At this point, even casual followers of the British royal family know that King Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles engaged in a years-long affair while they were both married to other people. Charles was married to Princess Diana, whom he divorced in 1995, and Camilla was married to Andrew Parker Bowles, whom she divorced in 1993. Much has been made of Camilla's role as mistress and her transition to wife and queen consort.
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But some have alleged that Charles had a second long-term mistress whom he was serious about, even calling her "the only woman who ever understood me." Sadly, Australian Dale "Kanga" Tryon, Baroness Tryon, died a lonely death only three months after Princess Diana died in 1997.
In 2008, gossip columnist Christopher Wilson wrote a piece about Kanga's reported relationship with Charles, drawing on his own friendship with the Australian. Kanga's husband, Lord Tryon, was a friend of Charles, and the pair were counted among the future king's inner circle.
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However, Kanga and Charles are said to have first met in 1966 when they both attended the Geelong Grammar School. They ran into one another again several years later, when Kanga moved to Britain. Her husband, Lord Tryon, also had his own royal connections, even serving as a page boy at Queen Elizabeth's coronation.
Kanga and Lord Tryon spent weekends at the Queen's Balmoral estate, after which they invited Prince Charles to their fishing lodge in Iceland. It's there that Christopher posits Prince Charles and Kanga fell in love, claiming that Kanga swiftly began to understand what kind of power comes with being counted among the women whom a future monarch enjoys.
Prince Charles reportedly visited Kanga's family in Melbourne, Australia, and she is said to have used her royal connections to launch a successful clothing shop in London. Eventually, her desire to make sure people knew about her relationship with Prince Charles appeared to be her undoing. As Christopher Wilson wrote, "Camilla, her rival, understood this instinctively — as one would, when one's great-grandmother had had an affair with another Prince of Wales. Kanga was from very different stock and bottling it up, both the triumph of love and the loss of it to a rival, affected her deeply."
Kanga's daughter, Victoria, has also spoken to the Daily Mail about her mother's association with Prince Charles, telling the publication that her mother's willingness to discuss her relationship with the future king was a source of embarrassment to her.
Victoria said: "It was a horrid, horrid time. It was embarrassing and it became even more embarrassing because later I learned that Mum was actually talking to the papers, which is just not the done thing in such circumstances."
Victoria added that Kanga's insistence on discussing her relationship and connection with Prince Charles undid both that relationship and her marriage to Victoria's father. As she put it, "She committed the cardinal sin of talking about the prince. I didn’t want to believe it at the time but as the years have gone on I have learned more, and I can see that this is what happened. There were fights at home behind closed doors between Mum and Dad. There were bitter, awful arguments — things you didn’t want to hear."
In 1993, Kanga was diagnosed with uterine cancer. This diagnosis was on top of her lifelong battle against Perthes disease, a degenerative hip disease. In 1996, Kanga entered rehab for a painkiller addiction, and while at the facility she reportedly fell 25 feet out of a window under mysterious circumstances. This fall paralyzed Kanga from the waist down.
Kanga died in 1997 after contracting septicemia on a trip to India. She died at the King Edward VII Hospital in London, where she was in a coma until her death.
