Toffs do it differently from the rest of us. We weary citizens bowed down with jobs, the school run, DIY and a trip to the gym if we’re lucky, find it difficult to make room for a spot of rumpy pumpy.
Not so aristos, according to the royal biographer Penny Junor, who said this week that researching her latest book had been ‘revelatory’.
Speaking at the Henley Literary Festival, Ms Junor, who has written a new biography of the Duchess of Cornwall, claimed the then Camilla Shand slept with Prince Charles in 1971 only as revenge on her philandering boyfriend, later husband, Andrew Parker Bowles — who was cheating on her with Princess Anne. That’s ‘just how the upper classes bonk,’ she said.
It’s a nice idea, if wide of the mark. As the writer who documented the affair between Charles and Camilla in my own book, A Greater Love, I know that Camilla had been dreaming since her teenage years of repeating her great-grandmother Alice Keppel’s romps with another Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.
Royal biographer Penny Junor, who has written a new biography of the Duchess of Cornwall, claimed the then Camilla Shand slept with Prince Charles in 1971 only as revenge on her philandering boyfriend, later husband, Andrew Parker Bowles (right) — who was cheating on her with Princess Anne (left)
But Junor’s words highlighted the fault-line which separates the blueblood from the ordinary bod when it comes to sex.
Those with the time to chase foxes over fences also have time to chase after other peoples’ wives — and they do.
Nothing makes the heart race faster than a tumble in the horse-box with someone you shouldn’t do it with. And the more aristocratic your partner, the faster the pulse beats.
Lady Diana Cooper (above) was known as a little minx in her day with shoals of titled men falling head over heels in love with her. One had to feel sorry for her future husband, Tory politician Duff Cooper, who pined for her but was kept at arm’s length
It is a little known fact that the socio-economic grouping most likely to divorce are dukes. They can afford it, just as they can afford mistresses and lengthy holidays. Dukes don’t have to report for work on Monday mornings, and can dispatch Her Grace off on a lengthy tour of India while they get down to business.
The middle classes? According to the late writer AA Gill, the ‘sad truth’ is that the middle classes only get to bonk each other.
‘The upper and lower classes collaborate all the time — whether eldest sons [of lords] practising on the maid, or their mothers banging the keeper in the heather — top and bottom of the social scale have a mutual attraction. The poor, dull, middling centre just bobs along in the dark, with all the zeal of a depressed missionary,’ he wrote.
The truth is the upper crust have been at it for centuries and their bedroom antics past and present have been an endless source of fascination to the rest of us, from the royals downwards.
Take Sheila, Lady Milbanke, who bedded the Queen’s father (Bertie, later George VI) when she was married and he a bachelor. When he heard about it, his father, George V, carpeted his son for playing fast and loose with a married woman — and an Australian at that.
So the King offered to make him Duke of York if he got rid of her. At the time his brother Edward (later Edward VIII) wrote: ‘If he really loved Sheilie he wouldn’t care a dick about dukes or anything else’ — a judgment he would famously come to live by.
Bertie, however, did care and dumped her. To console herself Lady Milbanke took up with their younger brother, Prince George, instead.
Elsewhere among aristocracy, Lord Mountbatten’s sister-in-law Nada, Marchioness of Milford Haven, was a real wild one. Russian by birth, she pounced indiscriminately on men and women, and on one occasion was witnessed by a maid, dressed in negligée and French-kissing Gloria Vanderbilt, the wealthy wife of an American railroad heir.
Throughout the Seventies, playboy Sir Dai Llewellyn was known in the gossip columns as the Seducer of the Valleys, though most of his activity was conducted a long way from his native Wales, in Mayfair
Of the current crop of top drawer aristos, Alexander, the Marquess of Bath, has over the years collected up to 100 ‘wifelets’ — obliging young (and-not-so-young) ladies who give him pleasure in return for a cottage on his Wiltshire estate and/or other unspecified benefits. Pictured, the Marquess with one of his wifelets
That kiss lost Gloria custody of her daughter, also called Gloria, in the most infamous divorce case in American history. Whatever claims are being made for the Duchess of Cornwall’s past, it’s nothing compared with her great-aunt, out-of-control lesbian Violet Trefusis.
Though apparently happily married to a nice Army officer, Violet threw herself at the writer Vita Sackville-West, also married: ‘I want you. I want you hungrily, frenziedly, passionately.
‘I am starving for you, I want to go away with you. I must and will and damn the world and damn the consequences and anyone had better look out for themselves who dares to become an obstacle in my path,’ she wrote.
It was a car-crash relationship which unsurprisingly ended in tears, forced to an end by their respective husbands.
Perhaps the aristocrat best known for her sexual proclivities was Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. Her husband, the 11th Duke, sought a divorce from Marg of Arg, as she was known, for having played away once too often. Little might have been made of the 1963 court case but for a photograph of Her Grace on her knees engaged in an act too intimate to mention here, involving a man whose head was out of shot
Further down the pecking order is Lady Idina Sackville. Known as the Bolter, she was a five-times divorced member of Kenya’s notoriously decadent Happy Valley Set, and her bed was known as ‘the battleground’. Lady Idina would greet guests naked in her green onyx bath, dress in front of them, then make them swap room keys after dinner.
Idina’s mother Muriel, the Countess De La Warr, had the opposite problem. When her husband lost enthusiasm for her, she wrote a legal letter demanding ‘the restitution of conjugal relations’. His reply, by return of post: ‘Not ruddy likely’.
Meanwhile, the prodigiously-endowed Henry Herbert, the 6th Earl of Carnarvon and owner of Highclere Castle — where Downton Abbey was filmed — was renowned on the country house weekend circuit for announcing his presence outside a lady’s bedroom door by knocking gently with a portion of his anatomy.
Perhaps the aristocrat best known for her sexual proclivities was Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. Her husband, the 11th Duke, sought a divorce from Marg of Arg, as she was known, for having played away once too often.
Little might have been made of the 1963 court case but for a photograph of Her Grace on her knees engaged in an act too intimate to mention here, involving a man whose head was out of shot. But somehow the mystery of the headless man, rather like the legend of Lord Lucan, just grew and grew.
In 2000, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys was named as the guilty party, but Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr was also a contender. More recently the name of Bill Lyons, a U.S. airline executive, came into the frame. Whoever it was, he turned naughty Marg into a legend.
Further down the pecking order is Lady Idina Sackville. Known as the Bolter, she was a five-times divorced member of Kenya’s notoriously decadent Happy Valley Set, and her bed was known as ‘the battleground’. Lady Idina would greet guests naked in her green onyx bath, dress in front of them, then make them swap room keys after dinner
Not quite in Marg of Arg’s league — and famously discreet — Lady Diana Cooper, mother of TV historian Viscount Norwich, was known as a little minx in her day with shoals of titled men falling head over heels in love with her. One had to feel sorry for her future husband, Tory politician Duff Cooper, who pined for her but was kept at arm’s length.
On one occasion, he stood outside her bedroom at a party while she was inside with old soldier Sir Matthew ‘Scatters’ Wilson. Suspicious noises could be heard but when quizzed, Lady Diana trilled: ‘It was nothing darling, Scatters was just testing the bedsprings.’
Possibly apocryphal is the tale that Lady D once returned to her hotel bedroom to discover her trouserless husband drawing a shirt over his head. Reaching between his legs, she grabbed hold and yanked, announcing, ‘Ding ding darling, tea’s ready!’
Wrong room, wrong husband . . .
Ladies of the night have played their part in the lives of the upper classes. The 11th Duke of Devonshire, husband of the recently departed and much-loved Debo Devonshire, had a great penchant for call-girls. He frequented a brothel run by the notorious madam Norma Levy.
Andrew Devonshire, Levy revealed later, would order up four girls at a time.
‘He couldn’t really manage them all, though,’ she recalled, ‘I think his eyes were bigger than his stomach.’
Another of her clients was the suave air minister Viscount Lambton, who rather than bed Levy’s girls preferred to share a pillow with their madam, smoking marijuana and having jolly japes when he should have been defending the country. In 1973, the scandal nearly brought about the fall of the Heath government.
Sheila, Lady Milbanke, bedded the Queen’s father (Bertie, later George VI) when she was married and he a bachelor. When he heard about it, his father, George V, carpeted his son for playing fast and loose with a married woman — and an Australian at that
Throughout the Seventies, playboy Sir Dai Llewellyn was known in the gossip columns as the Seducer of the Valleys, though most of his activity was conducted a long way from his native Wales, in Mayfair.
For a short time, the pudgy baronet became an enthusiastic jogger, leaving home in the morning in shorts and trainers and returning an hour later somewhat sweaty. It was widely known — though not by his long-suffering wife — that his jogging was mainly horizontal, Sir Dai having found a willing partner a few streets away.
Like many a public schoolboy, Llewellyn also developed an interest in corporal punishment, to the extent that he actually bought shares in a cane manufacturing company.
His younger brother, Roddy, was more conventional, and contented himself by bedding Princess Margaret, 17 years his senior.
It’s usually the man who tells tales out of the bedroom, but it was an ex-girlfriend who, according to legend, confessed that being made love to by Sir Nicholas Soames, heavyweight grandson of Winston Churchill and chum of Prince Charles, was ‘like having a wardrobe fall on you with the key sticking out.’ (Mercifully for all, the amiable Sir Nicholas has shed many stones in weight since then.) In 2011, Tory grandee and another Billy Bunter fingure, Lord Strathclyde — a married father of three — was exposed as having had a seven-year affair with a former girlfriend of the actor Kevin Costner, Birgit Cunningham.
In a kiss-and-tell, Ms Cunningham tearfully admitted ‘what I did was a sin’. Just how sinful was milord, then? Whips and spurs? Gags and masks? Unspecified marital aids?
No. Rather, sex involved ‘a bottle of Sancerre, a spot of smoked salmon, and George Michael on the music machine,’ revealed the all-too-talkative Ms Cunningham. Of the current crop of top drawer aristos, Alexander, the Marquess of Bath, has over the years collected up to 100 ‘wifelets’ — obliging young (and-not-so-young) ladies who give him pleasure in return for a cottage on his Wiltshire estate and/or other unspecified benefits.
With a personal fortune of over £200 million, the so-called Loins of Longleat can easily afford it, but for the girls it was always a relief when his roving eye moved on to pastures new.
‘Not much cop in the sack,’ a wifelet once told me disloyally, ‘in fact a bloody bore.’
And being a bore — especially in bed — is considered the most grievous of sins among toffs. According to a former editor of the society bible, Tatler, ‘sex is the opium of the upper classes’ — and that isn’t going to change.
Up at the Big House, they’ll continue to be at it like knives. So exhausting are their antics that, for the rest of us, there is some comfort in the soothing words of Boy George who, when asked about his sex life, replied: ‘On the whole, I’d rather have a cup of tea.’