Did Charles have a fling with stunning Highgrove high-flyer?
... as Charles would be the first to admit. Based on interviews with close friends, the most intimate portrait of their 45-year love affair — from the royal biography everyone’s talking about
IN OUR exclusive serialisation of a brilliant new biography of Prince Charles, we told on Saturday how Diana’s emotional instability left him needing 14 years of therapy. Here, in the second extract, SALLY BEDELL SMITH examines the Prince’s encounters with a glamorous Chilean researcher — and a Camilla lookalike who ran his Highgrove gift shop . . .
During her 20s, Camilla Shand was considered quite a catch. Along with an upper-class pedigree, she had fine features, a low husky voice, merry 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,’ said Lady Annabel goldsmith, a family friend.
Certainly, Camilla appealed to Andrew Parker Bowles, then an officer in the Household Cavalry. But so did other women: during his on-and-off relationship with her, Parker Bowles also enjoyed romances with Princess Anne and Lady Caroline Percy, the daughter of the Duke of northumberland.
Camilla despaired. And launched into a couple of dalliances of her own — first with rupert Hambro, the handsome scion of a prominent banking family. Then, when she was 25, she caught the eye of the 23-year-old Prince of Wales . . . unLike Diana Spencer, she’d had a blissful childhood in a rambling seven-bedroom 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 foxhunting. She took instantly to the thrill of the chase, vaulting the fences with courage and vigour.
Like most upper- class girls of her era, she had only a sketchy education. Having left school with just one O-level, she’d gone on to a Swiss finishing school to learn 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 then found a job as a receptionist at the prestigious decorator Colefax and Fowler in Mayfair.
But her 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, just down the street from Colefax.
Once installed there, Camilla started inviting her friends over for expensive Claridge’s breakfasts — Jane Wyndham (later Churchill), another Colefax girl; nina Campbell, then training as an interior designer; and John Bowes Lyon, a cousin of the Queen and of Andrew Parker Bowles.
For all her wealth, Sonia was annoyed when she began receiving the exorbitant bills, so she soon put a stop to the morning feasts.
if Camilla seemed feckless and footloose, at least she knew what she wanted out of life. And that was marriage and children with Andrew Parker Bowles — all of which seemed further from her grasp as the years went by.
That was the uneasy situation in the summer of 1972 when ‘Prince Charles sort of parachuted in the middle’, according to her friend of 50 years, Patrick Beresford.
The Prince landed at a convenient time. in July, Parker Bowles was off to northern ireland and Cyprus for six months of Army service, leaving Camilla to her own devices.
WHATappealed to Charles more than anything was that ‘ she talked to him’ and ‘ always listened,’ said a man who was close to her during those years.
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, said Patrick Beresford, ‘ your spirits rose, because you know you were going to have a laugh’.
For a young Prince with downbeat tendencies, that sort of personality was catnip. She would go to see him playing polo, and in the evenings they’d slip out to the exclusive Annabel’s nightclub in Mayfair.
The relationship met with the approval of Charles’s uncle Lord Mountbatten, who felt that the earthy Camilla would be a good learning experience for the Prince. So the earl lent them his Hampshire country house, Broadlands, 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 Camilla’s friend Charles Benson — she ‘still had the shadow of Andrew Parker Bowles looming large over her’.
The affair reached a natural hiatus when Charles, then still in the navy, left for the Caribbean in January 1973. As for Camilla, she returned to the arms of Parker Bowles. But he still showed no signs of proposing — much to the exasperation of both their families.
Two months later, both his father, Derek Parker Bowles, and hers decided to put an end to his dithering. According to John Bowes Lyon, Andrew’s cousin, the two fathers forced the dashing young officer’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in The Times on March 15. ‘Camilla was very much in love with him,’ said Bowes Lyon. ‘Her parents were very keen that Andrew should marry her.’
The game was up: Parker Bowles duly proposed to his girlfriend of nearly seven years. Charles heard the news while docked at english Harbour in Antigua, and 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 Parker Bowles and Camilla Shand 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 Bolehyde Manor near Chippenham in Wiltshire, where Camilla settled into domestic routines while Parker Bowles 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 two days later he called the Duke of Beaufort to ask if he could try foxhunting on the Duke’s Badminton estate, where Camilla was a regular.
From then on, she and the Prince regularly rode to hounds together. 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.
FOrmuch of 1977, Camilla was pregnant with her second child, Laura — but her marriage had become little more than a sham. By now compulsively unfaithful, the major carried on so openly in London that he became known as Andrew ‘Poker’ Bowles.
He was ‘a libertine Catholic’, said veteran journalist Andrew knight, who was at Ampleforth boarding school with him. ‘ He went to confession and started all over again.’
eventually, said a friend of Camilla’s, ‘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.
emma Soames, the sister of Charles’s friend nicholas, once observed the ardent way the Prince looked at Camilla when he walked into a party in London. ‘it suddenly hit me — my god, he’s in love with her,’ she recalled.
She wasn’t the only one who noticed. A senior Palace courtier
reluctantly informed the Queen that the Blues and Royals were ‘ unhappy’ that her son was sleeping with the wife of one of their fellow 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, though she was so fond of Parker Bowles 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 Parker Bowles himself appeared to be unconcerned about his wife’s infidelity.
‘He was slightly the victim,’ said a man in their circle, ‘but he rose above it. He played the cuckold very well, and I think he enjoyed it.’
Indeed, Parker Bowles was so compliant that he turned up in Zimbabwe to squire his wife at the independence celebrations.
Prince Charles was present, too — he’d actually travelled there with Camilla.
During a dinner in Government House on the first night, the lovers were reported to be flirting so openly that a dismayed Edward Adeane, the Prince’s private secretary, walked out of the room.
So content was Prince Charles that it’s likely he would have remained a bachelor, had he not felt under pressure to produce an heir. So, in 1981, he married Diana Spencer — after she’d been vetted and approved by his accommodating mistress.
He insists that he rekindled the 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 averted eyes and furtive, 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.
Parker Bowles, for his part, spent weekdays with his regiment in London, where he continued to have indiscreet affairs. When told he was a model for an ‘upper-class bounder’ in one of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster novels, he said: ‘I took it, and continue to take it, as a
great compliment.’ As his love affair with Camilla intensified, Charles made stealth visits to her when Diana and the boys had returned to London on Sunday afternoons. But most of his assignations with his married mistress were at the homes of their circumspect friends across England and Scotland.
It didn’t take long for Diana to discover his treachery. ‘What really galled me was when Diana and Charles would visit friends for a country weekend, and Diana would leave early to take the boys to school,’ recalled one of her friends. ‘Diana would go through one gate and Camilla would enter through another.’
Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles 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.
By then, she’d lost a lot of money at Lloyd’s of London, so her devoted friend Charles Halifax (the 3rd Earl) set up a trust fund to finance the purchase of her £1 million home, a mid-19th century stone house amid 27 acres, complete with swimming pool.
Charles oversaw the design of her new garden and arranged for flowers, trees and bushes to be transported from Highgrove in a horse trailer. In addition, he had a security system installed and helped with some minor upgrading — such as new windows and lighting fixtures.
After Diana’s famous Panorama interview, in which she complained that there were three people in her marriage, Camilla was, in effect, ‘under house arrest’, as her friend Charles Benson put it.
She could attend parties given by close friends, but had to sneak in through back doors. And when Charles visited her, he was reduced to hiding under a blanket on the back seat of his car.
DIANA’Sdeath changed everything, and Camilla agreed to follow a finely calibrated PR campaign to bring her gradually out into the open.
Behind the scenes, the Prince’s staff soon realised she wielded a great deal of clout. She saved the job of Charles’s much-disliked valet Michael Fawcett, for instance, after complaints about his rude and abusive behaviour. All it took was a plea to her lover to reconsider his acceptance of Fawcett’s resignation.
‘She was wearing the trousers, and he would tell you that,’ said 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, she 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 Marlboro habit. She also liked to entertain on her own, giving intimate, casual lunches that she often cooked herself.
Despite this, however, 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,’ said a long-time Clarence House adviser. ‘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 conduit to her complicated and often angst-ridden son.
ADAPTED from Prince Charles: the Passions and Paradoxes Of an Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith, published by Michael Joseph on april 6, at £25. © Sally Bedell Smith 2017. to buy a copy for £18.75 (offer until april 11, 2017), call 0844 571 0640 or order at mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free on orders over £15.