Royal Marriages Often Sour

The weddings often are splendid, gluing entire nations to their TVs. The outcomes often are not.

From Windsor to Monaco and beyond, many European royal marriages have turned sour or been tainted by scandal, with illegitimate children, divorces, sordid affairs and tragedies that tabloids dole out to publics with seemingly unquenchable appetites for the dirty laundry of royalty.

Britain's Prince Charles, who announced Thursday that he will wed his longtime lover Camilla Parker Bowles, is just one of the coterie of royals for whom matrimony has led to misery and lurid front pages.

No Briton over age 30 can forget the royal fever that gripped Britain when Charles wed the bashful, blushing Diana in 1981. The street parties, souvenir tea mugs, plates and coins; her dreamy dress with the its impossibly long train; the enormous, glittering jewel on her engagement ring.

Diana's split with Charles and their respective love affairs — his with Parker Bowles, hers with former cavalry officer James Hewitt and others — were documented in detail by Britain's small army of professional royal watchers and court hangers-on. Eavesdroppers taped the lovers' sweet nothings, and tabloids and magazines gleefully carried transcripts.

TV cameras were there in 1981 to capture the kindergarten teacher who would become "Princess Di" climb into her car; they were there to film the dark Paris tunnel where her speeding Mercedes slammed into a post in 1997, killing her and her latest beau, Dodi al-Fayed.

For Monaco's Prince Rainier III, a fairytale wedding in 1956 ended in tragedy, too. He never remarried after his Princess Grace — the stunning Hollywood actress Grace Kelly — died in 1982 of injuries suffered in a car crash.

Their children's tumultuous love lives have kept many paparazzi busy.

Princess Stephanie's 1995 marriage to her former bodyguard Daniel Ducruet collapsed a year later after he was photographed frolicking with stripper Fili Houteman, then the reigning Miss Nude Belgium.

A talkative and repentant Ducruet later published a "Letter to Stephanie" where he told her: "The night after my mistake with Fili, I felt dirty ... I couldn't make love to you."

Stephanie was regarded as the wild child of the family even before that scandal, because she and Ducruet had two children before they wed. She went on to have a third child with another bodyguard before remarrying in 2003, to a Portuguese circus acrobat. A palace spokesman wouldn't say Thursday if they are still together.

But the palace confirmed that Princess Caroline of Monaco is still married to Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who also has a reputation as a royal black sheep. A German court handed him eight months probation and a hefty fine in 2001 for kicking a photographer in the buttocks and beating the owner of a hotel in Kenya.

The prince — a distant relative of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and great-grandson of the last German emperor, Wilhelm II — also caused an uproar in 2000 when press photos showed him urinating outside the Turkish pavilion at the World's Fair in Hanover, Germany.

Colorful German-born Dutch Prince Bernhard, the father of Queen Beatrix, had a mid-marriage period of separation with his wife, former Queen Juliana, when she fell under the influence of a Rasputin-like holy woman. They never divorced, but Bernhard fathered two illegitimate daughters, one of them a landscape artist in the United States, the other living in France. He died last December.

Belgium's King Albert II is also known to have fathered a daughter out of wedlock. He acknowledged in his traditional Christmas Eve speech in 1999 that his marriage with Queen Paola has had ups and downs, with a "crisis in our relationship 30 years ago."

"We were able to get over those difficulties and rediscover a deep love and understanding," he said.

A royal marriage has turned rotten in the state of Denmark, too.

The palace announced last September that Prince Joachim, second in line to the Danish throne, and his wife Princess Alexandra were separating with plans to divorce. They wed with great fanfare in 1995; she wore a Danish-designed gown of thick Italian silk quilted with 8,900 pearls.

News of the divorce — the first in the Danish royal family since 1846, when King Frederik VII divorced Princess Caroline Charlotte Mariane of Mecklemburg-Strelitz — was front-page news in Denmark and in Alexandra's native Hong Kong.

The couple met in 1994 in Hong Kong, where Joachim was working for a Danish shipping company.