Chilean beauty introduced the shy young royal to love
WHEN it came to women, Prince Charles was a later starter than many men of his generation. Even when he became an undergraduate at Cambridge, he associated chiefly with other males.
‘The Queen Mother had parties, with reels to dance,’ recalled one debutante who was staying at Balmoral with Mary Charteris, the daughter of the Queen’s private secretary, during one of the Prince’s holidays. ‘Mary and I were both shy, but Prince Charles was even more shy.
‘He would stay apart, and wouldn’t approach anyone he didn’t know. He made us think he wasn’t interested in talking to any of us.’
The heir to the throne clearly needed a bit of discreet help in discovering the charms of the opposite sex, and it was the Master of Trinity College, Rab Butler, who helped to provide it.
He simply introduced Charles to his research assistant, Lucia Santa Cruz, who was the daughter of the wellconnected Chilean ambassador to Britain. She also happened to be a brunette knockout — big expressive brown eyes, sharply arched eyebrows, long hair teased high above her forehead and a full mouth.
Slender and petite at 5ft 4in, Lucia possessed a stunning figure and a big brain. At a time when most English upper-class girls received a rudimentary education, she had two degrees — from King’s College, London, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.
Plus, she was five years older than Charles, as worldly as she was bright, and fluent in English, French Spanish and Italian.
In the spring of 1969, after meeting at a dinner party in the Master’s Lodge, Lucia and the Prince clicked immediately.
‘She was the first real love of his life,’ said Lady Elizabeth Anson, one of Charles’s cousins and a friend of Lucia’s.
The glamorous Chilean was also a Roman Catholic, meaning that Charles would be prohibited by law from ever marrying her. But that certainly didn’t impede him from launching into his first love affair.
Patrick Plunket, the Queen’s Deputy Master of the Household, ‘provided safe havens for Charles and Lucia,’ said Lady Elizabeth.
And Rab Butler slipped Lucia a key to his lodge after Charles asked if she could stay there ‘for privacy’.
The Prince, however, reacted angrily to Butler’s insinuation in a 1979 biography that Charles and Lucia had become lovers.
From then on, lips were sealed — until Butler’s wife wrote in a 1992 memoir that Lucia was a ‘happy example of someone on whom [Charles] could safely cut his teeth, if I may put it thus’.
She later tried to put an innocent construction on her words, but the damage was done.
Charles, however, was still smarting: in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby for his 1994 biography, he claimed: ‘Most of what Rab Butler says is preposterous.’
Ironically, it was his first love who introduced him to the great love of his life. The Prince and Lucia had remained close after he left Cambridge and one day she told him she had ‘just the girl’ for him.
Although she was hazy about the date (around 1972), Lucia confirmed that she had in fact introduced him to Camilla Shand — later Parker Bowles. The two women were friends at the time and lived on different floors in the Cundy Street Flats, just around the corner from the Victoria bus station.
‘The Prince was coming for a drink, and I asked her to come up,’ said Lucia.
It was a coup de foudre: Charles fell in love almost at once.