There’s a difference between being an intellectual and being canny, smart, common sense kind of smart.
That's fair. I guess my perception is that a lot of the royal family seem to lack pragmatism about their situation. Charles' entitlement caused the biggest royal scandal since King Edward's abdication over Wallis, and if Wills truly is philandering the work they've done to rehabilitate their image could easily be undone. I think the Queen was aware of the relative precarity of her situation; it's a bit unthinkable that we'd ever depose the Royals but she saw a lot of other monarchies (including her husband's) ending and also oversaw the breakup of Empire. The younger crop seem somewhat complacent (although Charles in later years at least is a bit more canny with his drive to modernise, but he might have wrong-footed it).
Here you go, have the whole chapter. The whole book is great, highly recommended.
This sounds fascinating. I'm not sure if I believe it, exactly, but it's one of those stories that I wouldn't be shocked if it were true. It has got my juices flowing a bit and reminded me of the old crackpot conspiracy theory.
Basically, the Marquess of Cholmondley is gay. He cultivated an image of a womaniser playboy, but he met François-Marie Banier in the early 1980s as a young man and fell for him. François-Marie is an openly gay photographer and artist who had been best buddies with Yves Saint Laurent, and he has a giant house on the Rive Gauche in Paris that the Marquess is constantly staying at (which is also shared by the French actor Pascal Greggory in no doubt a highly European set up, as Pascal was also going out with the openly gay opera director Patrice Chéreau - the building was apartments, and François-Marie had gradually bought more and more of them until he owned the whole building). He also owns a couple of Riads in the Medina of Marrakech (one of which is "Pascal's") and in the mid 20th century Marrakech was a gay celeb hotspot.
In the late 1980s the Marquess and François-Marie bought a
Palladian villa together in Brouzet-lès-Quissac in the south of France, which they used to host elaborate soirées (Johnny Depp met Vanessa Paradis there, and François-Marie is their daughter's godfather). However François-Marie had been scamming/manipulating Liliane Bettencourt, the L'Oréal heiress and the richest woman in the world, in a sort of Truman Capote swans way, and had managed to become the sole beneficiary to her entire estate besides her L'Oréal shares (and received gifts from her in excess of a billion euros, and was also made the beneficiary of her life insurance policy). Liliane's daughter went to court in 2007 citing an
abus de faiblesse, essentially that her mother had been exploited and as investigations continued it was decided that it would be brought to trial in September 2009. This meant François-Marie (and by extension, the Marquess, who was frequently described as one of the
most eligible bachelors and yet at 49 had never married) were going to be under the microscope as this trial began gaining momentum.
Mater Cholmonldey (who unusually for a dowager, had refused to vacate the Castle Cholmondley, although they did have another country pile in the form of Houghton Hall) would never have stood for the scandal of a gay heir.
None of that's actually a conspiracy theory beyond the Marquess having a gay lover - they do own that villa together, and they have been cited to be "inseparable", and by all accounts the Marquess does stay with François-Marie all the time and isn't about that much. The conspiracy theory is the other bit. Basically Rose Hanbury and William had been hooking up, supposedly because he loved getting pegged and Kate wouldn't do it. Wills and Kate's relationship broke down in 2007, but the firm wouldn't approve of the Wills/Rose pairing because she'd been a political staffer for Conservative politician Michael Gove, and the royals want to project an image of political impartiality, so worried that a future Queen having worked for the Conservative party would be toxic. So him and Kate got back together but he carried on secretly philandering... and oh no! He got Rose pregnant.
So the theory is that the firm, seeing a happy accident, decided that Rose would marry the Marquess (who was the Lord Great Chamberlain and so had an important role in royal affairs). That way, the Marquess would throw off scrutiny about his criminal gay lover and Wills wouldn't face problems about conceiving a child out of wedlock. Sure enough, the Marquess and Rose announced their engagement two days before they got married in June 2009 and she gave birth to twins four months later in October 2009. When Wills and Kate got married, the Queen said as a wedding gift she'd gift them any estate in the UK, and Wills picked out Anmer Hall in Norfolk (two miles from Houghton Hall, the place that Marchioness Rose lives, kinda like how Charles bought Highgrove, which was twenty minutes from Camilla's home of Bolehyde Manor).
Rose got the sweet deal of having a massive country house and loads of money (supposedly the Marquess is worth far more than William) and a gay husband who spends most of his time abroad while still getting to see her lover. The Marquess got the veneer of respectability and a beautiful young bride to show off, who was completely fine with him maintaining his gay relationship and life in France (indeed François-Marie is the children's godfather), but Will got sloppy and got Rose pregnant
again in 2015 shortly after Kate had given birth, at which point Wills and Kate decamped to Adelaide Cottage in Windsor (which is now their primary residence outside of London, despite having the freshly renovated Anmer Hall just sitting there).
www.bbc.co.uk
