In the end, King Juan Carlos had little choice. When he was flown back to Spain with a broken hip from a hunting trip in Botswana it unleashed a previously fawning press. It was bad enough that he’d been on a luxury jaunt with his former mistress — and in the midst of a devastating economic crisis that left a quarter of Spanish workers unemployed — but the party had also shot and killed an elephant. His subjects were appalled. Within two years he was forced to abdicate.
Locked in a loveless marriage with Queen Sofia, Juan Carlos embarked on the affair with Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German-Danish business consultant, in 2004, after meeting her at a shooting party. When she visited Madrid, she stayed