A Royal Love Triangle - Diana Remembered, Camilla Revealed

The story of Diana, her lovers and her mysterious death told in tandem with an account of Camilla, Charles's first love and Diana's rival is related by the award-winning biographer of Royal Mistresses of the House of Hanover-Windsor. The Camilla story is updated to the present and shows a different aspect of Camilla than usually portrayed. Susanna de Vries was the wife of a psychiatrist consulted by members of the royal family and through him privy to information on the Camilla-Charles-Diana love triangle.

The Royal Family needed the Prince of Wales to produce an heir. Camilla was not deemed suitable as she lacked a title and had a past. Only an aristocrat would do and so the eighteen year old virginal Lady Diana Spencer was selected to marry a Crown Prince who loved another woman. The motherless teenager with a crush on Prince Charles had what she suspected confirmed when Charles admitted he had been having an affair with Camilla while courting her on the eve of her wedding. Shocked and dismayed and stricken with bulimia on her honeymoon Diana became so thin she was sent to consult a psychiatrist about her bulimia and her extreme jealousy of her rival. The 'fairytale' marriage of the Golden Couple lurched from crisis to crisis but Diana found she had an uncanny ability to relate to the sick and dying. The fact the public adored the beautiful Princess aroused her husband's jealousy.

When problems developed in Camilla's marriage, she reasserted her hold on Charles fearing he would become depressed in a marriage that seemed to have no solution to its problems. After Diana's death, Camilla became the first royal mistress to marry an heir to the throne. The Duchess of Cornwall, once banned from royal residences, has now been accepted by the Queen as a hard-working member of the Royal Family, and once gloomy Prince Charles seems a happier man.

Two years before her death, after several unhappy affairs with men who betrayed her, Diana fell for Dr Hasnat Khan, FRCS, a brilliant heart surgeon who valued her for her unique qualities and provided loving support which helped her become famous as a humanitarian, visiting Bosnia to try and achieve this aim only weeks before her death in Paris, trying to make him jealous. The best memorial to Diana's work with children has been provided by the heart surgeon Diana loved as Dr Khan has established the hospitals they planned together for underprivileged children in Pakistan and Ethiopia. Diana's gift to her sons has been the end of arranged marriages for princes who, like Prince William, have gained the right to marry for love rather than for titles and ancient bloodlines.

This is the only up to date biography of both women in this love triangle, incorporating new material which has emerged on Diana and on Camilla's new role and similarities between her and Alice Keppel.