In upper class circles, affairs aren’t shocking. Rather, they’re often expected.

Yup, you read right – but you really shouldn’t be surprised.

This week, biographer of the Duchess of Cornwall, Penny Junor, suggested as much at the Henley Literary Festival. She revealed how “researching her latest subject had been most revelatory about just how the upper classes bonk,” reports The Telegraph.

Intrigued? Let’s continue then:

Junor claims the then Camilla Shand only slept with Prince Charles in 1971 to take revenge on her philandering boyfriend, later husband, Andrew Parker Bowles – who was cheating on her with Princess Anne at the time.

“When [Camilla] was introduced to Charles, he thought she was pretty special and he thought she was a bit of all right,” Junor said. “And she thought, ‘Andrew is at the moment off with Princess Anne; I’ll teach him a lesson’; so she had a fling with Charles.”

We all know what happened next. Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973. He continued to play the field and she later resumed her affair with Charles, breaking up his marriage to Princess Diana.

Juicy, ne?

But, as Harry Mount put it, “the licentious boudoirs of Britain’s country houses, that sort of behaviour is completely run of the mill, and always has been”:

“The landed classes traditionally had rather elastic attitudes towards marital fidelity,” says Rowan Pelling, editor of The Amorist.

“If your spouse was unfaithful, you had two clear choices: ignore it and take up gardening, or quietly find your own lover. The one thing you mustn’t do was complain. That was seen as rather babyish. That’s why all Charles’s friends disapproved of Diana: she protested like fury.”

Of course, it’s easier to have an affair ” if you can push off to your schloss [castle] in the country, and leave your wife in the London townhouse” – a practice all the more difficult if you’re cramped together in a townhouse:

When Princess Diana confronted Charles about his affair with Camilla, he supposedly said, “Well, I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”

At the end of the day, sex, affairs and illegitimate children are literally “written into the interlocking DNA of royalty and the upper classes”. It was Sir Jimmy Goldsmith – the late husband of Lady Annabel Goldsmith, daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry – who came up with the immortal line:

“When you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.”

Filled with fantastic history and lewd one-liners, read the full Telegraph piece here.

But before you go, I’ll leave you with this:

“The upper and lower classes do as they please, because class is a kind of circle not a straight line,” says Hugo Vickers, “The middle classes twitch their curtains and wash their cars on Sunday mornings.”

…and go to church.

Moral of the story? Don’t get mad, get even – or better, “get horizontal, with another grand bounder who can be relied upon not to spill the beans”.

Terrible.

[source:thetelegraph]