Ladies of the Bedchamber: The Role of the Royal Mistress

by Dennis Friedman (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.58

  Democratically elected representatives of the people, as well as constitutional monarchs who are powerless to effect political change, are nonetheless expected to manage the moral affairs of the country with the same degree of concern as parents are expected to shape the morality of their children. But where the power of leadership becomes confused with the power of sex, the moral victims of rumour, hearsay and the tabloids come a poor second. Sex addiction threads its way through the 600 years of the British monarchy to the present day via the multiple heterosexual infidelities of Henry VIII and the homosexual infidelities of James I, to George I, the first of the Hanoverians, who insisted that his mistress always be fat, and James II who liked his mistresses to be thin and fell in love with Arabella, daughter the then Sir Winston Churchill. Co-incidentally, George II planned (unsuccessfully) to marry a 'Lady Diana Spencer'. And so on, and so on. Ladies of the Bedchamber examines the role played by the mistress, the concubine and finally commercial sex, the ready availability of which possibly protected the virginal sanctity of marriage in the years predceeding today's less holy alliances. Ladies of the Bedchamber shows how sex addiction cast its shadow over the 20th century from the accession of King Edward VII in 1901 to his, and Mrs Alice Keppel's great, great-grandchildren, Charles Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles in 2001. Attention is focused on understanding the psychological imperatives of the sexual indiscretions of, among others: King Edward VII, Sarah Bernhardt, Lily Langtry, Mrs Alice Keppel King George V's older brother, the bisexual Duke of Clarence and his youngest son, Prince George, Duke of Kent (his homosexual affair with Noel Coward) King Edward VIII and his relationships with Lady Sybil Cadogan, Lady Marian Coke, Mrs Frieda Dudley Ward, Thelma, Lady Furness, Adolf Hitler and Mrs Wallace Simpson Prince Philip and Merle Oberon, Princess Alexandra and Daphne du Maurier Prince Andrew and Koo Stark, Finola Hughes, Caroline Herbert and others Diana Princess of Wales and Oliver Hoare, Will Carling, Christopher Whalley, John Hewitt and others Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles