Secrets Of The Royals
by Gordon Winter and Wendy Kochman
St Martin's Press
New York 1990
ISBN 0-312-04415-1
Chapter 14 - Sexy Modern Royals
When Queen Victoria died senile in 1901, her elder son Albert Edward came to the throne as KING EDWARD THE SEVENTH. Although he was a fair old monarch who gave his name to what became famous as the "Edwardian" age, Edward was a sexual cowboy who spent his whole life chasing skirt in order to get as many notches on the butt of his pistol as possible. More than ten thousand notches is a fairly conservative estimate because he sampled at least four women a week from the age of nineteen until he died at sixty-nine. The actual figure could be between fifteen and eighteen thousand, though, because in good weeks he managed six or seven different bed partners.
To regain his strength, Edward usually devoured an eight course breakfast, and his dinners often ran to twelve courses. When it came to sexual intercourse, however, Edward's eyes were greedier than his famously fat stomach. Proof of this came when he tried to seduce an outrageously sexy blonde wearing a long slinky silk dress at a party-only to discover to his horror that the "blonde" was actually the transvestite Russian prince Felix Yusupov, wearing full drag. (Source: Prince Felix Yusupov: The Man Who Murdered Rasputin by Chris Dobson [Harrap, 1989].)
Rather more amusing for the king was the millionaire Indian prince who was so impressed by His Majesty's sexual comings and goings that he sent him an unforgettable birthday present: a golf bag made from an elephant's penis.
Edward's best-known mistress was Lillie Langtry, the most outrageous "Scarlet Woman" of her time. During the height of her affair with Edward (then the Prince of Wales), a gossip columnist cunningly wrote this sentence in a weekly London journal: "There is nothing whatever between the Prince of Wales and Lillie Langtry." Readers were mystified by this dotty denial but in the very next edition, in exactly the same place, appeared the four words: "Not even a sheet"
Although she was a parson's daughter, Lillie Langtry was an uninhibited character who disrupted many a sedate cocktail party with her outrageous antics. But Edward's ardor for her cooled permanently when she jokingly poured a large helping of melting strawberry ice cream down the back of his neck at a boring dinner party.
Having fallen from the royal gravy train, Lillie took advantage of her notoriety as a former Buckingham Palace intimate by becoming an actress. During a whistle-stop tour of America in the early 1880s, she stayed overnight in a- newly formed settlement in Texas where she charmed the local judge Roy Bean so much (by her skill at poker) that he named the town Langtry in her honor.
Lillie also had an affair with Prince Louis of Battenberg (father of Lord Mountbatten) and by him is said to have given birth to an illegitimate daughter named Jeanne Marie. Later still, Lillie married a baronet's son and became the rather more sedate Lady de Bathe. She died in 1929 at the age of seventy-six.
Another of Edward's sleeping partners was the even more famous actress Sarah Bernhardt She not only had an affair with Edward, but also claimed to have had one with his son, Prince I Eddy. She was also the mistress of the Belgian prince Henri de Ligne, and her bastard son Maurice was said to have been sired by him. 
Sarah Bernhardt was as dramatic offstage as on. She kept a silk-lined coffin in her bedroom, and the spiciest tidbit of gossip in London at the time was that she once had sex with Edward as he lay supine, but very much alive, in that coffin.
Just before she died in 1923; at the age of seventy-nine, Sarah coyly indicated that she had "entertained" other famous lovers, such as the French novelist Victor Hugo and Napoleon III, in the coffin and that its pink silk lining had to be changed quite regularly-for wear-and-tear reasons. 
Edward's longest serving mistress was Alice Keppel, the wife of an earl. She spent six weeks of every year making love to His Royal Highness in the then-popular French coastal resort of Biarritz. Alice was a real survivor who held Edward's hand as he lay on his deathbed in May 1910 and sobbed that if he died she no longer wished to live. This was not quite true. She clung to life until 1947, when she died at the age of seventy-eight.
Another long-favored mistress was "Daisy" Warwick, the wife of Lord Brooke. But soon after King Edward died, Daisy tried to blackmail the royal family by producing a collection of his sizzling love letters. Although everybody in London society knew all about His Royal Highness being an adulterer, these letters were political dynamite because their publication in a newspaper would have proved it to the workers-who were not supposed to know. 
So Buckingham Palace arranged for an urgent application to be made to the High Court, restraining Daisy from selling the letters to the gutter press. Daisy then threw the royals into a dither by threatening to sell them to one of America's biggest newspapers. At this stage, Arthur du Cros, of the famous Dunlop rubber (tire) company, stepped in and paid off £64,000 worth of Daisy's debts in return for the love letters. Mr. Du Cros was later created a baronet. Daisy, by the way, died in 1938, at seventy-six.
The most revealing story about Edward the Seventh-in terms of social hypocrisy-is that while staying in a friend's house one night, he felt rather randy and had to make do by calling for a maid. This was Rosa Lewis, who was made to measure for Edward as she not only served him adequately but told him about several other pretty little young servant girls who would simply adore to be in royal service.
After accepting many of Rosa's recommendations, the king realized she was far too talented to remain in below-stairs service to the top nobs and should give them pleasure upstairs instead. So he gave her the money to open London's (now respectable) Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, just opposite the back door of Fortnum and Mason's Royal Grocery shop.
There, from 1902 until she died in 1952, Rosa ran Britain's most famous high-class brothel where she provided classy harlots for members of Parliament, high-ranking military officers, and much of the aristocracy. The hotel-brothel became so famous that in the forties and fifties many members of the British nobility took their sixteen-year-old sons there to introduce them to the pleasures of the flesh and, often, to discreetly ascertain whether or not they were gay.
Rosa's guests were not all Brits. Her hotel was used by thousands of visitors from overseas, including many of America's most prominent politicians and millionaires, who were taken to the Cavendish by trusted friends in London for discreet afternoon sessions of tea and crumpet. And tarts. This world-famous cat house somehow managed to escape the attention of Scotland Yard's vice squad. Not once during her fifty-year reign as Britain's Queen of Sex was Rosa Lewis charged with keeping a brothel. 
Although King Edward the Seventh was a regular visitor at this house of pleasure that he had bankrolled, he still admired his faithful wife Alexandra, the lovely daughter of Denmark's King Christian the Ninth. Alexandra didn't mind the fact that her husband had sex with thousands of other women. What upset her was that all those other ladies knew what a terrible sex life she had with him as he took less than a minute to complete the sex act. In spite of this, Alexandra managed to produce three daughters and three sons. Two of those sons went on to great fame. 
Son number one was PRINCE ALBERT VICTOR, known as Prince Eddy. Born in 1864, he was lazy, a poor reader, an atrocious speller, and such a total dunce that his tutors despaired of him. Yet this did not stop a university awarding him with an honorary doctorate of law.
When the truth leaked out about his backwardness, the royal family tried to cover up by claiming he was "slightly deaf." They said this made it difficult for him to hear what his teachers said. Some people might wonder why this normally spoiled young prince was not supplied with an ear trumpet if he did have a hearing defect. But of course he didn't, because when it came to sex, Eddy was a genius who could hear the rustle of silk knickers two boudoirs away.
The most disgraceful but nonetheless intriguing rumor about Prince Eddy is that he was Jack the Ripper. Several books have linked him with the sensational murders that rocked Britain in 1888. The common denominator in these books is that Prince Eddy contracted syphilis from one of the thousands of prostitutes in London's deprived East End area.
Some say Prince Eddy obtained his revenge by returning to the East End one night and killing the disgustingly diseased tart by disemboweling her. Other books state that her fellow prostitutes were murdered by Queen Victoria's royal physician, Sir William Gull.
When Britain's Thames TV showed its three-part Jack the Ripper series, starring the actor Michael Caine in 1988, it categorically named Sir William as the Ripper. Viewers were told: 
"We have come to our conclusions after careful study and painstaking deduction. Other researchers, criminologists and writers may take a different view. We believe our conclusions to be true."
Possibly to protect itself against hostile reaction from admirers of the royal family, Thames TV did not suggest that Sir William Gull had been "recruited" by Queen Victoria, or Prince Eddy, to kill the prostitutes. The filmmakers explained that problem away by saying the royal physician was just "insane."
But the late Stephen Knight, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, took the subject further. He said Prince Eddy had fallen in love with a Catholic shop-girl named Anne Crook, had secretly married her in a Catholic ceremony, and that she had given birth to his child, a girl named Alice. To prevent a religious scandal erupting, which could easily have toppled the then unpopular Queen Victoria, Sir William Gull was commissioned to kidnap Anne. He did, and rendered her insane by operating on her brain-after which he had placed her in a mental institution.
According to Mr. Knight, this disgraceful plot backfired because Anne Crook had left her baby in the care of Mary Kelly, an amateur prostitute living in London's East End who, in collusion with three full-time whores, tried to blackmail the royal family.
The result, stated Mr. Knight, was that the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, sent Sir William to "eliminate" all those dangerous guttersnipes in a desperate last-ditch attempt to protect the British monarchy. To give the impression that a total madman was responsible, Sir William Gull had cut out the prostitute's wombs and ovaries or committed other atrocities, such as chopping off their breasts or ears.
Sir William is said to have died in 1890, but there is doubt about this because, contrary to usual medical ethics, his death was certified by Dr. Theo Ackland, who just happened to be his son-in-law.
Stephen Knight's findings were so well researched and convincing that somebody thought him dangerous. Perhaps that is why he was smeared by several newspapers, which tried to claim he had got his facts wrong. He hadn't. His book, which was originally published by Harrap in 1976, has been reprinted twelve times since by Grafton Books of London.
The whole Ripper saga has been confused, perhaps deliberately, by various conflicting claims-the most ridiculous being that Moscow had sent a Russian spy over to kill those prostitutes, just to embarrass the British government. No, that is not one of those anti-Kremlin jokes. The claim appeared in Things I Know by William Le Quex in 1923.
Three years after the Ripper killings, Queen Victoria decided that Prince Eddy, then second in1ine to the English throne, needed a strong-willed wife to keep him in line. The woman chosen was the Princess of Teck, and she agreed to take on the job. Their marriage was/planned for February 27, 1892, but Prince Eddy died suddenly six weeks before that. The Buckingham Palace version is that he died of influenza, though other sources insist it was caused by a softening of the brain due to syphilis.
His intended bride plunged herself into one year of mourning for her lost beloved. After emerging from that mourning, Queen Victoria called her in and told her there had been a change of plan and she must marry Prince Eddy's brother, Prince George.
We are told' she was "affronted and embarrassed" by the idea. But the truth is, she was most eager to be a possible queen and willingly obeyed. The story was then put out that the Princess of Teck had never really loved Prince Eddy but had always secretly loved his brother George, and the couple were speedily married two months later in July 1893. They enjoyed their honeymoon at Sandringham-where poor Prince Eddy had died just eighteen months earlier!
When King Edward the Seventh went to heaven in 1910, Prince George and his wife came to the throne as KING GEORGE THE FIFTH and QUEEN MARY. The diaries of various royals unnecessarily confirm that their marriage was one of total convenience and that no love was involved on either side. But the public was later told that their marriage developed into "a deep and lasting love."
Although she was a very German lady with not a drop of English blood in her veins, Queen Mary's ramrod-back deportment was seen to epitomize British royalty for over forty years. Her regal appearance hardly changed. Jeweled toques topped her tightly packed curls, and there was always the same style of coat and silver-topped cane. Her loyalty to the Crown was beyond any possible criticism-even to the point, as we have seen, of being willing to die for it rather than endanger the coronation of her grandchild, Elizabeth, in 1953.
There has never been one breath of sexual scandal about her. It is not unkind to emphasize that she had not the slightest interest in sex. Some historians have made this abundantly clear by recording her own comment that when her husband did visit her royal bedchamber to provide heirs, she "closed her eyes and thought of England."
This does not mean Queen Mary's character had no blemishes. The big skeleton in her cupboard is that she was "unfortunately afflicted with kleptomania." This is a disease affecting only the rich. When poor people steal, they are thieves. If Queen Mary liked a Georgian snuff box or a similarly valuable silver trinket when visiting the home of a friend, she swiped it.
So many aristocrats complained to Buckingham Palace about her theft of their objects d'art that Queen Mary's lady-in-waiting was told to watch her like a hawk when she went visiting. If she slipped something into her handbag, the lady-in-waiting would later retrieve it and mail it back to the owner with a covering letter stating that it had been taken "by mistake." Some psychiatrists say this kind of unnecessary stealing, particularly shoplifting by rich women, is a subconscious substitute for sex.
Queen Mary was a disinterested mother who gave little love or cuddles to her children-. When she died in 1953 her son, then the Duke of Windsor, told his wife, Wallis: "I'm afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they now are in death."
Queen Mary's husband, George the Fifth, had sowed plenty of wild oats in his youth. At one time he shared a girl with his sexy and alleged "Ripper" brother, Prince Eddy. They kept her in a luxury apartment in London's St. John's Wood area. But, after marrying, George is said to have settled down, and we are told he was a "paragon of virtue."
There is, however, one strange story about George. This surfaced in a French newspaper named The Liberator when he became king. Copies of the article were sent to all members of Parliament - obviously to ensure that the royals did not get the news smothered. It was terribly embarrassing because the story claimed that while in Malta, when he was still Prince George, the king had legally married a British admiral's daughter, Mary Culme-Seymour, and had sired several children by her.
This was political dynamite because, if true, those children were claimants to the English throne. Furthermore, it was alleged that Prince George had decided to abandon Miss Culme-Seymour only when his brother Eddy died and the royal family delicately pointed out to him that, as second in line to the throne, he should quickly discard this little commoner.
The journalist who wrote this story was an E. F. Mylius and not surprisingly, he was charged with writing lies. If he had been allowed to get away with it,. some nasty-minded people might have thought that King George's marriage to Queen Mary was not legal, which would have meant that her children were illegitimate.
During the court hearing evidence was given that, quite apart from never having married Prince George, Mary Culme-Seymour had not even met him during the years in question (1879 to 1898). Journalist Mylius was found guilty in 1911 and sentenced to one year in jail. After serving his sentence, he had a pamphlet published in New York in which he produced evidence, in the form of British newspaper clippings, that witnesses had lied at his trial.
This showed that Prince George had, in fact, met Mary Culme-Seymour in August 1891 when she opened the dancing with him at a large ball in Portsmouth. Ah yes, said Mary Culme-Seymour, "I had forgotten about that." Mr. Mylius, who was still unable to get the justice to which he said he was entitled, commented that he found it rather difficult to believe a pretty young lady could forget the great honor of opening the dancing at a ball with a handsome prince.
In 1917, toward the end of World War I, the British public developed such a hatred of anything German that they kicked innocent little dachshund dogs in the streets. Some people even suspected the German-blooded British royal family of having secret sympathy for the hated "Kaiser Bill"-Wilhelm the Second-who was, of course, Queen Victoria's grandson.
The publicity experts at Buckingham Palace urged King George to change the German name of his royal British house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. So the magic royal wand was waved and overnight the royal family became known by the much more English-sounding name, Windsor.
Another patriotic little story about King George is that he did not want to give Britain's Victoria Cross medal to America's "Unknown Soldier" when that revered serviceman was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 1921. Quite definitely not, said the king. Even when his advisors explained that America had given its Congressional Medal of Honor to the British Unknown Warrior one year earlier, George was not impressed.
He said it was ridiculous to compare the illustrious British VC with the Medal of Honor, which, he sneered, having been instituted in only 1862, "has no history behind it." The British VC, by the way, was instituted by Queen Victoria in 1856. So six years was obviously a long time in the mind of old George Five. In the end, however, he was forced to grant the VC to the anonymous American when the Whitehall diplomats pointed out that America was a valuable ally and could not be insulted with a lesser medal.
Fate sometimes plays cruel tricks, King George the Fifth insisted that his royal physician, Bernard Dawson, be sworn of the Privy Council-an extremely unusual honor for a doctor. As we have seen, Lord Dawson of Penn went on to thank King George by murdering him in 1936.
When that happened, George's son came to the throne as KING EDWARD THE EIGHTH. Although his marriage to Wallis Simpson was described by Winston Churchill as "one of the greatest love stories of history," King Edward had sown a lot of wild oats in his youth. But he was double smart. To prevent the gossip columnists writing scandal stories about his affairs, he only bedded married women. Their husbands did not complain as it usually raised their social standing and even helped them make better contacts in the City, which brought them juicy contracts.
One of his mistresses was Giulia Barucci. She was so open about it that she went around London bragging "I'm the greatest whore in the world." He also had a fling with Gloria Vanderbilt's twin sister, Thelma, Lady Furness. She was not his first titled lady. At the age of twenty-one he had quenched his sexual thirst with the much older Lady Coke. But it wasn't the real thing so he moved on to Freda Dudley Ward, wife of a Liberal member of Parliament.
Later, in September 1934 (when Wallis Simpson was away on vacation), it is said he dallied with Freda's sister Vera, who gave birth to a boy in mid-1935. After being educated at Eton, that boy become an actor and played the part of Ned opposite Marlon Brando in the 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty. His name is Tim Seely, and in March 1988 the British Daily Express ran a front page story naming him the Duke of Windsor's "secret son."
In this article, fifty-three-year-old Mr. Seely admitted that he bore an extraordinary resemblance to the duke. "It is something I have had to live with most of my life," he said. But it has not hurt him socially. He still rides to hounds with the upper set-sometimes in the company of Prince Charles.
When King Edward the Eighth abdicated for the love of Wallis Simpson and went into exile as what the royal family described as the "Puke of Windsor," his brother took the throne as GEORGE THE SIXTH-although all his family called him Bertie.
As a child he was knock-kneed so they put his legs in painful iron braces to make him walk properly and appear perfect. It didn't work. To make matters worse, his father, King George the Fifth, was a bad-tempered old bully when it came to disciplining kids and would threaten to punish the left -handed little weakling if he didn't stop whining. That is probably why the highly nervous Bertie became terribly shy, developed an appalling stammer, nervous facial twitches, and a chronic stomach complaint.
When Kingship was unexpectedly thrust upon him in 1936, he told his wife he was terrified he would be unable to cope. Without that wife, he never would have managed. In truth, Elisabeth was the real ruler behind the throne but, just like any loving wife, she gave the outside world the impression that he wore the trousers. Even more shrewdly, she pressed the point that her husband was a shy and sensitive man who, in spite of his terrible stammer and ill health, was absolutely determined to be a good king for them. Pure unadulterated brilliance. No wonder the British public came to love and admire him.
Nobody in the history of the British royal family has ever manipulated the media as brilliantly as Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was later to become world famous as the "Queen Mum."
In 1940 when Buckingham Palace was slightly damaged by a German bomb, she took full public relations advantage by telling journalists: "I'm glad we have been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the [badly bombed] East End in the face." No wonder Adolf Hitler had earlier told his Nazi propaganda expert, Joseph Goebbels, to describe her as "the most dangerous woman in Europe."
The Queen Mum scored another victory during World War II. With the help of her husband, she gave the royal family the appearance of being typically "English" once more. She helped to condition the British public into forgetting about the German blood in the royal veins and the incredible background of names such as Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Wurttemburg, Teck, Hanover, and Wettin. Yet even today, the real top-drawer aristocrats smile patronizingly at the Royal House of Windsor, saying "They are still Krauts after all, old chap."
Although she was born in England, the Queen Mother usually described herself as a Scot. Great mystery surrounds her birth. It is definite that her mother, Lady Glamis, gave birth to her in August 1900. But incredibly, nobody seems willing to say where. Her father, Lord Glamis, illegally forgot to register the birth, and for that he had to pay a fine of seven shillings and sixpence. And when he did register the birth he deliberately, or accidentally, gave the wrong place of birth-for which he could have been fined under the Forgery Act.
So where was the Queen Mum born? In her wickedly irreverent book Queen Elizabeth, a Life of the Queen Mother (Viking, 1986), the brilliant writer Penelope Mortimer tells us that the odds are strong that she was born in the backseat of a horse-drawn vehicle going through central London (or parked under a lamppost). When asked to confirm or deny this, the Queen Mum answered, through a spokesman, that she "had no interest in the subject."
Way back in 1923, when Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married her husband in Westminster Abbey, she showed that she under stood all about the mystique of monarchy-by agreeing with the archbishop of Canterbury that the BBC should not broadcast the ceremony over the radio. Why. not? Because "Some disrespectful people might hear it while sitting in public houses with their hats on!" She was obviously referring to her disgustingly vulgar working-class subjects, because the more refined English do not wear hats when they sit in up-market hotels and cocktail bars.
The Queen Mother also understood pictures. Skim through any of the thousands of photographs showing the Queen Mum standing outside Clarence House celebrating one of her many birthdays and you will see that she usually tilted her head slightly to one side. Some Hollywood film stars can learn from that clever trick as it puts "movement" into what could otherwise look like a stiff or posed picture. Whenever the Queen Mum did it, she gave the impression that she was nodding to each and every one of us. Pure genius!
Just like Queen Mary, there has never been one breath of sexual scandal associated with the Queen Mother although several gossip columnists forecast she would marry her long time friend, Sir Arthur Penn, after her shy, sensitive, and retiring husband died. But obviously, Sir Arthur was not one of the marrying kind.
The only commoner we know to have kissed the Queen Mum full on the lips was the American president Jimmy Carter. He clearly did not turn her on, as the comment she leaked to the press was: "He will never be forgiven for that!"
When King George the Sixth died of lung cancer in 1952, his daughter came to the throne as QUEEN ELIZABETH THE SECOND. Just like her mother, she has a perfect genius for the right kind of publicity. Perhaps the best example of this came when a TV film unit was allowed to photograph her enjoying a family picnic in the grounds of her holiday home at Balmoral.
The Queen shrewdly made a point of allowing the camera men to film her helping to wash and dry the plates and cutlery at the end of the meal. And, exactly as intended, this down-to earth ploy gave tremendous psychological reassurance to millions of suburban housewives who turned to their husbands snoring on the sofa and cooed: "There you are, you see. She's just like us really, isn't she?"
Without a shadow of doubt Elizabeth the Second is the best queen the English have ever had. The only scandalous thing we have read about her was written by Nigel Dempster, who has long been famous as the high society and royal gossip columnist of the Daily Mail. On the very first page of his super spicy book H.RH. The Princess Margaret. A Life Unfulfilled, (Quartet, 1981) he wrote that when Queen Elizabeth married her first love Prince Philip, she was: "as virginal as her eponymous ancestor."
WOW! That raises a most fascinating question: Did Nigel not know that the queen's ancestor, Elizabeth the "Virgin Queen" who ruled from 1558 to 1603 was certainly no virgin? That she had several young lovers and, at the late age of fifty-four, even started a twelve-year affair with a handsome young fellow of twenty? Really, Nigel, you should never have associated our Queen Elizabeth with a shady lady like that.
To be fair though, it must have been a genuine mistake because the Queen's name had never been tarnished by British press speculation about her love life.
In fact, only one English person has ever dared to mention the subject of sex in relation to Her Majesty the Queen. This was her son Prince Andrew, who once said: "You know, the one thing I can never possibly imagine is'11lY mother and father making love." Randy Andy's comment is said to have made his father "furious" and "outraged" his mother. (Source: Charles and Diana by that entertaining American writer, Ralph G. Martin [Grafton Books, 1986.])
In 1941 an American named Henry "Chips" Channon made the most astonishing prediction. Writing in his diary, he stated that the handsome Philip of Greece "is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy."
This really was an incredibly accurate prophecy because Prince Philip did not propose marriage to Princess Elizabeth until six years later in 1947-and even then, it took the world by surprise.
How on earth could Henry Channon have been privy to such a secret? The answer is that he received it from an impeccable source-none other than Princess Nicholas of Greece, who told him, on January 21, 1941, that a marriage was "being arranged" between Philip and Elizabeth!
This rather contradicts the fairy-tale love-at-first-sight stories churned out by Buckingham Palace. Could this be the reason why Sir Henry "Chips" Channon has been denigrated by many historians as an "unreliable diarist" and "an American snob who was obsessed by titles and money?"
Overseas newspapers and magazines have nibbled at the subject of the Queen's marriage to Prince Philip by claiming (about seventy times) that it was "on the rocks," that he had a long-term woman friend who had an interest in a top-society nightspot, and that there was a gigantic cover-up about his alleged involvement in the infamous Profumo "sex and secrets" scandal-which, in truth, should have been tagged the Stephen Ward scandal.
The son of a vicar, Ward was born in 1912 and traveled to America when' he was twenty. After studying at the College of Osteopathy in Missouri, he returned to London as a doctor and achieved success by giving relief to top-drawer people suffering backache and other muscular problems-such people as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Paul Getty, Nancy Astor, and Ava Gardner.
A sophisticated and elegant man, Stephen Ward also sketched portraits in pencil and crayon of such famous people as Princess Margaret, the Duke of Kent, the Duchess of Gloucester, and Prince Philip. Ward was not your tradesman's entrance type of artist who was summoned to the palace to do his sketches. He was friendly enough with Prince Philip to have lunched with him in central London. Philip also visited Ward's home several times.
In the early sixties, Ward turned from giving the nobility relief for their back pains and focused on other parts of their anatomy. He introduced them to pretty young working-class "models," such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies who were only too delighted to oblige the noblesse by having sex with them, and even dressing up as nannies and spanking their bare bottoms for them.
In 1961 a British Intelligence officer named Keith Wagstaffe recruited Stephen Ward as an undercover agent for MI5's Counter Intelligence Section. Ward's assignment was to persuade a London-based Russian naval attaché, Captain Eugene Ivanov, to defect. The son-in-law of Alexander Gorkin, the chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court, Captain Ivanov was known to be an undercover agent for Russian Military Intelligence (GRU).
Ward introduced Christine Keeler to Ivanov, but the plot went seriously wrong because Ward had also introduced Christine to John Profumo, who was then Her Majesty's war minister. Profumo had several sex sessions with Christine, the most famous of which took place in the bed of Profumo's actress wife, Valerie Hobson. When Fleet Street became aware of this adulterous relationship, Profumo tried to silence them by lying to Parliament that he had never had sex with Miss Keeler and that he would sue the pants off anyone who dared to say he had.
When he was proven to be a liar, Profumo was forced to resign in total disgrace. This made world headlines and brought horrendous embarrassment to the Tory government. To deflect the massive media heat from government, the British Establishment had to find a scapegoat. The man chosen was Stephen Ward, who was framed on a charge of living on the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies -although both women later admitted telling lies against Ward after being subjected to police pressure.
Stephen Ward denied all the charges. He said he had first been introduced to Captain Ivanov by Sir Colin Coote, then the managing editor of the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph. (Sir Colin, who died in 1979, is now known to have been a long-term propaganda agent for Britain's MI6.) Ward said he had later been recruited by British Intelligence to persuade Captain Ivanov to defect, but that the intelligence boys had disowned him in order to avoid becoming embroiled in the Profumo scandal. Ward was not believed at the time but, years later, several MIS officers admitted to various journalists that Ward had been telling the truth about being a secret agent for the British.
Anyone wishing to know the full details can read two excellent books on the subject. An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy (Cape, 1987) and Honey trap by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril (Weidenfeld, 1987). Both books convincingly demonstrate how Stephen Ward was framed by evidence produced in a manipulated trial, during which some of the main prosecution witnesses were later shown to have lied under oath.
Stephen Ward cheated the court that found him guilty of living on immoral earnings. He committed suicide by swallowing a large number of Nembutal capsules. At the time, his sketches were on show in a Bloomsbury art gallery and something very odd took place there. A tall, elegant, and well-spoken man walked into the gallery, selected every drawing of the royal family, including those of Prince Philip, paid £5,000, and carried them away without giving his name. The man was never identified although some journalists insist he was Sir Anthony Blunt, the British Intelligence agent (later exposed as a double agent for the KGB) who then worked at Buckingham Palace as Keeper of the Queen's Pictures.
So ended Britain's favorite high society bedtime story. Until 1987, that is. This was when Anthony Summers (co-author of Honeypot) made the shocking allegation that photographs removed from the home of Stephen Ward showed a likeness of Prince Philip alongside various naked girls. Buckingham Palace did not react publicly to this distressing claim, although they let it be known that they considered it "outrageous."
Today Christine Keeler lives quietly in a modest, low-rent apartment about two miles from Buckingham Palace in an area of London aptly named World's End.
Millionaire John Profumo is still a member of high society. After cleansing himself morally and publicly by working for a charity in London's East End, Buckingham Palace arranged for him to be photographed shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth in 1971. In effect, this gave the royal seal of approval to the man who once laid a dubious lady on his wife's bed and then lied to Parliament. Four years later, just to prove that Her Majesty's highly bred, elegant, honorable, repentant and totally reformed former Minister of War really had been completely forgiven, the Queen agreed to the now sweet-smelling Profumo being accorded the high honor of the CBE-Commander of the British Empire.
Another naughty fellow who was given the cleansing royal handshake in public was Major Ron Ferguson, the father of Prince Andrew's wife, Fergie. His sexy saga exploded in May 1988 when the British Sunday newspaper The People front-paged a fantastic scoop disclosing that Fergie's dad had been a regular punter at a high-class London brothel.
Covering its back against the predictable cries of "Lies, all damned lies," the newspaper published a photograph of the galloping major licking his lips salaciously as he emerged from the brothel, which, for reasons of "respectability," called itself the Wigmore Massage and Sauna Club. The People not only told how Fergie's father had paid blonde, brunette, and redhead prostitutes, but also published photographs of three of the girls he had paid for sex and other excitements! One of the girls described what the major looked like without his clothing, including his freckles and "patchy scabs like eczema."
Even more revealing was that during one session with a girl, Fergie's father had asked her: "What does it feel like to be dealing with royalty?" We can't help wondering whether the girl was quick-witted enough to ask him what it felt like to be felt by a non royal.
The sexploits of Fergie's disgraced dad presented the Queen with a major problem. Although she was privately "fuming with anger" about his immorality (or stupidity in being caught), it was more important to put on a great display of royal family unity. Ron Ferguson could not be fired from his job as polo manager to Prince Charles, and he could hardly be dropped socially as this would have been demeaning for his daughter, Fergie, the Duchess of York-as well as reflecting badly on Fergie's husband, Prince "Randy" Andy.
That is why, on June 5, 1988, the Queen gave Major Ron Ferguson that now-famous "royal pardon" handshake at a polo match. Not by coincidence, several press cameramen were there to record the royal "cleansing" operation, and next day, most British newspapers carried photographs of the Queen clasping the hand that had caressed those blondes, brunettes, and redheads. That handshake was a clear royal message to the terrible tabloids, which had been enjoying themselves immensely. It was: "Now shut up."
But five days later, Sun columnist Fiona Macdonald Hull, who is as delectable to behold as she is to read, accurately placed her finger on the public pulse by writing: "The Queen has muddled me. She obviously thinks that perverts who consort with prostitutes are acceptable, while tax-fiddlers are not." (Fiona mentioned tax-fiddlers because earlier, the Queen had withdrawn the Order of the British Empire decoration from Britain's most-loved jockey, Lester Piggot, who had been jailed for failing to disclose all his earnings to Her Majesty's tax inspectors.)
Fiona criticized the Queen for removing jockey Piggot's OBE with one hand "while she extended the other to warmly greet Major Ronald Ferguson." Pointing out that it was the Queen's duty "to set us all a moral example," Fiona said that if any ordinary person had done what Major Ferguson had done, he or she would not be allowed within "spitting distance" of the Queen.
"But when it's one of their own, the Royal Family will forgive ANYTHING. And you or I can either like it or lump it." Fiery Fiona ended her article by stating: "If this is what Monarchy is all about, we are better off without it."
Another married member of the royal family who caused great embarrassment to the Queen was Princess Michael. In 1985 a British paper secretly photographed her entering a London house for an alleged overnight rendezvous with Texas billionaire John Ward Hunt. But this whole affair was solved when Mr. Hunt, being a perfect gentleman, refused to say one word to the British press and flew back to America on the next possible flight.
The Queen then ordered Princess Michael to repair some of the damage caused to the family name by being photo graphed in public cuddling up to her long-suffering husband, Prince Michael, and gazing into his face with absolutely sincere love and total adoration in her eyes. Although she did it brilliantly, most people were not really fooled.
Despite all the sexual scandals and problems the Queen has had to tolerate within her family, her marriage to Prince Philip is perfect-as far as the British public is concerned. They know that their Queen, as Defender of the Faith, is a good woman. She must be, because she is the keeper of the nation's conscience and the guardian of Britain's (fast-sliding) morality.
And publicly, Elizabeth and Philip really do try to set a good example. They are proud when their children score a success, they adore their grandchildren, and Philip is always loyal and protective toward his Queen to the point that we are told her face still "lights up with pleasure" when she sees him walk through the door.
Throughout the 1980s, the royal with the biggest marriage problem was PRINCESS ANNE-though Buckingham Palace tried to convince the public otherwise. When it comes to Anne and her husband, Captain MARK PHILLIPS, we have personal knowledge that the palace is not always totally honest. In April 1973 (when it was no secret in Fleet Street that Mark was in love with Anne), we applied to the palace for guidance in connection with interviewing the handsome twenty-four-year-old Queen's Dragoon Guards officer.
After telling us how to contact Mark, the assistant press secretary at the palace, Anne Hawkins, warned us: "For goodness sake, don't bore him with questions about Princess Anne. You press men seem determined to marry him off to the princess, but they are both on record as having said there is no romance as such."
One hour later Mark Phillips, gave us an exclusive interview, which was published. Mark has been unkindly described as "Foggy" by some members of the royal family who seem to think he is "thick and wet," but we found him to be totally straight, honest, and intelligent. Obeying the palace request, we conducted that interview without once mentioning Princess Anne's name. How stupidly trusting we were! Six weeks later Anne and Mark announced their engagement.
Yet even then we did not expose Buckingham Palace's double-talk. Instead, to keep in their good books (so that they would continue to feed us other stories), we wrote a shoelicking story telling how wonderfully Mark had proposed to Princess Anne. In our published article, to our everlasting shame, we repeated how "even the Royal corgis had seemed to approve" and how they had wagged their tails when the engagement was officially announced. Now there's a perfect example of how a Buckingham Palace tale wagged the dog.
Princess Anne married Mark in November 1973 but the couple, although they continued to share their home in Gloucestershire, agreed to go their separate ways in other ways in 1980, at about the time Princess Anne was pregnant with her second child, Zara (Arabic for "Morning Star"). They led virtually separate lives but, to keep the public happy, they pretended to be man and wife for the sake of appearances. Yet even when they made official overseas trips together, they stayed in separate hotels.
This did not go unnoticed by the gossip columnists, who repeatedly told their readers that Princess Anne's marriage was on the rocks, although the Buckingham Palace press prestidigitators, with hands on heart, solemnly denied any such thing. There was no doubt about it though, because Mark was regularly photographed in the company of various worn en
including the controversial good-time naughty girl Pamella Bordes, who made world headlines when it was discovered that she had increased her' bank balance by spending romantic £500 evenings with various politicians and millionaires she had met while working as a researcher in Parliament.
Princess Anne also made some friends of her own. One of them was her handsome personal bodyguard, Sergeant Peter Cross of the Royal Protection Squad. This affair reached a climax when a Buckingham Palace spy discovered Anne was kissing and cuddling Peter privately, and he was quietly removed by Scotland Yard for being "overfamiliar" with the princess.
At that stage, Peter Cross presumed he had been ditched by Princess Anne because she had tired of him. But later, just before Christmas 1980, when Princess Anne was four months pregnant with Zara, he met her secretly at her Gatcombe Park home and discovered she had been informed that he had left the Royal Protection Squad for domestic reasons.
Realizing that he had been "framed," Peter decided to get his revenge by offering a kiss-and-tell story to Fleet Street newspapers. He is said to have asked for $700,000 on the basis that he had enjoyed a "special relationship" with the princess. He did not get anywhere near that amount, but a carefully worded part of his story was later published by The News of the World in September 1985.
It was a fantastic scoop. Peter Cross said he had met Princess Anne secretly on several occasions whenever she telephoned him and asked him if he would like to spend "a day in the country" with her. Sometimes they met at a cottage in the grounds of Princess Anne's country estate but also two or three times at a friend's modest little house in Surrey where they spent several hours together, completely alone.
Their friendship was such that the princess telephoned her former bodyguard to say she was going into hospital to have baby Zara. Next day, on May 15, 1981, Anne telephoned Peter Cross at his home to say: "I've had my baby-it's a girl. We're both fine." One month later Peter was invited to Princess Anne's home for lunch, and after the meal she took him to the nursery to see the baby. Peter said he had given the little girl a teddy bear he had bought for her and, one year later, he gave Zara a jumpsuit for her first birthday.
Buckingham Palace did not appreciate Peter's disclosures one little bit, and, in an attempt to trash his credibility, they let it be known that he was "a vain man who had indulged in several extramarital affairs." Tut-tut. The News of the World was proved correct though. In September 1989 it was officially disclosed that Princess Anne and Mark Phillips were to be separated.
This "shocked" those members of the British public who had believed all those denials of a marital rift issued by Buckingham Palace. But some of the damage was quickly repaired by gushing newspaper stories that Anne and Mark still "admire each other" and, although separated, will remain "the best of friends. "
It is also reassuring to know that Princess Anne's two children "understand," and that the problem of "sharing" them has mostly been solved by the fact that their son, Peter Phillips (born in November 1977) likes going out with his dad, whereas daughter Zara, who has a much stronger bond with her mother, mostly accompanies her.
The big gossip around London town these days is that Princess Anne will definitely apply for a divorce after paying Mark off with a big cash settlement in the region of $2 million. Not that Princess Anne has any intention of remarrying at the moment. Her friendship with former bodyguard Peter Cross ended in November 1983 when she telephoned him and asked him if he would like to enjoy "a day in the country." He took a raincheck by saying he had a new girlfriend. Peter Cross is now married to Angie, a dental nurse.
The latest man to be linked closely with Princess Anne is the dashingly tall dark and handsome "Tiger" Tim Laurence. Their friendship came to light in April 1989 when a Buckingham Palace servant of humble background who was earning $10,000 a year (live in), became so annoyed by the opulent life-style of the royals that she took possession of four intimate letters from Princess Anne's unlocked writing desk. The letters had been written to Princess Anne by the Queen's equerry Tim Laurence, and, in them, he made it abundantly clear, that he was madly in love with Anne.
Cleverly using a front man to protect her identity, the royal servant sent the letters to Rupert Murdoch's newspaper The Sun, the only newspaper in Britain that has consistently proved that it is not at all overawed or frightened of the royal family.
In this instance, however, realizing that they did not possess the copyright to Princess Anne's letters, The Sun behaved impeccably and returned them to the palace unpublished. But word leaked out and the super spicy story was chased by every newspaper. That's when Princess Anne's love life once again hit the fan.
The tragedy here is that Anne is the most honest and down-to-earth member of the royal family. When she married Mark Phillips, it was considered unthinkable that he could remain middle-class Mark without a title to his name. But Princess Anne felt otherwise. She refused pointblank when the Queen offered to give him an earldom, as had been done for the commoner Tony Armstrong-Jones when he married Princess Margaret. Anne said it seemed rather pompous to her that Mark should be given a high falutin' title just because he was marrying a woman who was a princess by an accident of birth.
The same applied to Anne's children, Peter and Zara, who, at the time of writing, are the only members of The Family not to have titles. The Queen was insistent that they should be known as Prince Peter and Princess Zara, but Anne said no way. Her actual comment on this subject was: "They are not royal. The Queen just happens to be their grandmother."
Princess Anne is an original who likes to do it her way. She has no intention of copying Princess Diana's engaging but shrewd way of saying "Cheese" for press cameramen and refuses to behave like a performing. seal for them. She prefers to wear trousers, jumpers, and check shirts rather than flashy dresses, saying she would like to be judged by what she does, not by what she wears. Unlike Princess Di, Princess Anne does not have vast walk-in closets containing thousands of garments, and she does not have a private hairdresser who visits her every day. Neither does she have a manicurist in daily attendance, as can be seen from her often chipped and unpolished fingernails.
The hardest working member of the royal family, Anne hates trotting out much of the tripe written for her by Buckingham Palace. Tripe, because she has told friendly journalists that it's often "ridiculously pompous and even patronizing." She loathes pretentious people and also those who show off or crawl to her. She refuses to have the usual army of royal kitchen maids at her country home and keeps a small staff who help her by "mucking in" with the housework, with everybody wearing blue jeans. When competing at horse trials, she likes to drop her Princess title and asks to be known as plain Anne Phillips. In other words, we admit to having a sneaking regard for her.
Compare all that with the Queen's cousin, LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN, he who was Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, Chief of the Defence Staff, and a truly brilliant but sneaky man who handled himself and manipulated everybody else so well that he was known as the shop steward of the British royal family. That is until 1979, when the Irish Republican Army blew his body to pieces while he was fishing on a small boat near his magnificent Classiebawn Castle in the Irish county of Sligo.
Mountbatten was not only the most crashing snob in royal history but also one of the naughtiest sex-wise. Yet he always managed to get away with it. Most senior British journalists knew that Mountbatten and his vastly rich wife, Edwina, spent most of their married life jumping in and out of other people's beds. It was also no secret that Mountbatten was a bisexual, which might explain why his wife searched for affection in the arms of well-known public figures such as Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru. 
Anyone wanting further details about Lord Louis can read The Mountbattens (Constable, 1989), written by Lord Lambton who is no amateur when it comes to sex scandals. He was a Cabinet Minister serving as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence and was in charge of the Royal Air Force. In 1973 he was forced to resign after being secretly filmed in bed naked (and smoking pot) with London's then famous prostitute, Norma Levy. 
Millionaire Tony, who now lives in happy exile in a sixteenth-century villa near Siena, Italy, discloses in his meticulously researched book that Mountbatten was not only a charlatan and a snob but also a pathological liar who disguised his ancestry ("pastry cooks, tailors, and pastors") in order to enhance his claims to royal status.
Not mentioned in Lambton's book are the latest and most astounding claims against Lord Mountbatten. Someone in British Intelligence is leaking rumors to authors and journalists that Mountbatten was a Soviet sympathizer who secretly helped the Russians during the Cold War. Equally incredible is the claim that Mountbatten was murdered on the orders of the KGB, as they feared he might have been intending to disclose his role as a Russian agent.
This rumor was ridiculed by some but in August 1989, top British journalist Richard Ingrams opened a new can of worms. In his weekly Observer column he stated that Mr. Alan Clark (now Britain's Minister of State for Defence) had told him the same story about Lord Lambton.
It's a strange world. Apart from Her Majesty the Queen, nobody in the royal family is safe from naughty disclosures these days. Except perhaps the Queen's gentle and sensitive bachelor son, PRINCE EDWARD, who was called a wimp by his angry father when he deserted the famously tough Royal Marines in 1987 because he found their assault coarse.
Being a great lover of the performing arts, Edward decided to learn his desired trade from the bottom up by taking a job as a tea boy working backstage at a London theater. But you can safely bet that in years to come he will end up laying them in the aisles as a famous impresario mounting some great stars in a spectacular musical.
At the moment however, central stage is being occupied by the astonishing antics of three of the prettiest young female royals. This unusual soap opera started in October 1989, when newspapers in Italy, France and Germany disclosed that Princess Margaret's unmarried daughter, twenty-six-year-old LADY SARAH ARMSTRONG, was living with her actor boyfriend Daniel Chatto who was described as "the illegitimate half-brother of the two famous movie stars, James and Edward Fox."
Major London newspapers disclosed this to the British public rather tactfully by saying Lady Sarah was "quietly and discreetly" living with Daniel. Sarah's father, Lord Snowdon, reacted by acidly telling a journalist: "Sarah is a student and Daniel is a 'resting' actor. How can they get married yet?"
Another shock for Buckingham Palace came when it was disclosed that twenty-six-year-old LADY HELEN WINDSOR, the unmarried daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, was also "quietly and discreetly" living with her art gallery boss, Tim Taylor.
As both girls are in line to the throne, these revelations caused severe embarrassment to the Queen because she likes to perpetuate Victorian values and cannot possibly be seen to condone any suggestion that her young relatives are "living in sin." She was horrified when she heard that foreign "paparazzi" cameramen were responsible for uncovering such naughty goings on. They had shadowed the two pretty young ladies night and day and had discovered they were keeping their bedroom slippers at the homes of their boyfriends.
But the biggest shock for the Queen came a few days later when her twenty-three-year-old unmarried cousin, MARINA OGILVY, created the most diabolical royal scandal by telling her parents (Princess Alexandra and businessman Sir Angus Ogilvy) that she was several months pregnant by her commercial photographer boyfriend, Paul Mowatt, aged twenty-four. Mum and Dad quite naturally suggested that a marriage should be speedily arranged so that the royal baby would not be born a royal bastard.
Being a fiercely independent girl, Marina said she didn't want a shotgun wedding and that she was determined to live with boyfriend Paul for a while to make sure they were right for each other. But as Paul did not have any money, Marina asked her millionaire father to buy her a house.
Both parents were appalled at the idea of a young lady royal living in sin while carrying a "love child" (only common people have bastards). So much so that they not only refused to buy her a house, they also threatened to cut her off from the family completely. And, as a little taster-to show they meant business-they stopped Marina's monthly pocket money of $420 and also instructed their lawyers to block her from touching any of the substantial funds being held in trust until her twenty-fifth birthday. To round all this off, Marina's boyfriend Paul was told that if he ever darkened a royal doorstep again, the police would be called and he would be arrested.
Marina was so incensed by all this that she went public and gave her story to a British tabloid newspaper. The very first royal in British history to do that! Suspecting that Buckingham Palace might arrange some kind of kidnap in an effort to suppress the story, the newspaper (Today) spirited Marina and her boyfriend off to a secret hideaway in Ireland. When the story hit Page One, Buckingham Palace leaked some viciously wounding stories to friendly newspapers. One was that Marina and her boyfriend Paul hit the bottle just a little too much because at least $750 worth of empty liquor bottles had been seen in the trash bins outside the love nest they were sharing.
That shaft was presumably aimed at Paul, to indicate he was a bad influence on sweet naive little Marina. But Marina did not escape the vitriol either. Another story leaked to the newspapers alleged that she was not quite right in the head, poor dear. She had earlier gone through a "personality change" you see. And this had worried her distraught family so much that they had thoughtfully placed her in a posh private clinic in Surrey, where she had spent some time having "psychiatric counselling. "
Being mightily displeased by the suggestion that she was off her rocker, Marina made an astounding counter attack by going on television and telling millions of viewers all her problems. The very first British royal to do that! During the program she cried her heart out and begged her parents to telephone her, saying: "I want you to stand by me and love me. I am your child. I want you to understand that this is what I want."
British newspapers had a field day. Some of them lashed out at Buckingham Palace for being "old-fashioned," whereas others said the Palace must not knuckle under to permissive attitudes. The papers were equally divided about Marina. Some described her as "a bewildered and rather naive young mother-to-be," while others portrayed her as "a vindictive and manipulative, Royal brat" who had betrayed her class.
When Marina's parents refused to weaken in the face of all this scandal, she played her trump card and caused another avalanche of bad publicity by writing a six-page letter to the Queen. Starting it with "Dear Cousin Lilibet" (Queen Elizabeth's family nickname) shrewd little Marina begged Her Majesty: "Please help me to save my unborn child." She rounded this off nicely by alleging that her parents had tried to trick her into having a secret abortion during "a routine check" with a top Harley Street doctor. 
That did it. Her Majesty the Queen simply could not risk becoming embroiled in a highly religious controversy involving the royals in an alleged abortion attempt. So Princess Alexandra took some of the heat out of the explosive issue by denying she had wanted her daughter to have the unborn baby's life terminated. She said poor little Marina must be confused. In royal terms, that meant: "She's either mad, or a liar."
For some strange reason, Marina suddenly stopped shooting her pretty little mouth off in public. Cynics claim she was paid to shut it. But even then, she still put two fingers up many upper-class noses by moving into the modest terraced home of her boyfriend's parents who live in the relatively social backwater of suburban Kingston. This was a most unusual act for Marina when you know she is twenty-fifth in line to the English throne! Goodness gracious, whatever next?