Not bloody likely
Byron Rogers
CHARLES BL CAMILLA by Gyles Brandreth Century, £20, pp. 368, ISBN 1844138453 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Delicate confections, these biographies of contemporary English royalty. You have to take so much on trust, the confidences of ‘friends’, the unattributed whispers, the hearsay, it only takes one ugly erroneous fact for the whole thing to slide away in front of your eyes like one of those huge cakes in comedy films. For me, in Charles & Camilla, this happened on page 153.
Just a short sentence. ‘The English had captured Caernarfon Castle from the Welsh in 1282.’ There was no castle at Caernarfon in 1282. What there was was a settlement of timber houses, this so small it took 20 men just five days to demolish the lot to make way for the English town, which the Welsh duly destroyed in 1294.
But the cake had begun to slide for me 18 pages earlier where Gyles Brandreth quoted a story told him by the broadcaster Wynford Vaughan Thomas. In 1936, sent to interview David Lloyd George, Vaughan Thomas found the former prime minister in his pyjamas in a hotel room, ‘sitting in bed between two topless tarts’. Under such circumstances the BBC interview duly took place. And if you believe that, sunshine, you’ll believe anything.
Like the fact that the Duchess of Cornwall lost her virginity on the night of Saturday, 27 March, 1965. Gyles Brandreth is no more exact than that: he does not give the hour or place, but adds, ‘in the month, incidentally, when Goldie, the golden eagle, also found freedom, escaping from his cage at London zoo’. Eh? The commas are there presumably as a guarantee of his scrupulous precision. He then wheels on the suspected agent (no, not of Goldie’s escape), a chap called Burke, but says he cannot completely vouch for this, not that it did not happen, but that it may not have happened on that night; he has been, he says, too much of a coward to ask either Burke or the Duchess. The point is that Brandreth might have asked them; he pops up in the oddest places. So it is another guarantee of his good faith, d’you see? It is a formidable technique.
Defoe used it when he wrote his Journal of the Plague Year, which was accepted as a factual record, except that Defoe would have been about four in the year of the Plague. No matter. All it required was the odd uncertainty on his part to convince his reading public that they were not reading a work of fiction. And of course to pack the background with detail. This Brandreth also does.
A magical mystery tour of royal shenanigans, designed to provide a historical perspective, starts with the coronation in 955 of Edwy the Fair, who snuck away from the ceremony and was found in bed with his mistress — and her mother — by the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less. This was probably included as a testimonial to the discretion of contemporary royalty.
The tour goes on to include the founding father of the Keppel family business, to which the Duchess belongs. He was a young Dutchman who came over with William III, and was at 29 created by him Earl of Albemarle because, Brandreth wrote in an earlier royal biography, he was the king’s catamite. Ah. Gyles now thinks he was wrong on this one, and says so, thereby increasing our respect (‘It is all too easy to libel the dead’). Apparently young Keppel was just a stud.
And then there was Mrs Keppel, who used to service Edward VII. When Prince Charles met Camilla for the first time ‘legend has it’, as Brandreth puts it, that she propositioned him. ‘You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather — so how about it?’ He cannot vouch for this, so what he does is pack the paragraph with his usual cunning. It was the early summer of 1971, it had been raining, Charles had been playing polo, he was sweaty and wet and stroking a horse. She was wearing green wellington boots, brown corduroy trousers etc etc. You will note how far we have come from ‘legend has it’, and the cumulative effect is that of course this is true, Gyles was there.
The weird thing is that Gyles sometimes is there. Thirty years later, he says, he actually asks Camilla whether it was true. ‘She pulled a face, then laughed, then shook her head and backed away.’ As any reasonable person might, confronted by a goblin popping out of a line of strangers. This is on page 46, and it is an amazing page.
‘I am afraid,’ goes on Honest Gyles, the People’s Friend and great-great-greatgrandson of the inventor of Brandreth’s Pills, ‘I am afraid I did not have the courage also to ask her whether she believes Edward VII was in fact her greatgrandfather. She probably doesn’t, but many do.’ Again, no matter. Gyles is down in the cellar of his footnotes, rummaging amongst the dead. ‘Many also believe, incidentally,’ that Queen Victoria was the illegitimate daughter of a Sir John Conroy, an Irish soldier, and that Prince Albert was the illegitimate son of a German Jew. This book seems to have been written by two people, the Honest Gyles of the text and the Gossip Brandreth of the footnotes. Amazing.
Discretion intervenes just once, when he addresses himself to the question of what the Duchess of Windsor could or could not do with her private parts. He says only that she could do ‘the most extraordinary things’. But what? Whistle the Marseillaise, extinguish candles? Even the Gossip Brandreth is silent.
Incidentally (one of his favourite adverbs), the only gossip I know about the Windsors is that the Duke, apparently (Brandreth’s other favourite adverb), was a skilled needlewoman, and so obsessed by his disintegrating underwear that he spent hours darning his old pants. I was told this by the costume historian who did an inventory of his wardrobe. I found it very poignant.
Just as I found poignant the roll-call of the Prince of Wales’s charities at the end of the book. These must have been included to show the author’s gratitude to the Prince’s Office for help with this book. The only thing is, they are in the form of appendices and look strangely isolated, like the boats left by the retreating tsunami of sexual gossip in those minutes before it sweeps in again.
I also found poignant the way the Duke of Edinburgh keeps appearing from time to time, like a character actor in a Western, Walter Brennan say, to confide details of his son’s marriage to the author. Never such innocence before or since. The Duke, incidentally, apparently, had no idea that he was confiding in a public address system.
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