--------------- [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown]------------- The combination of wealth, royalty, and sycophancy was in danger of making Charles as spoiled as his father had always feared. Despite his sensitivity on other matters, the Prince expected his girlfriends to wait around all day for his attentions like groupies while he was exercising himself or his horse or was otherwise engaged....
An early girlfriend, Georgiana Russell, the strikingly attractive daughter of British Ambassador Sir John Russell, was vocal in her discontent after joining Charles at Balmoral for a romantic weekend and ending up sitting on a riverbank in the cold all day watching him fish....
Almost every week, the press threw a new name into the hat as the next Queen of England. They scoured the lists of European royalty for a suitable bride for Charles.... Princess Caroline of Monaco was top of the list...but she had become too racy and café society for his rural tastes.
The Daily Express invented a romance with Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, then rubbished their own story on the grounds that the Prince of Wales could never marry a Roman Catholic....
The press game was to first hype a girl as the next Queen of England and then discover the skeleton in the closet that would disqualify her. Fiona Watson, the curvaceous daughter of a landowner, was a prospect until a raunchy set of pictures in the girly magazine Penthouse turned her glass coach into a pumpkin.
Hacks chased the lovely Davina Sheffield into the ladies' room at Heathrow looking for a quote about the kiss-and-tell memoir of her ex-boyfriend, James Beard, a powerboat racer and designer....
In the lulls between girlfriends, a staple newspaper space-filler on a foreign tour was paying some friendly cheesecake model to leap out of the surf and buss the heir apparent.
The vulgarity of the bridal beauty contest and the noise of press speculation was increasingly irksome to the senior members of the Royal Family. The Queen Mother's views on the subject of Prince Charles's future bride matched those of the Queen: a virgin and soon.
The Queen Mother believed that she was better qualified than anyone else to prescribe what was required in a Queen-in-Waiting. When she heard of the engagement of the beauteous and very rich Lady Leonora Grosvenor to Lord Lichfield in 1975, she said, "What a shame; we had been saving her for Prince Charles."
As Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon,the youngest daughter of a Scottish peer, the fourteenth Earl of Strathmore, the Queen Mother had been a virtuous young thing like Diana when she married the shy, unexciting Prince Albert, Duke of York (aka "Bertie"), in 1923.
Her wifely support, after the shocking abdication of his elder brother Edward, was the crucial factor in helping the stammering Duke evolve into the dignified monarch George VI, who led the British nation through the trauma of the Second World War.
She saw in Charles many of the recessive characteristics of George VI, and believed he was desperately in need of a wife strong enough to both handle the pressures of royal life and stiffen his backbone. "Some plants need watering -- need to be forced." That was said to be her line on her princely grandson.
In mid-August 1979, the Prince of Wales finally psyched himself up to propose to Amanda Knatchbull. The two were aboard the royal yacht Britannia on the Royal Family's annual cruise of the Western Isles of Scotland. Much to his supposed chagrin (but probably to his secret relief), the admirable young woman turned him down.
As with Jane Wellesley, her own privileged access was a deterrent.
The girls who were most appropriate as future brides for Charles knew too much about the burdens and boredom of royal life and weren't impressed enough with the perks of princesshood to angle for the role.
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