Lord Ivar Mountbatten is a cousin of The Queen. The 53-year-old member of the extended family has found something going with a gay partner, James Coyle. However, he confessed recently that he is not comfortable with his gay status.
Even though he is the member of the extended royal family, he has been open about it currently. Surprisingly, the family has not opposed him but is totally agreeable about it.
Mountbatten, who is a cousin to The Queen and the son of the 3rd Marquess of Milford Haven, is the great-great-great- grandson of Queen Victoria. He also has three children with his ex-wife, and is godfather to Lady Louise Windsor.
He had confessed before he was married to Penny that he was bisexual, but she had accepted it. Finally, she divorced him in 2011, because she felt that she did not feel totally as loved as she thought she should be.
His friend Prince Edward and wife Sophie, who are godparents to two daughters, have accepted his status.
"Now everyone in our family knows and could not be more supportive. Neither of us wanted to have relationships which were transitory; the stereotypical view of gay relationships is that they are too fleeting, too frequent," he said on Sunday.
Although he never wanted to get married the second time, it might be considered with airline cabin services director James. "If you'd raised that six months or even two weeks ago, I'd have said 'No way'. But now it's out there [he means the fact he's gay], anything is possible," he said.
He had met his partner when he was skiing in Verbier, the Swiss resort, last March. He confessed that "Being a Mountbatten was never the problem, it was the generation into which I was born. When I was growing up, it was known as 'the love that dare not speak its name', but what's amazing now is how far we have all come in terms of acceptance."
"Simply talking about it in public is a huge step for me. Up to this point, I have had a heterosexual lifestyle, so living with a man is really new. One step at a time."
The gay couple is living in the Georgian mansion at Bridwell Park. This is a wedding site. Mountbatten's former wife Penny, who lives nearby, drops in frequently to their house.
" I am a lot happier now, though I am still not 100 per cent comfortable with being gay," he said.
"In an ideal world, I know the girls would like their mother and father still to be together, but they love their 21st Century family that we have built too. Their father has a boyfriend. It's that complicated and that simple, but finding James means I will not have to lie to anyone or grow old on my own."
