13 incredibly controversial royal relationships

From forbidden loves to ‘unsuitable’ matches, bitter divorces to scandalous affairs, the royal family is no stranger to controversial relationships.

Read on to discover 13 liasions that shook The Firm to its core. The inclusion of some, including the three separations that contributed to the late Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’, are less surprising. The presence of others, including the late Queen’s highly divisive early courtship of Prince Philip, are rather more unexpected…

Wallis Simpson, at the time married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, met the then-Prince Edward at a party thrown by his mistress, Viscountess Furness, in 1931.

By 1934, a relationship between the two was widely suspected, though Prince Edward always denied that anything happened before Wallis’s divorce.

Edward’s father King George V was so concerned he even wrote to the head of secret services about his son, concerned the man known as the ‘playboy prince’ would damage the monarchy. 

In January 1934, King George V died, and Edward became king. Yet George’s concerns over Wallis didn’t die with him. Given Wallis’s married status and ties to far-right figures, the secret service tapped phones in Buckingham Palace and monitored the new King.

A few months later, Wallis filed for divorce from Ernest, sending rumours flying. His extramarital affairs were listed as the reason for the split, but many speculated that Wallis and the King had become romantically involved.

This conjecture was further fuelled when King Edward was urged by the Prime Minister at the time, Ramsay MacDonald, to prevent the divorce, but he refused.

As ‘Defender of the Faith’ and head of the Church of England, the King was not allowed to marry a divorcée.

On 16 November, King Edward met with the Prime Minister to reveal that he planned to marry Wallis and was prepared to abdicate as he could not serve as king without the American socialite by his side. He said it was “impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility … without the help and support of the woman I love.”

By the end of the year, he had proposed to Wallis and abdicated, paving the way for a new line of succession through his brother, King George VI.

While the royal relationship we know was one of longstanding and dutiful love between the late Queen and her consort, there was a time when Prince Philip and the then-Princess Elizabeth were courting for the first time in the late 1930s when a happy ending looked distinctly improbable. 

Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, was so concerned about the match he asked the Met Police Special Branch to prepare a dossier on Philip, taking into account his politics, background and loyalty.

His fears would not have been assuaged by Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary, Jock Colville, who reportedly told him that Philip was ‘unlikely to be faithful’.

Lady Pamela Hicks, who served as Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting, revealed her parents’ reactions: “The King and Queen were appalled. The thought that he might become a son-in-law was most unwelcome. Why wasn’t she marrying some respectable English duke? Yes, he was a Prince of Greece and Denmark. But very suspect. Greece – they get rid of their royal families regularly. And he had no money,” she told Vanity Fair.

A royal valet reportedly said of the Prince: “That poor young navy officer, he don’t even have no hairbrushes.”

There was also the matter of Prince Philip’s three living sisters, Princess Margarita, Princess Theodora, and Princess Sophie, who had married into German royalty.

While Philip and Elizabeth were permitted to marry in 1947, the Prince’s sisters were barred from attending the ceremony, as it was just two years after the end of World War II.

A royal relationship that demanded the impossible choice between duty and love, Princess Margaret’s ill-fated romance with her father’s former equerry, Peter Townsend, began when Margaret was 22, around the time King George died.

The relationship was kept secret, as Peter was divorced from a previous marriage that had ended because of his wife’s affair.

In 1953, they asked for the Queen’s permission to marry. She asked them to wait a year.

A simple gesture gave it away, however. On her sister’s Coronation Day in 1953, Princess Margaret was waiting at Westminster Abbey for a carriage to Buckingham Palace when she removed a piece of fluff from Peter’s uniform.

The story ran in the press a few days later, and Peter was sent to Brussels to be air attaché at the British Embassy.

As Margaret was under 25, the Queen had to consent to her marriage which was in direct conflict with her role as head of the church. While the public supported the marriage, the government opposed it, and said that if she decided to marry Peter, she would be stripped of her royal privileges and income.

The princess eventually made her choice.

“I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend,” she said in a public statement. “I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But, mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have decided to put these considerations before any others.”

Following the heartbreak of her relationship with Peter, Princess Margaret married photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960. Despite welcoming two children, the marriage was not to be a happy one. 

Both parties had affairs, one of which ended in tragedy: Margaret’s tryst with pianist Robin Douglas-Home. It called off abruptly when Anthony found out but, having historically struggled with depression, Robin committed suicide 18 months later.

In 1973, Margaret began a relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener several years her junior. Three years later their relationship was made public when the News of the World published photos of the couple on holiday together. Two days later, Anthony, now Lord Snowdon, and the Princess announced their separation. They divorced in 1978.

In response to the relationship’s uncovering, Roddy released a statement begging for privacy: “I much regret any embarrassment caused to Her Majesty the Queen and the royal family, for whom I wish to express the greatest respect, admiration and loyalty. Could we please be permitted by the media, who have besieged us, to carry on with our work and private lives without further interference.”

The couple remained together for eight years.

1992 was the year famously referred to by the Queen as her ‘annus horribilis’ – not least because of several royal relationships.

Over the course of the year, three of the Queen’s four children separated from their partners.

First was Prince Andrew’s separation from Sarah Ferguson in March.

In her autobiography Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself, Sarah said of her Navy-serving husband: “During the first five years of our marriage, I saw my beloved Andrew only forty days a year,” She wrote that their prolonged absences from each other would be the demise of their relationship. “We rarely saw each other, and you cannot build a foundation without the bricks and mortar of togetherness and communication.”

There was also an alleged affair between Sarah and Texas oilman Steve Wyatt.

In April 1992, Princess Anne announced her divorce from Captain Mark Phillips.

The couple married in 1973, and welcomed two children together before reports of their unhappy union and affairs began to circulate.

The scandal reached a head in 1985 when Mark was revealed to have fathered a child during his marriage to Anne. They separated in 1989, the same year that private letters from Princess Anne’s now-husband Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence were stolen and sent to The Sun. While the publication didn’t include details about the letters’ contents, it added fuel to speculation about marital strain.

In 1992, Anne and Mark’s divorce was finalised.

While more recently the focus has been on Prince Andrew’s association with disgraced financier Jeffery Epstein and the allegations of serious sexual misconduct made against him by Virginia Giuffre, he courted scandal prior to this when he had an 18-month relationship in 1981 with American actress Koo Stark.

Koo and the Prince were subject to intense media attention which she later wrote about in The Daily Mail: “The attention in those days was unprecedented and the paparazzi were everywhere. I was once dragged from the back of a motorbike by the hair; I was hit in the solar plexus by a long lens. Photographers on motorbikes literally rode into restaurants to attempt to get pictures of us together. I moved address for 2 years every time my address was published.”

The frenzy was in part due to inaccurate speculation that Koo starred in adult films, though she was in two films of a sexual nature.

Prince Andrew is godfather to Koo’s daughter whom she shares with her ex-husband Warren ‘Robbie’ Walker.

In 1985 aged just 24, Princess Diana was assigned Barry Mannakee as a bodyguard and, foreshadowing 1992’s classic Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner romance movie, The Bodyguard, they fell in love. Indeed, Diana would later refer to Barry as the “greatest love” she’d ever had in private tapes with her voice coach.

The Princess of Wales also explained she was “quite happy to give all this up and to just go off and live with him. And he kept saying he thought it was a good idea too.”

Barry was dismissed from his role as protection officer a year later when rumours of their affair surfaced. Tragically, in 1987 Barry was killed in a motorbike accident.

In a video obtained by NBC, Princess Diana described his death as “the biggest blow of my life”, saying, “I was only happy when he was around”.

Another of Diana’s infamous marital affairs was her five-year fling from 1986 and 1991 with cavalry officer James Hewitt, who worked as her riding instructor.

“He was a great friend of mine at a very difficult, yet another difficult time, and he was always there to support me,” Diana told Martin Bashir in the infamous BBC interview. When the interviewer asked if the relationship had gone beyond a close friendship, the princess responded, “Yes it did, yes.”

Scandals and press intrusions continued to follow Princess Diana, including a very public incident known as ‘squidgygate’ involving James Gilbey, heir to a gin fortune. While still married to the then-Prince Charles, an 1989 phone call between the princess and James was recorded, during which he referred to her as ‘Squidge’ or ‘Squidgy’ 53 times.

While neither confirmed the relationship, the intimate nickname and nature of the call led to the belief that they were intimately involved.

A scandal that rocked the royal family came in the form of Sarah Ferguson’s holiday with her financial adviser John, where the pair were pictured cavorting on a sun lounger in the Duchess’s villa in St. Tropez in 1992.

Most famous was a picture of John seemingly sucking Sarah’s toes, though he later said it was a kiss.

Sarah was staying in Balmoral at the time and was reportedly asked to leave, with the Queen ‘furious’. Prince Philip reportedly walked in, threw the papers in front of Sarah and then left, never speaking to her again. Sarah was swarmed by paparazzi upon her return home.

The Duchess of York sent Princess Margaret flowers as part of her apology to the royal family, which received a severe rebuke from the Queen’s sister via letter. She wrote: “You have done more to bring shame on this family than could ever have been imagined. Not once have you hung your head in embarrassment even for a minute after those disgraceful photographs.

“Clearly you have never considered the damage you are causing us all. How dare you discredit us like this and how dare you send me those flowers?”

Somewhat harsh given Margaret’s own track record…

It was not just Princess Diana who garnered headlines following her separation from Charles as the then-Prince was embroiled in an affair of his own – with his future wife and our future queen, Camilla.

Charles and Camilla first met at a polo match in 1970 and got along well, but three years later Camilla was engaged to Andrew Parker-Bowles.

While both were married, in 1986 Charles began an affair with Camilla.

In Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, the Princess recalled a conversation with her husband’s mistress at a party: “I know what’s going on between you and Charles and I just want you to know that.

“She said to me: ‘You’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got all the men in the world fall in love with you and you’ve got two beautiful children, what more do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want my husband.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way…and it must be hell for both of you. But I do know what’s going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.'”

Things worsened when a leaked phone call between the couple from 1989 was released in 1993, during which the future king confessed his love for Camilla and other salacious sentiments, including an infamous reference to a tampon.

Actor Dominic West, who played Prince Charles in The Crown, said: “I remember thinking it was something so sordid and deeply, deeply embarrassing [at the time]. Looking back on it, and having to play it, what you’re conscious of is that the blame was not with these two people, two lovers, who were having a private conversation.”

He told Entertainment Weekly: “What’s really [clear now] is how invasive and disgusting was the press’s attention to it, that they printed it out verbatim and you could call a number and listen to the actual tape. I think it made me extremely sympathetic towards the two of them and what they’d gone through.”

Camilla subsequently opened up about the effect of the scandal, telling The Daily Mail: “I couldn’t really go anywhere… It was horrid. It was a deeply unpleasant time and I wouldn’t want to put my worst enemy through it. I couldn’t have survived it without my family.”

Both Camilla and Charles’s separate marriages broke down, and following Diana’s shocking death in 1997, the process of introducing Charles’s long-time love to the public stalled..

Charles and Camilla eventually married in 2005, 35 years after their first meeting.