Excerpt from Julie Burchill's "Diana", pp 94-103

The Queen's favourite television programme of all time is by many accounts The Good Life, the rather sickeningly twee seventies sit-corn in which Felicity Kendall (doing her usual routine as an over-excited eight-year-old boy) and Richard Briers (usual doesn't-know-what-day-it-is routine) turn their backs on their City jobs and attempt to be self-sufficient as small farmers in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. You can see how this must have appealed to the Queen. But by cleverly making her family seem middle class in order not to alienate her subjects, and by stressing that they were very much a family1 she made previous behaviour vis-&-vzs an aristocratic disregard for bourgeois fidelity completely untenable. Remember how shocked people were when Michael Fagan broke into her bedroom and the newspapers revealed that the Queen and Prince Philip didn't sleep in the same bed? Royal experts fell over themselves explaining that amongst the upper classes this was quite common, but to ordinary people it merely established what they had thought for a long time; that the Duke was a bit of a wrong 'un. 'GIVE HER A CUDDLE, PHIL!' the Sun advised with lewd concern. By making her family 'ordinary', the Queen kept her head. But when her son lost his and turned once more to Camilla after his marriage turned out not to be to his liking, he found himself on very shaky ground. For who could believe in A Good Life in which Tom was habitually unfaithful to Barbara with Margot?

It had all been so different once upon a time. Given even less chance to marry for love than other people, the monarchy has always felt much less compulsion to be faithful. In Henry VIII, the most enthusiastic serial monogamist of all, we see this at its most sensational, but other kings merely left their wives on the side of the plate for Mr Manners when they fired of them, rather than inside a bucket. The glory and spirituality of monarchy, the divine right of kings and all that blasphemous mumbo-jumbo about the monarch being His representative on Earth seems even more profane when placed alongside the prolonged delight with which monarchs have broken their marriage vows.

The type of prim and proper citizen who sees the monarchy as a totem of purity in a dirty world should have no truck whatsoever with history books lest he find himself reading about 1324, when King Edward II had a retreat built on the south bank of the Thames, staffed and stuffed with whores for his relaxation and recreation. Or 1431, when Henry VI visited France, and was entertained bv three naked women frolicking in a fountain - he was ten at the time. (And we think it's a little bit racy for Prince Harry to get an eyeful of all those topless African dancing girls!)

And of course 1660, when Charles II returned to the throne of England, bringing with him a huge influx of aristocrats determined to resume the lifestyle which Cromwell had so nudely interrupted. Being a leisured class and, additionally, one highly pleased with itself for returning from the routing handed out by the New Model Army (which sounds like a good enough description of Prince Andrew's girlfriends before he had the good luck to hook up with Miss Sarah Ferguson), one of the main functions - and indeed the only talent - of the aristocracy was to be seen enjoying itself, and no King was ever as suited to this onerous task as Charles II, whose courtesans and mistresses took up easily as much of his time as did affairs of state. His friend the Earl of Rochester wrote the following about him:

Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
Nor are his high desires above his strength;
His sceptre and his prick are of a length...
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor

Which does make you wonder, recalling the saccharine suck-ups of John Betjeman and Ted Hughes, why we can't have Poet Laureates like that anymore. Can you imagine what the Earl of Rochester might have done with the Tampax tapes?

Barbara de Villlers, Frances Stewart, Louise de Keroualle and the charming guttersnipe 'Mistress Nelly' Gwyn; these were the principal mistresses of Charles II, interspersed with a never-ending stream of the pick of the capital's whores and actresses. At the tirne of the Restoration, London resembled one big brothel to the extent that any courtier, City financier or politician without a mistress became a figure of fun. So much for the idea of revolutionary governments promoting free-for-all street orgies while reactionary ones promote family Life!

The Restoration period so degraded marriage and revered sexual incontinence that Catherine Sedley, born in 1657 the only heir to a large fortune, chose to become a courtesan rather than to marry because that way she could hold on to her own money and indeed increase it while enjoying a freedom and independence far beyond that of a respectable, disrespected aristocrat's wife. Not blessed with the temporary visa of beauty but rather the permanent passport of charm and wit she became mistress to the King's brother, the Duke of York, after being placed at Court as maid of honour to his wife. When the Duke became James II she was rewarded with a yearly pension of £4000, created Countess of Dorchester and Baroness Darlington. When James II was ousted by the Protestant William of Orange, the new king so respected Miss Sedley that he gave her a pension of £1500 a year; still only thirty-eight she married a soldier and lived grandly off her inheritance plus all the jewels, riches and fliles she had gathered as a royal courtesan until the age of sixty when, still happily married and independently rich, she died.

It was the exact opposite of the Dating Do's And Don'ts that Barbara Cartland always preached; then, if you were a young girl who saved your virginity for your husband, he was likely to think you a fool, not to mention a bad bedmate, and leave you at home to rot while he caroused with low-born whores. Even discretion was a complete unknown during the Restoration period; aristocratic men found playrnates at public houses and at brothels patronized mostly by the common people. Catherine Sedley's own father (obviously the original Lad) was brought to trial (while fearing no punishment from his peers on the Bench greater than a few weeks banishment from Court, all the better to dry out at his country home in readiness for the next inevitable pubcrawl) for becoming drunk at a public house, coming naked onto the balcony above the street miming all forms of sexual congress known to man or beast and parodying the scriptures in a downright filthy sermon before taking a glass of wine, washing his penis in it and dririking the King's health! This, in broad daylight, in front of a thousand people! They don't show you that on the lid of the Quality Street tin.

It was hardly surprising that Catherine Sedley rejected the mandatory early marriage with such an example of husbandly behaviour before her very eyes; lewd times or not married women of the aristocracy were permitted no such licence. And the hypocrisy of the times stunk as badly as the sewers; Samuel Pepys recorded that the King 'usually came from his mistress's lodgings to church, even on sacrament days; held as it were a court in them, and all his ministers made applications to them'.

Just as men have always sexually abused women and adults always sexually abused children, the working class was always sexually abused by the ruling dass. But as the eighteenth century progressed - though progressed is hardly the word -there came to be an element of almost genocidal sadism about this casual contempt. In London, the Mohocks - gangs of young male aristocrats - terrorized the people of London by night, raping and murdering women for kicks in a manner far pre-dating A Clockwork Orange. Their parents formed societies such as the Hellfire Club, kidnapping and raping young working-class virgins, particularly in the ruins of churches- In France the Marquis de Sade specialized in the torture, imprisonment and poisoning to death of working class women.

It was not, despite all the Restoration romps, a time of great sexual liberation but rather of great sexual oppression, as the women who took part in such bacchanals were largely unconsentmg and working class- There was a real hatred in the sexual conduct of the aristocracy of this time, which must partly stem from the fact that they were still smarting from the humiliations the Puritans had quite rightly heaped upon them for being so utterly sleazy and unworthy of their power. Now, once more, the rich would get the pleasure and the poor would get the blame. Not to mention the clap.

But the poor did not take it lying down all of the time. Young working-class men, in particular, were so mortified by the fact that their sisters and mothers were whoring for the rich that they habitually threatened royal mistresses in their coaches, while in 1688 a group of apprentices smashed up the Moorfield brothels, one of them later saying before his hanging that they did 'ill in contenting themselves with pulling down the little brothels and did not go to pull down the big one in Whitehall'

By the time that James followed Charles, he was shrewd enough to house Catherine Sedley well away from Whitehall and to issue instructions that no courtier be drunk in front of the Queen, Mary of Modena, who repented each day to her Italian confessor for the rouge she felt forced to wear by the fashionable women of the Court. The wind of change was blowing through Gropecunt Lane (an actual street name in the London of the time), and with the deposing of James II and the crowrting of the upright William of Orange, who turned his back on the Court to rule from Hampton Court rather than Whitehall (which was burned down in 1698), it blew that particular house of cards down. It may be that William and Mary had gone in search of their own Good Life; whatever the case, the days of the royal dolce vita were gone for good.

Just as the British monarchy embourgeoised itself in order to live (contrary to popular experience, in which one must reject the bourgeois state in order to live fully), the royal paramour underwent a similar process. By the time of Edward VII, they were no longer whores, foreign aristocrats, orange sellers or other such loose cannons, though actresses remain popular to this day -think of Susan George and Koo Stark, who with the artifice typical of their breed have managed to display complete discretion.

Lily Langtry was a prototype of the new bourgeois mistress as patronized by the then Prince of Wales, but the epitome must have been the Honourable Mrs George Keppel. In her case, the 'Mrs' was a far more attractive part of her title than the 'Honourable', meaning as it did that she would be very unlikely to become possessive or otherwise cause trouble. During the courtship of the Prince and Princess of Wales, according to Andrew Morton, she asked him about his previous girlfriends and he had told her with complete shamelessness that be preferred married women because they were 'safe'. It seems frankly shocking that the man who plans to become head of the Church of England should apparently see marriage not as a sacrament but as a talent pool which makes a woman wonhy of receiving a royal rogering; perhaps the Prince's devotion to Islam and his preference for being Defender Of Faiths, rather than the Faith, stems from his desire to have more than one wife - regardless of whose she is.

Mrs Keppel was the soul of propriety; on the day of the Abdication, she was dining at the Ritz and was heard to say 'Things were done so much better in my day'. She slept with the King at least three times a week, went on holiday with him twice a year on the royal train and advised him on presents for his wife. To add insult to injury she kept a large signed photograph of the King's wife, the beautiful and fragile young Danish princess Alexandra, prominently displayed. Her great-granddaughter Camilla Parker-Bowles would appear to have been a veritable Estella to her Miss Havisham, though with a burning contempt for women rather than men.

And contemptuous such behaviour was, despite the cosy witterings of the King about his 'Dear Mrs George' - contemptuous and quite hideously hypocritical. Such behaviour made it perfectly clear that, while the proles waved flags and cheered themselves hoarse, events of allegedly national importance and spiritual relevance such as royal marriages and Coronation vows were rituals that must be endured, but which essenfially meant nothing to the men who made them, at least. Princess Alexandra, half-deaf and unable to walk properly, would probably not have chosen to have herself delivered in such a vulnerable condition to a man who had no intention of loving her, had she had a choice. Though knowing the state of morals of the merry monarchs of Windsor, a wife who was hard of hearing probably counted as a plus.

Mrs Keppel, meanwhile, was cut from the same coarse cloth as her great-granddaughter; she considered a vulgar hat worn at the races far more shocking than mere adultery. His ministers all approved; Sir Charles Hardinge wrote of the 'excellent influence' she had over the King, who true to form, looked at his Kennel Book, ate too much, drank too much and smoked too much but was, nevertheless, easily bored and the proud owner of a vile temper Mrs Keppel, who once said that her job was 'to curtsy and jump into bed', kept him amused for twelve years by changing her clothes four times a day and throwing wildly expensive parties for him. To help foot the fantastic bifis, the King found Mr Keppel a lucrative job as a buyer for Liptons and introduced Mrs Keppel to his banker Sir Ernest Cassel, who literally made a small fortune for both her and the King. So cosy; and to poor foreign Alexandra, barely speaking the language, hardly hearing a thing, about as cosy as a nest of vipers.

They look well together and each looks as good as they ever will

There is a photograph from the early part of the seventies (a period which often seems to have had more than its fair share of shimmering, sunlit Indian summers to those who grew up in it; see the crrrrent early seventies nostalgia for what seemed like a tirne of unsurpassed freedom, post-Pill and pre-AIDS) of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Shand, as she was, standing together by a tree, seemingly unobserved, in profile. He has been playing polo; they are casually dressed and rumpled, and utterly blind to everyone but each other They do not seem aware that the photograph is being taken at all, though the camera seems close and we only see them from about the waist up. It brings to mind the scene in West Side Story when the star-crossed lovers first meet at the dance in the gym, and around them all the room and people fade away, leaving only their rapt faces in clear-cut close-up.

They look well together and each looks as good as they ever will. He has not yet lost his hair, nor she her lips. Between them there is a tree, on which a heart has been carved, and inside that heart there is a 'C'. It is the most beautiful picture of Prince Charles and the woman he loved ever taken; not the engagement pictures which went on all the mugs for the mugs, not the Kiss, not those posed Country Life jobs en famille for the Christmas cards.

We hear so much about the bravery; the progressiveness and the fearless quest for change which burns inside the Prince of Wales like the heartburn from Hell. Then why could he not, on this most important of all issues, marry a woman of his own age with a modest amount of sexual experience, knowing that she would in all probability make him happy for the rest of his days? Why did he drag a third party in, an innocent third party who would go to her early grave irretrievably damaged by such a monumental sting? What in the world possessed him not just to blight the life of the woman he loved, but of the woman who loved him? One thing is sure - on that day in the Mall, in front of those jubilant millions, we saw who did it: Judas, on the balcony, with a kiss.