How did a posh good-time girl become the most important person in the King’s world? As Charles and Camilla celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, Hilary Rose looks at how a scandalous affair turned into an enduring passion.
Nothing about Camilla Shand’s beginnings seemed destined to end on a throne. Girls like Camilla were expected to marry well, breed enthusiastically and spend their days running ramshackle houses and, for most of her life, she did just that. “She didn’t stand out in any way,” a teacher once said. “There was nothing special about her.” But this apparently unremarkable upper-middle-class girl had a youthful dalliance, which became an extramarital romance and ultimately, in middle age, the enduring love story of two lives, with Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Lord of the Isles and heir to the throne. Sometimes, she once observed, you have to stick your head above the parapet. Ironically, she never wanted to. Somehow, she ended up queen.
It was touch and go. Camilla was pushing 60 when she and Charles finally married in 2005, 35 years and two failed marriages after they met. Even Queen Elizabeth, who for many years would have nothing to do with her son’s mistress, was touched almost to the point of sentimentality, commenting in her speech at the reception that, “My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.” She then made a swift exit to watch the Grand National. On the day, Camilla was so nervous and ill that her sister had to threaten to wear the wedding dress herself if she wouldn’t get out of bed. Her bouquet, when she made it to Windsor register office, included flowers symbolising return to happiness, you complete me, and married love. Posing for photographs with the happy couple, her new stepsons, William and Harry, did a passable impression of not hating the woman they blamed for ruining their mother’s life. They were, they claimed, “100 per cent” behind the newlyweds, a lie that persisted until Harry rubbished it years later in Spare. In April, Charles and Camilla will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary, for which the traditional gift is china. A coronation mug might be nice.
Camilla grew up in Sussex, the eldest of three children of Major Bruce Shand and the Hon Rosalind Cubitt. Her father was independently wealthy, a decorated army veteran turned wine merchant. Her mother’s ancestor, Thomas Cubitt, built the balcony of Buckingham Palace and developed Belgravia. Her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was the mistress of Edward VII and, according to Shand family legend, was known to say, “My job is to curtsy first, then jump into bed.” Evidently, it ran in the family.
With her younger sister, Annabel, and brother, Mark, Camilla spent her early childhood at the Laines, a sprawling house with a croquet lawn opposite a racecourse in East Sussex. Her parents, unusually for their class and the time, raised their children themselves, without a nanny, and showered them with love. According to family friends, the Shand children were, as a result, friendly, confident and likeable.
“They’ve always been quite chatty,” their father once observed. “There haven’t been any inhibitions in their upbringing that I know of.”
She has a terrific laugh. I adore her.
Three miles up the road was her first school, Dumbrell’s, a rigidly disciplined co-ed establishment where the day began at 7.30am with 29 minutes of “violent exercises”. In her biography of Camilla, Rebecca Tyrrel writes that any child who left belongings lying around was required to wear them. As a result, one little girl ate lunch wearing three hats, while another had a large sewing basket tied to her waist. Afternoon activities might include learning to prepare soft fruit while a teacher read from the classics. A contemporary of Camilla’s remarked that a child who could cope with Dumbrell’s could cope with anything. Needless to say, Camilla coped. She has described her childhood as “perfect in every way” – climbing trees, eating jelly and ice cream at the “duckling dances” organised by her parents for local boys and girls, and riding her pony. “We were brought up not to be centre stage,” her sister, Annabel Elliot, told Robert Hardman for his book Charles III.
Aged 10 she arrived at Queen’s Gate school, near the family’s London townhouse in South Kensington, with much the same hairstyle that she has today. As a teenager she was apt to sneak onto the roof for a cigarette, and she left at 16 left with one O-level and a reputation for being excellent at fencing. At Mon Fertile, a Swiss finishing school, she learnt how to organise a table placement, ski proficiently and run a big house. Suitably finished, she proceeded to Paris to study French and French literature before returning to London to be launched on the capital’s social scene where she would make friends, have a jolly time and fulfil her destiny in the home counties.
Typical Camilla. It looked like a bomb had hit it.
“She is,” a friend once commented, “a frightfully nice person. She had frightfully nice parents. She is a very jolly girl. She is simply someone about whom there is nothing bad to say.”
In 1965, her parents threw her a “coming out” party for 150 at Searcys, a fashionable venue just behind Harrods in Knightsbridge. A photograph of her appeared in society magazine Harpers & Queen, wearing a form-fitting black dress that showed off her cleavage, and chandelier earrings.
“Camilla was never going to be Deb of the Year,” remarked one of her contemporaries, “but she was determined to have the best fun she could.”
“Fun” is a word that has followed her around her whole life. “If you wanted a party to go with a swing,” one contemporary noted, “you invited Camilla.”
According to Jilly Cooper, an old friend from Gloucestershire, “She’s a terrific laugh. I adore her, and I don’t know anybody who cheers one up more than she does. Her ability to see the funny side of life has made an enormous difference over the years.”
Her first boyfriend was a 19-year-old Etonian called Kevin Burke, whom she dated for a year. Burke drove a yellow Jaguar, which she nicknamed “Egg”, and he later described their year of nightly cocktail parties and dances as “the best time, and I had the best partner you could wish for. She was never bad-tempered. She knew how to have fun.”
By now, Camilla was sharing a flat on the Pimlico-Belgravia borders with a girlfriend, Virginia Carrington. Her bedroom was described by one visitor as “typical Camilla. It looked like a bomb had hit it.” Carrington affectionately described how her flatmate had a complete “inability to hang anything up and an aversion to cleaning fluids of any description. You should see the state of the bathroom when she’s been in it.”
Camilla briefly moved on from Burke with another Old Etonian, banker Rupert Hambro. But then, when she was 19, she met a dashing army officer, 27-year-old Andrew Parker Bowles, and was smitten. According to legend, the first time she set eyes on him at a party she said, “Introduce me to him now.” They dated on and off for seven years, but Parker Bowles was not a man to let a long-term relationship cramp his style. He continued to cut a swathe through high society while spending “many, many nights” with Camilla. According to Tyrrel, he “schooled her in the ways of the world” and taught her that sexuality was healthy. One weekend visitor to his Notting Hill flat found a dishevelled Camilla sitting on Parker Bowles’s knee wearing one of his shirts. On another occasion, Camilla berated him on his own doorstep while he was in his underpants after she caught him with another woman.
Another of Parker Bowles’s early conquests was Princess Anne, leading some to suspect an element of one-upmanship in what happened next.
“It seems likely,” writes Tina Brown in The Palace Papers, “that her dalliance with Charles was a ploy to make Andrew jealous.”
“She was determined to show him [Andrew] that she could do as well in the royal pulling stakes as he had done,” one of the “polo community” told Robert Lacey. (Princess Anne later said of Camilla, possibly with a wry smile, “I’ve known her a long time, off and on…”)
“Andrew behaved abominably to Camilla, but she was desperate to marry him,” said one of his girlfriends, Lady Caroline Percy, who once dismissed a jealous Camilla with the words, “You can have him back when I’ve finished with him.”
‘Pretend I’m a rocking horse’
Charles and Camilla first met when she was 24 and he was 22. They were introduced at a dinner party by a friend of his, Lucia Santa Cruz, who lived in the same block of flats as Camilla and Carrington. They enjoyed nights out together dancing at Annabel’s and at the opera in Covent Garden, and spent weekends at Broadlands, the Mountbatten family home, where according to Tina Brown, Camilla helped him to overcome his shyness in bed by telling him “pretend I’m a rocking horse”. They shared a fondness for The Goon Show – their nicknames for each other, Fred and Gladys, are from that series – and Camilla was adept at cheering up the slightly forlorn, self-pitying Prince of Wales, who was already moaning that his life was “intolerable”.
“Your spirits rise whenever Camilla comes into a room,” Lord Beresford told Robert Lacey for his book Battle of Brothers. “You can tell from her eyes and the smile on her face that you are going to have a bloody good laugh.”
According to Brown, “The prince adored her carelessness and utter absence of sycophancy,” and, in a foreshadowing of Prince William’s affection for the Middletons, he was “charmed” by Camilla’s family, “whose relaxed warmth was the polar opposite of his own”. He was also well aware of his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s maxims: that while he, as a man, should “sow his wild oats” before marrying, his bride must very much not. Or as Mountbatten put it, “A bedded can’t be wedded.”
In other words, it was clear to everyone, possibly including Camilla, that she was an acceptable girlfriend but not an acceptable bride. In December 1972, they spent a final weekend together at Broadlands before Charles, aged 24, departed in the new year on an eight-month deployment with the Royal Navy to the Caribbean. According to Gyles Brandreth, a friend of Camilla’s, “Charles declared his love but not his hand. He whispered sweet nothings, but said nothing of substance. He made no commitment and he asked for none.”
If the affair was at least in part a ruse to gain Andrew Parker Bowles’s attention once and for all, it worked. Parker Bowles put a ring on it while Charles was away, bounced into proposing after seven years when his father and Camilla’s conspired to place an engagement announcement in The Times. “I suppose,” Charles wrote in a letter, “the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”
Your spirits rise whenever Camilla comes into a room.
They married when Camilla was 25, in front of 800 guests at the Guard’s Chapel, Wellington Barracks, which was so packed it was standing room only. The principal witness signing the registry was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Parker Bowles was no more faithful after he married than before, but no one knows for sure when Charles and Camilla resumed their relationship. Charles infamously told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that it was only once his marriage to Diana had “irretrievably broken down”. Others, however, describe Camilla having assignations with Charles at her grandmother’s house not long after she had her first child. Lord Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary between 1972 and 1977, told the Queen that her eldest son was sleeping with the wife of an officer in the Guards “and the regiment doesn’t like it”. From then on, “We were warned never to include Mrs Parker Bowles in the guest list for any formal event where the Queen was to be present,” said a former member of the household.
But the Parker Bowleses were happy. Visiting them at home in 1981, Tina Brown found their relationship to be “a kind of ‘electric indifference’” and it was generally agreed that they had a very “English” marriage: he would entertain himself in London during the week while Camilla would keep the home fires burning in Wiltshire, bring up the children and have a roast on the table on Sundays. According to one story from the time, she was waiting for Charles at her grandmother’s house one day, wearing jeans with a broken zip held up with a safety pin. Her grandmother protested that she must change before the prince arrived, saying, “I can even see your drawers, Camilla.” Camilla replied, “Oh, Charles won’t mind about that.” Shortly after he arrived, they disappeared upstairs. Tina Brown argues that she was “sexual and emotional comfort food for Charles”, a man who needs to be “soothed and amused by a woman who can be both maternal and subtle in her controlling hand”.
Constitutionally, however, rather more was required of Charles than being soothed and amused by a married woman. He needed a bride and an heir, and Camilla was neither maternal nor subtle when it came to vetting his options. Whether it was for their suitability as royal brides or possible threats to her own status, or both, no one knows. Certainly, Princess Diana told Andrew Morton that Camilla made no secret of her intimate knowledge of Charles’s diary and whereabouts, and asked her twice over lunch when she was engaged if she planned to hunt when she was married. (Diana did not. Hunting with the Beaufort was one of Charles and Camilla’s regular pastimes, with one friend describing Camilla approvingly as the sort of woman who went straight from hunting to a black-tie party without bothering to shower.)
Another of Charles’s pre-marriage girlfriends, Anna Wallace, did hunt and was duly routed. Camilla spent the summer of 1980 openly canoodling with Charles at various social events until Wallace got the message after one public humiliation too far at the Queen Mother’s 80th birthday party. “I’ve never been treated so badly in my whole life,” she told Charles before leaving early. “Nobody treats me like that, not even you.”
Camilla was not the only one to conclude that Lady Diana Spencer was rather more tractable and, according to Tyrrel, she described her as “a mouse”. When Tina Brown wrote a cover story questioning the state of the Waleses’ relationship in 1985, four years after they married, it was headlined “The Mouse That Roared”. It described Diana as “the shy introvert unable to cope with public life [who] has emerged as the star of the world’s stage”. Charles, on the other hand, had withdrawn into an “inner world” and was “pussy-whipped from here to eternity”. Both, Brown wrote, were alienated by the change in the other.
Through it all, or most of it, or now and then, depending on who you believe and when they were talking, was Mrs Parker Bowles in her jeans with the broken zip, conveniently up the road from Highgrove, the country house Charles bought for himself before his marriage.
It seems likely that her dalliance with Charles was a ploy to make Andrew jealous.
“Camilla never passed judgment,” a friend once said as the Waleses’ marriage went south. “She was never particularly nasty about Diana. She was just a great, great friend who would listen for hours and never get bored.” Whenever the affair resumed – Diana was convinced it never ended – they had plenty of discreet friends with big houses at the end of long drives willing to accommodate them: the Mountbattens at Broadlands; the Palmer-Tomkinsons in Hampshire; the Duke and Duchess of Westminster on their vast estate in Cheshire, and on whose Spanish estate Camilla and Prince William have more recently, and separately, enjoyed shooting holidays. One of Camilla’s oldest and most loyal friends is Fiona Shelburne, Marchioness of Lansdowne and chatelaine of Bowood, a magnificent Georgian pile in Wiltshire. Her loyalty was rewarded with the position of Queen’s companion and a key supporting role, alongside Camilla’s sister, at the coronation.
Behind the scenes, the relationship, and its effect on the Waleses’ marriage, was causing consternation. Michael Shea, Queen Elizabeth’s press secretary with responsibility for managing the Waleses’ media coverage, told Tina Brown that after the birth of Prince Harry in 1984, Princess Anne and her brothers were thinking about writing to Charles to protest about his behaviour with Camilla. He added that the Queen and Prince Philip “felt the same”, but he didn’t know if they’d ever gone through with the idea. The affair continued. One friend of Charles mused that the attraction lay in the fact that “practically everything he says to her is going to be interesting. If he is telling you about something that happened with his mother and his mother is the Queen, then it automatically becomes fascinating. Camilla has a ringside seat. I think that’s what she likes, having the ringside seat. She knows the truth.”
Another suggested that at some point in her marriage, Camilla simply realised that her husband didn’t need her but her lover did. Her lover’s sons, William and Harry, were, according to Tom Bower, collateral damage after their parents separated, as when Charles wasn’t busy with official duties he was busy with Camilla. Both William and Harry blamed her squarely for their parents’ break-up, with Harry recalling in Spare being summoned from Eton to meet her for the first time over tea.
“I told myself no big deal. Just like getting an injection. Close your eyes, over before you know it. I have a dim recollection of Camilla being just as calm (or bored) as me. Neither of us much fretted about the other’s opinion. She wasn’t my mother and I wasn’t her biggest hurdle. In other words, I wasn’t the heir.” Camilla played a “pivotal role in the unravelling of our parents’ marriage”, he continued, “but we understand that she’d been trapped like everyone else in the riptide of events. We didn’t blame her. In fact, we’d gladly forgive her if she could make Pa happy.” He slightly spoilt the magnanimous effect by also describing her as dangerous, questioning whether she would be a “wicked stepmother” and promoting his book on television by claiming that she was happy to leave bodies in the street in pursuit of good press coverage for herself.
I told myself no big deal. Just like getting an injection.
“I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother,” he said. “I see someone who married into this institution and did everything she could to improve her own reputation and her own image, for her own sake.” Harry perhaps didn’t realise, or left unsaid, the parallels with his own wife.
Even though Charles and Camilla’s relationship was an open secret among their friends as the Eighties turned into the Nineties, it remained largely below the radar. The Parker Bowleses’ marriage rolled on, the Waleses’ marriage quietly imploded and everyone looked the other way. Three events conspired to blow up the status quo. First, the publication in June 1992 of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, which detailed Diana’s belief that Camilla was to blame for the failure of her marriage. That December, the prime minister announced to a packed House of Commons that the Prince and Princess of Wales were to separate, and at Christmas, after the fire at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth described it as her annus horribilis.
‘None of us has ever broken ranks’
The fallout for Camilla from the book and the Waleses’ separation was immediate and prolonged: hate mail, abuse in the street, and being hounded by photographers who camped outside her house. It was said to be 10 years before she dared set foot in a London restaurant.
“Obviously if something has gone wrong I’m very sorry for them, but I know nothing more than the average person in the street,” Camilla told reporters with a straight face as she retreated with her sister to Bowood. “I only know what I have seen on television.”
Andrew Parker Bowles gamely described reports of his wife and the Prince of Wales as fiction. Her mother declined to comment with the words, “None of us has ever broken ranks.”
Worse was to come. In January 1993, the Camillagate tapes were published. Recorded by an amateur radio enthusiast four years before, they made an international laughing stock of the heir to the throne and his mistress. But they also provided an insight into why their relationship worked. Charles is recorded telling Camilla that he’s been working on a speech and Camilla asks which one. “Business in the community,” Charles replies. “Rebuilding communities.” Any normal person would say, or at least think, “How boring,” and move on. Instead, Camilla asks if she could see a copy.
Opinion polls were merciless. Seven out of 10 people said that the tapes had done “great damage to the monarchy”. The public, it was said, would like the throne to skip straight from Queen Elizabeth to Prince William. Sixty-four per cent felt “let down” by Charles. Even his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, said that he was simply “not king material”. The diarist James Lees-Milne spent a weekend at Chatsworth with the Parker Bowleses in September of that year. He wrote that Camilla “is not beautiful and has lost her gaiety and sparkle. Women spit at her in supermarkets… She walks with bowed head and has trained her fluffy hair to cover her cheeks.”
After she’s been staying, I find knickers all over the place.
A housekeeper at her former brother-in-law’s house in Wales was less sympathetic. She claimed Charles and Camilla had been regular and frequent guests since 1992 and described her as “quite snooty, you know. Quite grand and she doesn’t tip. And I’m not terribly keen on her habits. After she’s been staying, I find knickers all over the place.”
The irony of Camilla’s position was that, as a friend pointed out, “She has no desire for position or power. She’s as unlike Mrs Simpson as you could possibly be and certainly has no wish to be queen.”
Possibly not unconnected was that she also had no wish to be divorced. She and Parker Bowles had an amicable arrangement. “They will never divorce,” Simon Parker Bowles said of his brother and sister-in-law. “While the relationship is rather eccentric, it appears to work.”
And then it didn’t. The façade crumbled in 1994, when Charles admitted adultery. In spite of Camilla’s misgivings, he co-operated with a biography by Jonathan Dimbleby and agreed to a TV interview, in which he confessed that he had remained faithful to Diana only until his marriage had “irretrievably broken down”.
A situation that was ‘parlous in the extreme’
Andrew Parker Bowles felt publicly humiliated and filed for divorce. Camilla’s friends felt that she’d been thrown to the wolves after years of devoted discretion, and at a time when her mother was suffering from osteoporosis and seriously ill. (She died in July that year aged 72. Camilla has been devoted to raising funds and awareness for osteoporosis ever since.)
Tina Brown argues that at this point, and for the next few years, Camilla’s situation was parlous in the extreme. Her ex soon remarried. Her children were away at university. She was not exactly flush with cash, and there were rumours that Charles had stumped up some of the money to buy her post-marital home, Ray Mill House in Wiltshire. It remains her private residence and, she has said, “the one place I can be completely relaxed on my own terms”. Charles helped out: he sent over horseboxes full of flowers and trees from Highgrove for her to plant in the garden. Her supermarket shop was charged to his account. If she threw a dinner party, Charles’s chef was dispatched to cater it, and her horse was stabled at Highgrove.
But Camilla had no official role in the prince’s life and could theoretically be dropped at any point. She could do what she liked and had none of the tedium of royal life to put up with, but she was also persona non grata for the royal family and the general public – a middle-aged divorcee, forever a visitor at Charles’s houses, not the chatelaine. Unless and until he made it official, she was vulnerable to palace intrigue, public opinion and the luminous, eternally wronged presence of Diana. On the other hand, as a friend told Tina Brown, “Camilla is a smart poker player.”
In early 1996, she was instrumental in hiring a spin doctor called Mark Bolland to rehabilitate her public image – from the villain who ruined Diana’s life to the loving partner who made Charles’s bearable, from “most hated woman in Britain” to future queen. Camilla installed her old friend, Virginia Carrington, on Charles’s staff to run his personal schedule. She and Charles were photographed together for the first time as a couple, coming out of the Ritz. Charles threw Camilla a 50th birthday party at Highgrove, where she was photographed arriving wearing a new necklace he had given her. (She told the chauffeur to slow down at the gates so that photographers could get a good shot. To this day, she is admired by press photographers for her willingness – unusual in the royal family – to help them get the shot they need.) Slowly, Bolland’s plan for public acceptance of Mrs Parker Bowles appeared to be working. Diana was out of the country on holiday, apparently happy. It was July 1997.
The aftermath of a tragedy
For a year after Diana’s death, Camilla effectively went to ground once again. In private her relationship with Charles continued and in public the brickbats kept coming. The American fashion critic Richard Blackwell, famed for his “worst dressed lists”, described her as “the queen of frump – the biggest bomb to hit Britain since the Blitz”.
By 1998, though, Bolland was on manoeuvres once again. It was reported that Mrs Parker Bowles had met Prince William and the sky had not caved in. She was photographed arriving at Highgrove with her sister for Charles’s 50th. She went to the opening of a London jewellery boutique with her daughter and smiled gamely for the cameras. She played a long game – two steps forward, one step back – and kept her counsel, a devotee of Queen Elizabeth’s maxim, “Never complain, never explain.” She was, a friend said, the sort of person who dealt with problems not by having therapy but by going hunting, putting rum in her tea and eating scrambled eggs on toast.
But even by 2002 her situation was open to question, with Queen Elizabeth inclined to agree with some of her advisers that Mrs Parker Bowles was surplus to requirements. Sir Michael Peat, a senior courtier, was dispatched up the Mall from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House, the heir to the throne’s HQ. His orders were to sort out Charles’s “chaotic” household and “sever” his relationship with Camilla, which was deemed a messy distraction for Charles from his work and a potential lightning rod for adverse public opinion. Peat, however, concluded the opposite: Camilla was good for Charles and he should “marry her and be done”, as Tina Brown puts it. It was now five years since Diana had died and nine since the Parker Bowles divorce. Characteristically, though, Charles dithered, reluctant to be pushed into a corner, wary of opinion polls and unable to propose even when a former Archbishop of Canterbury said it would be “the natural thing” for them to marry. Before he died, Camilla’s elderly father even petitioned him to make an honest woman of his daughter.
“If Camilla had a family motto,” a friend has said, “it would be, ‘Thou shalt not whine.‘”
She might not whine, but she could certainly put her foot down. It was the marriage of another couple that was the final straw for Camilla, jolting Charles into action. In November 2004, the daughter of the Duke of Westminster was marrying Charles’s godson, Edward van Cutsem, at Chester Cathedral. Days before the wedding, Camilla, who had officially been living with Charles at Clarence House since the year before, discovered that she would not, as she expected, be seated directly behind Charles in the church. Instead she was effectively in Siberia, at the back, behind a pillar, with the bride’s family. She took it as an insult and said she wasn’t going. If Charles went he would go alone, which would itself invite speculation. In the end, he fudged and announced a sudden urgent appointment on the day prevented him from attending.
He proposed over new year at Birkhall, with a 5ct diamond ring from the collection of his beloved grandmother. Time magazine put them on its February cover with the headline “Charles and Camilla. Love Actually”. Prince Harry said recently in a TV interview that he and William “didn’t think it was necessary” for them to marry and begged him not to. “We thought,” he said, “it would do more harm than good.” The marriage went ahead anyway.
“She is an amazingly stoical, strong person,” her sister told Robert Hardman recently, describing Camilla and Charles as “yin and yang, polar opposites” who nevertheless work “brilliantly” together. “I’m not sure many people would have been so strong throughout it,” she added. “There were so many years of difficulties. She is his rock and I can’t emphasise that enough. She is completely loyal and she isn’t somebody who has huge highs and lows. They’re like any couple who’ve been together for a long time – lots of jokes and squabbles.”
Slowly, in classic royal fashion, Camilla was incorporated into the “firm”. There were photo opportunities with Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Cambridge at the Diamond Jubilee. The three of them visited Fortnum’s together and looked jolly. The Queen gave her permanent loan of most of the Queen Mother’s jewellery collection, including the show-stopping Greville tiara, and appointed her Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO). By the time the Queen died in 2022, the long-running dispute about the Duchess of Cornwall’s future title had been settled. On the eve of her Platinum Jubilee, in February 2022, Queen Elizabeth announced that it was her “sincere wish” that when the time came Camilla be known as Queen, and that was that. The sky once again did not cave in. The move, Tina Brown believed, was “both magnanimous and strategic… For Charles, his mother’s validation of his devotion to Camilla was the last exorcism of Diana’s ghost.”
‘She makes him laugh’
In May 2023 she was duly crowned Queen alongside her husband. She wore a gown embroidered with the names of her children and grandchildren and her two rescued Jack Russell terriers, Bluebell and Beth. That day, the Court Circular quietly started to refer to her simply as “the Queen”.
“I think she’s transitioned beautifully,” her sister, Annabel, said. “I mean, sometimes I look at her and I can’t really believe it.”
The Princess Royal concurred. Camilla didn’t have the lifetime of preparation that Charles did, but nevertheless “her understanding of the role and how much difference it makes to the King has been absolutely outstanding. I think she’s been incredibly generous and understanding.”
Twenty years next month since they married, Charles is said to be “a changed man” and Camilla “a great asset”.
“She has a great twinkle and it comes out very readily,” says the Marchioness of Lansdowne. “It puts people at their ease very quickly. I think that’s a great gift to have.”
While Charles at one point had 11 private secretaries, Camilla has a small office of happy staff with a very low turnover. She still retreats to Ray Mill when she can, where the garden is full of grandchildren and people telling her, “You’re not Queen to us – totally irreverent,” her sister says. “People can see that she’s not someone up ‘there’ to be revered. She’s an ordinary person who has gone through the same things we all have. Maybe that’s reassuring in this day and age.”
During the first year of the new reign, Charles and Camilla racked up 571 engagements between them and, when he was diagnosed with cancer, she refused to cancel any of her own undertakings.
One very old friend of Camilla’s watched the coronation almost in disbelief. “When I think back to those days when she was getting so much grief, and how she soldiered on without complaining out of loyalty and love, then you look at today? Well, I was in floods. This felt like proper closure.”
“Basically,” her sister says, “she makes him laugh. And he brings to her, well, everything.”
Written by: Hilary Rose
© The Times of London