Royal exposé
Charles and Camilla’s untold love story
In her 20s, the Duchess of Cornwall, then Camilla Shand, was considered quite a catch. Along with an upper-class pedigree, she had fine features, a husky voice, deep blue eyes and a fetching figure with a large bust. “You could see what a man could see – an intensely warm, maternal, laughing creature with enormous sex appeal,” recalls Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a family friend. Certainly, Camilla appealed to Andrew Parker Bowles, then an officer in the British Army’s Household Cavalry. But so did other women – during his on-off relationship with Camilla, he also enjoyed romances with Princess Anne and aristocrat Lady Caroline Percy. For a while, Camilla despaired, but she then launched into a couple of dalliances of her own. And when she was 25, she caught the eye of a 23-year-old Prince Charles. Unike Diana Spencer, Camilla had enjoyed a blissful childhood in a rambling sevenbedroom house, where rows of gumboots stood at attention by the door. Nicknamed Milla, she was an extrovert tomboy who was mad about ponies and horses. When she was
just nine, her father Bruce had introduced her to fox hunting. She took instantly to the thrill of the chase, vaulting the fences with courage and vigour. Like many upper-class girls of her era, she had only a sketchy education before attending a Swiss finishing school, where she learnt how to roast a chicken and lay a table correctly.
Although she had no intention of pursuing a career, she needed to stay occupied, so she found a job as a receptionist at a prestigious decorating firm in London. But her wealthy grandmother Sonia Cubitt was concerned that Camilla might not be able to get to work on time, so she rented her granddaughter a room on the top floor of the luxurious Claridge’s hotel, where she ran up exorbitant bills inviting high-society friends for posh breakfasts.
If Camilla seemed feckless
and footloose, at least she knew what she wanted out of life. And that was marriage and children with Andrew – all of which seemed further from her grasp as the years went by.
That was the uneasy situation in the middle of 1972, when “Charles sort of parachuted in”, according to her friend of 50 years, Patrick Beresford. The prince landed at a convenient time. In July, Andrew was off to Northern Ireland and Cyprus for six months of army service, leaving his girlfriend to her own devices.
A bit of fun!
In Camilla, the prince found not only a sympathetic ear, but also warmth, vivacity and a goofy sense of humour. When she walked into a room, says Patrick, “your spirits rose because you knew you were going to have a laugh”.
For a young prince with downbeat tendencies, that sort of personality was catnip. She’d go to see him playing polo, then they’d slip out to the exclusive nightclub Annabel’s. Their relationship met with the approval of Charles’ uncle Lord Mountbatten, who felt the earthy Camilla would be a good learning experience for the prince, so he lent them his Hampshire country house for trysts away from the public eye.
Both knew their time together was limited. He felt he had to marry a virgin and according to one of Camilla’s friends, she “still had the shadow of Andrew looming large over her”. The affair reached a natural hiatus when Charles, then still in the navy, left for the Caribbean in January 1973 and Camilla returned to Andrew’s arms. But he still showed no signs of proposing – much to the exasperation of both their families.
Two months later, the couple’s fathers decided to put an end to his dithering. According to Andrew’s cousin John Bowes Lyon, they forced the dashing young officer’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in the newspaper on March 15. “Camilla was very much in love with him,” says John. “Her parents were very keen that Andrew should marry her.”
Andrew duly proposed to his girlfriend of nearly seven
years and Charles, who heard the news while docked in Antigua, felt blindsided. He now had no-one to return to. “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,” he wrote to a friend.
Andrew and Camilla were married in a Catholic ceremony at the Guards Chapel in London on July 4, 1973. It was a major social event, with the Queen Mother and Princess Anne seated in the front pew. Afterwards, the couple moved to Wiltshire, where Camilla settled into domestic routines while Andrew was either deployed with his regiment or doing army work in London.
But Charles had no intention of losing sight of his fun and relaxing ex-girlfriend. They spoke while she was pregnant with her first child, and saw each other on the polo field whenever he and her husband were playing.
In February 1975, Charles became godfather to her son
Tom – and from then on, she and the prince regularly rode together while fox hunting. Not only that, but she became his best friend and confidante, and he ended up buying his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire partly because it was near her home.
In 1977, Camilla was pregnant with her second child Laura, but her marriage had become little more than a sham. By now compulsively unfaithful, her husband carried on so openly in London that he became known as Andrew “Poker” Bowles. Eventually, a friend of hers tells, “She gave up on him.”
Sometime towards the end of 1978, Charles and Camilla resumed their love affair. It remained clandestine, but the sparks were noticeable to anyone paying attention. Family friend Emma Soames observed the ardent way the prince looked at Camilla when he walked into a party in London. She recalls, “It
suddenly hit me – my God, he’s in love with her!”
She wasn’t the only one who noticed. A senior palace courtier reluctantly informed the Queen that the Household Cavalry was “unhappy” that her son was sleeping with the wife of one of their officers. She remained impassive and made no reply, but she put the word out that Camilla was not to be invited to any royal events. The Queen Mother took similar steps, although she was so fond of Andrew that she continued asking him to join her in the royal box at the Cheltenham races – without his wife.
Neither the Queen nor Prince Philip spoke to their son about his behaviour and Andrew himself appeared to be unconcerned about his wife’s infidelity. “He was slightly the victim,” remembers a friend, “but he rose above it. He played the cuckold very well and I think he enjoyed it.”
Indeed, Andrew was so compliant that he turned up in Zimbabwe to escort his wife at the nation’s independence celebrations. Charles was present too – he’d actually travelled there with Camilla. During a dinner at Government House on the first night, the lovers were reported to be flirting so openly that the prince’s private secretary walked out of the room.
Enter Diana
Charles was so content with the situation, it’s likely he would have remained a bachelor had he not felt under pressure to produce an heir. But in 1981, he married Diana – after she’d been vetted and approved by his accommodating mistress.
Charles insists that he rekindled his affair with Camilla only in 1986, when his marriage was beyond repair. By then 39, she still had a distinctive allure and she was as non-threatening as she was comforting. After years of his wife’s furtive eyes and changeable manner, Charles found much-needed reassurance in Camilla’s direct gaze and appreciative smile.
Her laughter was throaty, genuine and complicitous. And unlike Diana, she didn’t try to score points against him. Andrew, for his part, spent weekdays with his regiment in London, where he continued to have indiscreet affairs.
As his love for Camilla intensified, Charles made stealth visits to her when
Diana and Princes William and Harry, after spending their weekends at Highgrove, returned to London for school. “Diana would go through one gate and Camilla would enter through another,” recalls one of the princess’ friends.
Andrew and Camilla announced their divorce in a statement from their lawyers on January 10, 1995. “Throughout our marriage, we have always tended to follow rather different interests,” they said with admirable understatement, “but in recent years, we have led completely separate lives.”
The family home was sold and Camilla moved five miles away to Lacock, one of England’s most picturesque villages, where Charles oversaw the design of her new garden, arranging for flowers to be transported from Highgrove in a horse trailer.
After Diana’s infamous “there were three of us in this marriage” interview, Camilla was, in effect, “under house arrest”, as a friend puts it. She could attend parties given by close friends, but had to sneak in through back doors. And when Charles visited, he was reduced to hiding under a blanket on the back seat of his car.
Diana’s death changed everything and Camilla agreed to follow a finely calibrated PR campaign to bring her gradually out into the open. But behind the scenes, the prince’s staff soon realised she wielded a great deal of clout. “She was wearing the trousers – and he would tell you that,” says one of his top officials.
Refreshingly for Charles, Camilla had no need to explain herself or beg for approval, as Diana had done. “I was always brought up to get on with life, and not sit in a corner and weep and wail,” she told a friend.
Setting a pattern that would continue after their marriage, Camilla preferred to spend most of her time at her own country home. There, she could be as untidy as she pleased, ignore the torn carpets, lounge around in comfortable clothing and freely indulge her smoking habit.
She also liked to entertain on her own, giving intimate, casual lunches she often cooked herself. Despite this, a few of her friends privately complained that she’d become terrifically grand.
As for Charles, he still adored her, yet bizarrely seemed in no hurry to make an honest woman of his lover. In 2004, seven years after Diana’s death, it was his
staff who took the initiative, conferring with government and church officials to create a path to the altar.
“Getting him married wasn’t easy,” reveals a longtime Clarence House advisor. “The prince was perfectly happy the way it was.”
The Queen, for her part, was genuinely pleased when the couple finally tied the knot. She liked Camilla’s down-to-earth unfussiness and her love of dogs. The two women spoke regularly on the phone – and the Queen shrewdly started using her as a way to influence her complicated and often angstridden son as he prepared to take the throne.