Revealed: Camilla; Duchess of Cornwall life before she fell for Prince Charles

Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall have now been married for 14 years. The two have been in love for almost 50, however, to one degree or another.

Their marriage, on April 9, 2005, started a new chapter of their epic love story but also was the culmination of a journey that easily could have gone another way, considering both married and had children with other people firs and one hails from a family that historically holds the reins rather tightly when it comes to who is considered a suitable mate for one of their own.

They had been constant companions for years by the time they said their I-dos at Windsor Guildhall, but by then each well into their 50s and with the confrontation-averse Charles content to just continue on as they were, there had been no certainty that they would ever become husband and wife.

But seemingly anyone who’s spent time with the couple thinks he made the right move by tying the knot. Even his mother, the piece of the puzzle that took the longest to fit into place, thought so.

At their wedding reception, Queen Elizabeth II famously said in toasting the newlyweds, “I have two important announcements to make. The first is that Hedgehunter has won the Grand National.” The steeplechase that also took place that morning was delayed 25 minutes so the BBC could televise their prayer service at St. George’s Chapel.

Continuing with the racing metaphor, the mother of the groom added, “They have overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through, and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”

And the woman he really loved had to date been the only woman who turned Charles into the best version of himself because she loved him just as he was, no matter what.

“She’s made a massive difference in him,” a longtime royals correspondent told Vanity Fair last year about the duchess’ ongoing effect on the Prince of Wales. “He’s much more relaxed now. They are always laughing and chatting, they have great affection and humour between them.”

That being said, “when she joined the royal family it was a very different situation to the one we see now,” Daily Mail royals correspondent Rebecca English told Victoria Murphy for Town & Country recently. “They decided the way to do it wasn’t to ‘sell her’. They concluded that the best way to move things forward was to just let her be herself and let people see for themselves what she is actually really like.”

Unlike Princess Diana, Charles’ first wife and the wife whom many people still carry a torch for 21 years after her death, Camilla never felt the pressure to be anything other than herself because she had, in theory, gone off to live her own life by the time Charles proposed to Diana.

And by the time she was thrust into the judgmental public eye, first as “the other woman,” the third party in Charles and Di’s marriage; then as his actual girlfriend; and then, at last, his wife she could be nothing but herself.

Charles was 22 when he first met a 23-year-old Camilla Shand in the summer of 1971, the pair introduced by mutual friend Lucia Santa Cruz. Lucia knew Charles from Trinity College, where she, a few years older, had been working as a research assistant when he first enrolled, and Camilla was then her downstairs neighbor in London.

Camilla’s flatmate at the time was Virginia Carington, whose father, Lord Peter Carington, had just become Britain’s Defense Secretary. Camilla was busy enjoying a rich social life since her official “debut” at 17, and she and Lucia became fast friends. 

Camilla had also by then been dating British Army Capt. Andrew Parker-Bowles for the better part of five years. They had met at the cocktail party Camilla’s mother, Rosalind Shand, threw for her daughter’s “coming out” in 1965 and, though Camilla had a boyfriend then, too, she was drawn to the charming officer. When they reunited at a dance in Scotland in 1966, Camilla was down for the count.

Andrew, meanwhile, already had multiple inroads with the royal family. His parents were longtime friends of Charles’ grandmother Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and at 13 Andrew was a pageboy at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. He also had been an officer of the Household Cavalry, the Queen’s official bodyguard, since 1960.

Though more is made of how Camilla’s enduring affection helped Prince Charles come into his own and, eventually, helped repair both of their reputations in the public eye, Charles’ love for Camilla also helped her heal from life’s indignities as well. And his undivided attention was what she deserved after having signed up for a relationship that for years had a big question mark looming over it.

Again, Starting in 1966, Camilla was nuts about Andrew Parker Bowles country-song-style, at times.

Though she was for all intents and purposes his No. 1 girlfriend, the one who spent cosy country weekends with him and his whole family and all their friends, Andrew loved the ladies and didn’t give them up. One night, according to Penny Junor’s The Duchess, Camilla saw his car parked outside the home of one of her best friends, and she let the air out of his tires and scrawled a message in lipstick across the windshield.

In fact, that’s why Lucia decided to set her up with her pal Prince Charles she thought her fun, generous, bubbly friend Camilla needed to meet an actually nice guy.

So Lucia arranged for both to come over to her flat one night, and Charles, just returned from a trip to Japan, brought gifts for both ladies.

Though it’s been reported that Camilla’s first words to Charles were, “Oh you know your great grandfather and my great grandmother were lovers. How about it?,” according to Junor it’s Lucia who introduced the pair by saying, “Now you two be very careful, you’ve got genetic antecedents careful, careful!” (Camilla’s great-grandmother Alice Keppel is said to have been a mistress of King Edward VII not to be confused with Charles’ great-uncle Edward VIII, who abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson.)

Either way, Charles may have been a little gobsmacked by the cheeky comment, but he was also instantly charmed by Camilla’s warmth and sense of humour. His own parents, after all, were known for their dry, ribald senses of humour, and Charles as the whole world would find out down the road certainly enjoys his share of banter.

Their friendship blossomed immediately, but Charles had just graduated from Royal Air Force College and, though more enthusiastic about being a pilot, was on his way to his father’s alma mater, Royal Naval College at Dartmouth that September. After he graduated from RNC, he was stationed aboard the destroyer HMS Norfolk for nine months.

At the time, the closest father figure in Charles’ life was his great-uncle Louis, Earl of Mountbatten, or Dickie as he was familiarly called. And Dickie recommended to Charles that he sow his royal oats while he could.

But when it came time for a man in Charles’ position to marry, Mountbatten added, “for a wife he should choose a suitable attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for…I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.” 

Hence all that was made years later of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer’s presumed virginity.

So Charles was getting all of this sage advice, but he was also seeing Camilla as much as possible while not busy with his naval duties, sometimes taking her to Mountbatten’s estate, Broadlands, for private time alone.

Camilla and Andrew were still an item, and in the fall of 1972 he and Charles found themselves playing for awhile on the same polo team at Smith’s Lawn, the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park a welcome opportunity for Charles and Camilla to see even more of each other.

When Charles was about to go on an eight-month tour in the Caribbean aboard the HMS Minerva, he invited Camilla and Mountbatten to tour the ship. Mountbatten thought Camilla was just terrific but still not a real prospect for his great-nephew, the future king.

But while he was head-over-heels for Camilla, she was still determined to make it work with Andrew who toward the end of 1972 had taken up with Charles’ sister, Princess Anne, these royal/noble/military social circles apparently only having so big a circumference.

Anne knew in the back of her mind that she couldn’t marry Andrew, who was a Roman Catholic (the rule doing away with that barrier wasn’t changed until 2011), but they were serious enough for the queen to invite him to join the family during Royal Ascot week all of which left Camilla free to enjoy herself, which she was intent on doing, though not to the extent that she considered actually setting herself free.

On his end, Charles didn’t exactly help matters by never explicitly telling Camilla how he felt.

After Anne paired off for good (at the time) with Mark Phillips, whom she had known for several years from the equestrian circuit, Andrew proposed to Camilla which, despite her deep affection for Prince Charles, is what she had wanted for almost seven years. (Anne and Phillips didn’t get engaged until April 1973, however, a month after Andrew proposed to Camilla, so it’s ever possible that one decision affected another.) 

Camilla wrote to Charles, who was stationed in the West Indies, to break the news. 

“I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly, otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable,” Charles, starting to feel abandoned by the most important women in his life, wrote to a friend in the wake of his sister and Camilla’s engagements, per Sally Bedell Smith’s 2017 biography Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.

“I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,” he mused.

According to Junor’s The Duchess, Charles pleaded with Camilla a week before her wedding to call it off, but there was no question that she wanted to go through with it.

Camilla was very close to both of her parents, especially her father whom she idolized, Army Major Bruce Middleton Shand. Bruce became a partner in a wine supply business after World War II and later was appointed an officer of the Queen’s Body Guard. Rosalind and Bruce Shand had by all accounts a very happy marriage and Camilla would turn to her father for comfort when her own marriage was on the rocks (and as she was being dragged in the press as the “other woman”).

Growing up at The Laines, the seven-bedroom home in East Sussex where Rosalind and Bruce settled when their eldest daughter was born, Camilla had a messy bedroom and shared a bathroom with her younger sister Annabel (an interior designer who has remained one of Camilla’s closest confidantes). Rosalind was an attentive, full-time mom and Camilla, Annabel and their little brother Mark didn’t have nannies.

Camilla inherited a love of horses and books from their father and an affinity for parties and socializing from both parents, and their house was often full of friends and family. The Shands remained there for 45 years until Bruce moved away following Rosalind’s death in 1994.

For all of the passion she put into her pursuits, especially riding, Camilla was decidedly not interested in going to work, or at least in pursuing a career.

She wanted her mother’s life: husband (preferably a strapping military man), children, country home. In the fall of 1964 she went to finishing school at Mon Fertile in Switzerland, where she skied, worked on her French and learned to be a proper hostess, and then went for an additional polish at the Institut Britannique in Paris.

Camilla told Penny Junor years later that she left Paris with what would be a lasting fear of elevators after getting stuck in one with three other people for seven hours one day. Subsequently, she always prefers to take the stairs.

On July 4, 1973, she became Camilla Parker Bowles. She and Andrew had a Roman Catholic ceremony at Guards Chapel at the Wellington Barracks in London. The queen, Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother and Princess Anne all came and sat right up front.

Charles was invited but was still in the Caribbean and he has maintained it wasn’t wounded feelings that kept him away, but rather a commitment to appear in the Bahamas on behalf of the queen.

The newlyweds honeymooned in the south of France, then started hunting for a house in the English countryside to call their own though Andrew spent most of the week in London working. Bruce Shand had hired him on in the wine business, a move that gave his Rosalind pause, as she thought her son-in-law was a little pompous.

They rented a house near Andrew’s parents, one of whom Camilla felt close to. She and her brother-in-law Nic Paravicini (who married Andrew’s sister Mary Ann) bonded over their love of their father-in-law, Derek Parker Bowles, and their prickly feelings for their mother-in-law, Dame Ann.

Eventually, Camilla and Andrew found a home to buy in Wiltshire, 200-acre Bolehyde Manor, not long before they welcomed son Tom on Dec. 18, 1974. Daughter Laura Rose was born on Jan. 1, 1978. 

In the meantime, Camilla had been long since disabused of the hope that her husband would change his ways.

“I’m really hurt, Andrew. I’m the only one of Camilla’s friends you haven’t made a pass at what’s wrong with me?” one of Camilla’s so-called friends supposedly told Andrew at a dinner party, per The Duchess. Yet while it seemed that everyone in their circle knew what Andrew was up to (in London he and brother-in-law Nic shared a bachelor pad and had a system involving milk bottles left outside the door), he and Camilla remained a dazzling couple at dinner and when otherwise together. Mrs Parker-Bowles just accepted that her husband’s philandering was part of the deal.  

In addition to reading and riding, Camilla turned to gardening to stay sane, and per Penny Junor, she and her friends would laugh at the to-do lists Andrew would leave for her when he’d go off to London for the week.

Camilla was also determined to give Tom and Laura a stable home life, as her parents gave her, so she made it clear she didn’t want to move as so often military families are compelled to do.

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