Unseen intimate photos show Charles and the girl who turned him down
Proposal by the Prince of Wales was refused by second cousin he thought would be an ‘ideal’ bride
AS HE relaxed on a paradise island in the Bahamas, the Prince of Wales was snapped with the young woman he would ask to be his bride.
These previously unpublished photographs of the prince with Lady Amanda Knatchbull, his second cousin, in 1977 are from the Mountbatten family album. Miss Knatchbull was the granddaughter of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, and had known the prince since childhood.
At the time, the prince’s love life was the focus of uncomfortable press attention. The pressure was on him to marry and every woman pictured with him was scrutinised as a potential bride.
On the tiny island of Eleuthera, far from the prying eyes of the paparazzi, he was able to lower his guard in the company of the Mountbatten family.
The images are contained in one of 68 photograph albums compiled by Lady Mountbatten and stored at the University of Southampton library, which holds the Mountbatten archive. They will be shown on television for the first time in the Channel 4 programme The Royal House of Windsor, to be broadcast on Wednesday.
Lord Mountbatten was the muchloved great-uncle and mentor to the prince.
According to the programme, he also harboured a wish to become the power behind the throne. As part of his plan, he “designed a programme for the royal love life” and encouraged a romance between the prince and Miss Knatchbull.
He had written to the prince in 1974 that “in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-natured girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for.” The girl he had in mind was his granddaughter and the holiday on Eleuthera was one of several trips engineered by him.
In correspondence, the prince told his great-uncle that Miss Knatchbull was “incredibly affectionate and loyal” with “a glorious sense of fun and humour”. He wrote that she seemed an “ideal” bride.
He proposed aboard HMS Britannia in August 1979, during the Royal family’s cruise around the Western Isles. However, it was not to be – Miss Knatchbull turned him down.
Lady Mountbatten later told biographer Gyles Brandreth that the young woman had felt “no spark” with the prince and thought of him as a brother.
There were other rumoured romances in the Seventies for Charles during his time as the world’s most eligible bachelor, and almost all the women he is said to have dated were from aristocratic families.
Eighteen months after Miss Knatchbull refused him, the prince proposed to Lady Diana Spencer during a private dinner at Buckingham Palace, and the couple married in July 1981. They too visited the Bahamas, but for their honeymoon – a ten day vacation where the Prince once again found himself on the island of Eleuthera. Yet as Prince and Princess of Wales, they endured a troubled marriage as Diana found herself under constant scrutiny from the world’s media. Their divorce was finalised a year before her death in a car accident in a Paris underpass in 1997 – a tragedy which left their sons William and Harry without a mother. Little did Charles know that prior to marrying Diana, he had already met his future wife. As early as 1970, he’d set his eyes upon Camilla Shand, later to become Camilla Parker Bowles when she married a cavalry officer by the name of Andrew Parker Bowles. The couple divorced, and she ultimately became the Duchess of Cornwall following her marriage to Charles in 2005. Miss Knatchbull went on to marry novelist Charles Ellingworth and qualified as a social worker. She is now a trustee of several charities including Barnardo’s and Plan International UK.
The Mountbatten family archive comprises 250,000 papers and 50,000 photographs, including documentation of the Earl Mountbatten of Burma’s service as the last Viceroy of India, First Sea Lord and Chief of the UK Defence Staff.