was dubbed ‘Camillagate’ and ‘Tampongate’ by the British press – came at the height of the Prince’s martial difficulties with his then wife Princess Diana, the mother of his two sons Prince William and Prince Harry.
The transcript of the provocative phone call was released by People in 1993, two years before the Princess of Wales’ infamous BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.
The Queen’s son is heard saying: “Oh God. I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!”
Camilla, then married to Andrew Parker-Bowles, jokingly replied: “What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers!? Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.”
“Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck!” Charles laughs.
Princess Diana, who was living at Kensington Palace at the time the scandal broke, was said to have declared “Game, set and match” over the release of the tape.
Author Tina Brown told Vanity Fair magazine that Charles – the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – was under “intense pressure to marry the right girl” not only from the royal family and the public, but also from Camila herself.
Ms Brown said the Prince of Wales liked to “confide in married women”, and speculated that Camilla supported the idea of a marriage to Diana because she felt the “meek” Lady Spencer would not interrupt her existing friendship with the future monarch.
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