WAS CAMILLA TRULY SMITTEN BY CHARLES?

LOOKING back over their three separate affairs, some members of their circle have questioned the degree of Camilla’s attachment to Charles.

Their first dalliance had taken place in the early 1970s, six years into Camilla’s on-off relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles, a captain in the Blues and Royals. Aware that her boyfriend had lovers on the side, she’d begun sleeping with the Prince.

Andrew Parker Bowles knew, and was unconcerned. Camilla had actually laughed with him about Charles, saying he was an emotionally immature boy, suitable for a fun fling.

It was Parker Bowles she was obsessed by and when he finally proposed, choosing her as the best of the bunch of his current girlfriends, she accepted. A week before their wedding, Charles rang from the Caribbean, where he was serving on a Royal Navy ship. Sounding desperately lonely, he asked whether she was sure about marrying, but didn’t propose himself.

After ending the call, Camilla immediately repeated the conversation to her fiance. They told each other that Charles felt isolated and depressed because his sister Anne had just married Mark Phillips.

From the outset, the Parker Bowles marriage was unusual. Army officers expected their wives to play their part in regimental life, tolerate regular relocations of home and maintain appropriate standards in dress and housekeeping.

Among her husband’s fellow officers, however, it was known that Camilla avoided all that — not least because, as Andrew admitted to his friends, ‘she’s bone idle’.

Instead of basing himself in their untidy country home, he decided to live in London during the week, where he was soon having successive affairs. So when Camilla resumed her dalliance with Charles in 1979, he again made no objection.

Even then, many of her friends felt, Camilla was not genuinely in love with the Prince, though she was flattered by his attentions. And then came her final affair with Charles, which began while he was married to Diana.

Even Mark Bolland, who served as Charles’s assistant private secretary for six years and became very close to Camilla, was unsure that it was ever truly a big love story.

Was it instead, he wondered, a case of two middle-aged people, at the tail end of their marriages, finding each other a convenient staging post?