As of next month’s coronation, the Queen Consort will at last have ascended to the title of Queen – not Consort, not common-law, but fully legit Queen Camilla – without the world knowing much about her. There are some simple reasons why.
It’s partly because she never gives interviews and partly because she doesn’t reveal much in her actions, which are standardly royal, but not very disclosing: good deeds and horses, essentially. It’s partly because she has functioned, for decades, as a cipher for other conversations. What do we think of adultery, marriage, divorce, the royal family, the leisure class, the finer gradations of social hierarchy? Of Charles? Of Diana? These debates have played out in sometimes hideously microscopic detail, with Camilla as object, but never subject. The result is that she is never more obscure than when everyone is talking about her.
I mean object and subject in the grammatical sense, of course. The question of Camilla as a subject of the realm – and the attendant posh axioms about whether or not a prince can marry a subject, and who on earth he is supposed to marry if not – we will get to later. (The answer seems to be a cousin, or a German, or a German cousin.)
Yet, thanks to the meticulous labours of royal-watchers, the bones of her life are known. These are the five ages of the queen-to-be.
1947-64: a remarkable childhood
No, no, nothing truly remarkable happened – don’t get excited. Born in King’s College hospital in south London, to Rosalind née Cubitt and Bruce Shand, Camilla had plenty of notables in her family tree – including Alice Keppel, a mistress of Edward VII, and Thomas Cubitt, the master builder after whom so many serviceable pubs are named – and a fair number of not-notables, wastrels and proles.
The Debrett’s world loves its fine distinctions: who came over with the Conqueror, who bought their own furniture; a Pantone scale of blue blood. But all we need to know is that the Shands were wealthy, with houses in East Sussex and South Kensington; raised Camilla and her younger siblings, Annabel and Mark (who died in an accident in 2014), in the regular way; and were unusual for their class and era in only one respect: they were very supportive and loving.
Camilla has always described them warmly, while Annabel told Vanity Fair: “Unlike a lot of our generation, we had this incredibly warm, easy relationship with our parents.” Splice in some dogs and horses and this childhood, as if by magic, seems to have produced someone who is usually in a good mood. That is how school friends – indeed, all known associates – describe Camilla: optimistic, happy-go-lucky, untroubled.
When popular historians write about kings and their mistresses, they always perform this elaborate bafflement when the royal in question doesn’t select for beauty, like a judge in Miss World: “Countess So-and-so was no beauty, yet Prince Whatshisface was smitten …” But when you consider the royal family, none of whom look remotely happy except in those split seconds when a horse has just won something – King Charles was “metaphorically born with a headache”, in the words of the royal biographer Hugo Vickers – it is not difficult to understand why the heir to the throne was drawn inexorably to the one woman in his circle who didn’t have an expression like a bulldog licking a nettle.
She went to Queen’s Gate school in South Kensington, leaving with one O-level, and then Mon Fertile, a now defunct finishing school in Switzerland. You can’t glean a huge amount from her academic record. Public schools exist to create the material they need for the class they want to build. When Eton needed soldiers, it was a very harsh environment; later, when it needed shysters and chancers, it adapted successfully to produce Boris Johnson and David Cameron. The girls’ estate is no different – and in the 50s and 60s it needed hostesses and broodmares. The last thing you would have wanted them to emerge with was a bunch of O-levels.
1965-73: the debutante
By the time Camilla was a 17-year-old debutante in 1965, the coming-out fandango was being wound down. Society ladies were no longer presented to the Queen, but rather to a large, symbolic cake; the distinction conferred by the season was being steadily eroded by Princess Margaret making salty remarks, probably when she was drunk. (“We had to put a stop to it,” she said. “Every tart in London was getting in.”)
The question underpinning the entire Camilla and Charles saga, through each of their affairs with one another, through their respective first marriages and all the fallout, is: if he liked her that much, why didn’t he just marry her in the first place?
While I still can’t quite believe the answer, and competing narratives are sometimes limply proffered – she wasn’t posh enough, she didn’t look enough like a princess – everyone who was interested enough at the time to remember it agrees. It’s because, by the time she met Charles in 1971, she wasn’t a virgin.
Astonishingly, courtesy of Gyles Brandreth’s engaging book, Charles & Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair, we even know the date she lost her virginity, and to whom (27 March 1965, Kevin Burke). Brandreth in his book claims not to have known much about Camilla when he started writing. Brandreth in the Daily Mail says he knew her as a teenager, when she used to smoke Woodbines. So, he is a fabulously unreliable narrator, but solid on the bare bones. The virginity clause was just the way it was. It was fine to be the prince’s mistress, whatever your past, but not his wife.
Amazing, really, to mediate matters of such dynastic and material consequence through the romantic decisions of a 17-year-old, but there it is. She met Andrew Parker Bowles in 1966 and they Ross’n’Rachel-ed for seven years. Charles wanted to marry her at the end of 1972, but was prohibited. The first arc of their relationship ended then, apparently, and she married Parker Bowles in 1973.
1974-86: terrible wife (joke!), excellent mother and determined horse-lover
Public opinion on Parker Bowles has oscillated between “what a longsuffering, stoic cuckold” and “what a loveless bounder who drove her into the arms of Charles with his own behaviour”. One of Parker Bowles’ and Camilla’s breaks, in 1970, was because he thought he might have a shot at Princess Anne; he and Anne reignited their friendship during Anne’s separation from Mark Phillips in the late 1980s.
But I think we’re reading Camilla and Parker Bowles wrong in these attempts to sort them into victim and culprit. It’s possible, even likely, that there is an understanding in this class that anyone who gets a chance to hoik themselves out of the soup of undistinguished aristocracy and on to the crouton of royal attention grabs it with both hands and everyone’s blessing.
After her marriage, Camilla moved to Bolehyde in Wiltshire and had two children (Tom in 1974 and Laura in 1978), but she and Charles were back together from the summer of 1979, going to balls separately (she with Andrew, Charles with one or another ill-used lovely), but snogging each other in public and whatnot. Older ball-goers were scandalised, but most accepted kissing someone on the dancefloor when their husband was right there as the new fashion, because the Prince of Wales was doing it. Like Anne Boleyn’s French hood, who sets fashion if not those at the top? When Charles chose Highgrove as his residence in 1980, it was common knowledge that it was mainly for its proximity to Bolehyde, just 10 miles away.
Charles married Diana Spencer in 1981 and insisted in his notorious Jonathan Dimbleby interview in 1994 that nothing happened between him and Camilla for the next five years. Later, Diana was adamant that Charles and Camilla had always been in love. It’s certainly true that they went to a lot of the same horsey events from late 1981 onwards.
1987-2004: the hate figure
The Camillagate tapes, in which a private conversation between Charles and Camilla was transcribed first by an Australian magazine, then by the British tabloids, dropped in 1993. The conversation itself had happened at the end of 1989, by which time Charles and Camilla had been having a private-but-public affair for at least three years.
The tape was jaw-droppingly intimate. I was surprised to learn that Charles knew what a Tampax was, let alone wished to be one. Reading the transcript now, they seem much more anguished than ludicrous, trapped in their status quo, suffocating in this narrowing space between what convention expected of them and what their circle knew to be true.
Diana blew the lid off the whole thing, first with the Andrew Morton book in 1992, then, three years later, with the Martin Bashir interview (“there were three of us in this marriage”), which remains one of the most-watched pieces of television in British history. Camilla and Parker Bowles divorced that year, Charles and Diana the next.
What you may not remember is how much people hated Camilla, with all their ire on behalf of Diana – almost a caricature of a wronged wife – aimed at the other woman. The tabloids loathed her. Public opinion was ranged against her so implacably that if there had been a referendum on what to do with these two lovebirds, if not leave them in peace, Camilla would probably have ended up in prison. Brandreth describes in intoxicating detail how she was pelted with bread rolls in the car park of Chippenham Sainsbury’s. After Diana’s death and the “great outpouring”, the animus only intensified.
Yet the most concrete criticism of her on record is Prince Harry’s. This year, he told an American interviewer: “I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation, and her own image, for her own sake.” His charge is that she leaked stories about him and William – including about his time in rehab in 2002 – to the papers to improve her standing. Apparently, she was trying to make Harry look like a wreck in order to garner sympathy for herself.
I just don’t buy it. Why would Harry’s trials have any bearing on the public view of Camilla? This family has been put through the wringer by the press so often that they always assume it’s one of their own riding the tiger. But maybe no one is riding the tiger and the tiger occasionally just makes things up.
2005-23: consort to queen
Charles and Camilla got spliced in Windsor, not even in the castle, but in the Guildhall, a hole-in-the-corner affair, with a subdued crowd and terrible, daytime-TV lighting, the whole event pored over for rifts by the press.
I watched it in a hospital in Iceland, where my mother had just had a heart attack. A nurse wheeled in a giant television “so you can see your new queen”. “She’s not my queen,” my mother said, laughing too much, but still too breathless to swear, thank God. When the nurse came back, we had to explain as a family that we were lifelong republicans who didn’t care about these daft people, not hardcore Diana loyalists, as she might have supposed.
Because there was still a lot of anger in the air, there were regional dignitaries who refused to raise the union flag on Camilla’s birthday – it was “still too soon” (seven and a half years!) after Diana’s death. This, by the way, is why you should never trust anyone who wants to be one of those mayors where all it means is a great big chain.
Harry, again, is inadvertently revealing on this. He says that he and William had begged Charles not to marry Camilla, but, when it became clear that he was going to anyway, “pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognised that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”
In the end, spurious feelings – a passion for convention and sacrifice; an obsession with duty, so long as someone else is performing it – will always give way to feelings that are real, to two people who want to be in the same place, even if it means one of them has to live life as a sanitary product. Public opinion has softened. Mark Bolland, formerly Charles’s deputy private secretary, in a rare moment of household openness, once said a relative of Camilla had called her “the laziest woman to have been born in England in the 20th century”. But when you consider all these years, all these hoops, all this turmoil, it looks like quite hard work.
