Camila Parker BS is remembered as the woman who broke Diana’s marriage, the villain of the fairy tale, the mistress who would not go away. The biographers tell a different story. She and Charles were introduced around 1970. Within months, they were a couple. The advisers around the prince considered her unsuitable as a future queen.
She married Andrew Parker BS in 1973 while Charles was at sea with the Royal Navy. The marriage the institution eventually steered him toward became the largest royal scandal of the 20th century. 34 years later, Camila walked into Windsor Guild Hall as his wife. In 2023, she was crowned beside him.
This is the woman Charles wanted long before Diana. The summer of 1970 in London was the season in which Charles, 21 years old and newly graduated from Cambridge, began the transition from student to working prince. He had been formally invested as Prince of Wales the previous July at Careron Castle. He was preparing to begin officer training with the Royal Navy the following year.
The intervening months were the last extended interval of relative privacy he would have for the rest of his life. The introductions of that period came through the network of mutual friends that surrounded any young royal in the early 1970s. The most consequential of them came through Lucia Santa Cruz, the daughter of the Chilean ambassador to London.
Lucia had been one of Charles’s first serious romantic interests during his time at Trinity College Cambridge. By 1970, the two had moved on amicably, and Lucia had a friend she thought he should meet. Her name was Camila Shand. She was 23 years old, the daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a wine merchant and decorated cavalry officer, and Rosalyn Cubet, daughter of the third Baron Ashkam.
She had been raised between a farmhouse in Sussex and a townhouse in South Kensington. She had attended the same finishing school in Switzerland that Lucia had passed through a few years earlier. She rode well, smoked, drank gin and tonic, and was, in the descriptions later given to several biographers, the kind of woman who walked into a room and assumed she was welcome.
Where exactly the formal introduction took place is one of the small mysteries the published accounts have never quite agreed upon. The most repeated version supported by Sarah Bradford in her biography of Diana and by ABC’s royal contributor Robert Jobson places the first meeting at a polo match at Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park, where most of Charles’s early relationships were said to begin.
Other accounts locate the introduction at a private dinner in Lucia Santa Cruz’s London Flat. Penny Jr. In the duchess, the untold story places the falling in love at some point in 1971 after the introduction had already taken place. The Polo version is the version that has entered general memory. The exact circumstances are less clear than the memory has made them.
What is not disputed is that within months of meeting, Charles and Camila were a couple, and the social world they shared was the world of Wiltshire weekends, country house parties, and the polo grounds around Windsor. Camila brought to that first encounter a small family detail that became almost immediately one of the most repeated anecdotes in royal lore.
She was the great granddaughter on her mother’s side of Alice Keell, who had been the long-standing mistress of King Edward 7th, Charles’s great greatgrandfather. Contemporary accounts hold that Camila made some reference to the ancestral connection at or near their first meeting. The exact phrasing varies wildly across the sources from a flirtatious oneliner to a casual aside, and no two biographers reproduce it the same way.
The line in the form it is usually quoted should be treated as legend rather than transcript. The family connection itself is documented. Charles brought to the same encounter the temperament of a young man whose private interior life had spent the previous decade being shaped by a particular kind of British upper class education.
He had been sent at 8 to Chim Preparatory School. At 13 he had been sent to Gordontown in the north of Scotland on the explicit instruction of his father who believed character was a matter of cold showers and long runs in bad weather. He had emerged from this education sensitive, introverted, intellectually curious, and accustomed to difference.
He had reached his early 20s on the consistent evidence of his diaries and letters as preserved in Jonathan Dimblebee’s authorized biography with a sense that something fundamental about his life had already been decided for him without his consent. He had not until 1970 met a woman who treated this fact as an inconvenience to him personally rather than as the central thing about him.
Camila did. The relationship that began that summer moved quickly through the back gardens and country houses of the English social calendar. They were seen at Cowre Park. They were guests at Broadlands in Hampshire, the country house of Lord Mountbatton. They appeared together at a series of weekend parties in the houses of mutual friends.
The friends who watched the courtship later remembered the same thing. He was happier in her company than they had ever seen him. He was 22 years old. He was in love for the first serious time in his life. And he was surrounded by people who already understood why it could not be allowed to continue. The rules were never written down.
There was no document in the royal archives that set out the requirements for a future Princess of Wales in the early 1970s. There was instead a powerful set of social and court expectations carried forward through the generations of advisers and ladies in waiting and courters around the queen which the institution applied to prospective royal brides with a consistency that everyone in the relevant circle understood without having to discuss it.
A future princess of Wales, the woman who would one day be queen consort of the United Kingdom was expected to be Protestant. She was expected to be British or at least drawn from one of the Protestant European royal houses. She was expected to be young, ideally several years younger than the heir so that she could grow into the institutional role rather than arriving with a fully formed adult biography.
She was expected to be aristocratic although the precise threshold of aristocracy required had been quietly lowered across the 20th century and she was expected to come to the marriage in the cautious language of the period without a past. The last expectation was the one that mattered most and it was the expectation Camila Shand could not meet.
She had been involved with Andrew Parker BS on and off since she was 17 years old. He was a household cavalry officer, Roman Catholic, several years her senior, the son of an old Berkshire family with significant land. He was charming, philandering, popular in the same polo set in which she moved. The relationship had stopped and restarted repeatedly through her teens and early 20s.
At various points, he had been involved with other women, including for a period in 1970, Princess Anne, Charles’s own sister. The Parker Bull’s arrangement with Anne had ended without lasting damage, but the fact of it complicated Camila’s standing inside the court. She was, in the verdict of the older advisers around the queen, a young woman with a romantic history.
There was no statute that excluded her on this ground. The statutes that governed royal marriage, the act of settlement of 1701, and the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 were concerned with religion and parental consent and made no reference to the prior personal lives of the prospective spouses. The exclusion of Camila to the extent it took place at all was social rather than legal.
It was the unanimous quiet weight of the people around the prince expressed in conversations he was unlikely to hear about directly accumulating into a settled view that Camila Shand was not the right kind of woman to be molded into the next princess of Wales. The other obstacle harder to quantify and harder to ignore was Lord Mountbatton of Burma.
Charles’s great uncle, the last viceroy of India, the man the prince called his honorary grandfather, and whose advice he treated with the seriousness one reserves for guidance from someone who has lived an entire life one is still trying to understand, the popular shortorthhand accelerated by recent dramatizations, is that Mount Batton vetoed Camila.
The reality, as it emerges from Mount Batton’s own letters and from the reconstruction in Sarah Bradford’s biography, was less direct and more enduring. Mount Batton did not order Charles to break things off. He encouraged Charles to consider when the time eventually came for marriage, a younger woman with a more conventionally suitable public reputation.
Mountbatton had a particular candidate in mind for the long term. Her name was Amanda Kenachbull. She was Mount Batton’s own granddaughter. In 1971, she was 15 years old. The prince listened. He had always listened to his greatuncle. He had been raised by a father who treated affection as something earned through performance, and a mother who, by her own later acknowledgement, had not been the kind of parent her children had needed in their early years.
Mountbatton was the figure to whom Charles could write at length about what he was feeling and expect to be answered as a man rather than as a constitutional inheritance. By the early months of 1971, in letters quoted by Dimby in the authorized biography, Charles was writing about Camila in terms that left no doubt about what she meant to him.
He was also writing about her in language that suggested he was preparing himself to let her go. He had concluded on the advice of his great uncle and under the quiet weight of the court around him that the relationship could not continue in the form it had taken. What he did not yet know was that in London Camila had reached a similar conclusion of her own.
In September 1971, Charles entered the Royal Navy. He was 22 years old. The Navy was a family expectation, the path his father had taken, the institution that would keep him occupied and at sea for the next several years, while everything else in his life sorted itself out. He sailed first as a sublieutenant on HMS Norfolk in the Mediterranean.
He moved through a series of postings over the following two years, including HMS Jupiter and HMS Manurva, the frigot that would in early 1973 take him to the Caribbean. Camila in London had been making her own calculations. The on andoff relationship with Andrew Parker BS, which had survived a decade of other entanglements on both sides, was now under family pressure of a particular kind.
The Shand family was conventional, country, the kind of household where unmarried daughters in their mid20s were a quiet source of concern. Andrew in early 1973 finally proposed. According to Penny Junior, the engagement was not entirely conventional in its execution. A notice in the Times appeared in March 1973 in circumstances Jun describes as having been at least partially arranged by Camila’s mother.
And once the announcement was public, the wedding became a question of when rather than whether the guard’s chapel at Wellington barracks was booked. The date was set for 4th of July, 1973. The news of the engagement reached the Prince of Wales while he was serving aboard HMS Manurva on her Caribbean station.
The exact mechanics by which the news reached him are not preserved in any reliable contemporary source. What is documented is what he did afterward. Several biographers working from private letters made available to them by Charles’s circle have quoted from the correspondence he sent during this period to one of his closest confidants.
Penny Jun reproduces the most extended passage. In it, Charles wrote that it seemed to him particularly cruel that after what he described as such a blissful, peaceful, and mutually happy relationship, the affair should have been allowed to last only a matter of months. The letter was not addressed to Camila.
It was written in the manner of a young man trying to make sense of something to himself, to a friend. There is in some accounts the suggestion that Charles attempted to intervene in the wedding plans even at this distance. Juner describes a lastditch effort. The exact form it took is not preserved in any verifiable source.
What is clear from the eventual record of the day itself is that whatever was attempted did not succeed. On 4th July 1973, Camila Rosemary Shand married Andrew Henry Parker BS at the guard’s chapel. She wore an Empire line gown by Belleville Cissoon. Her bouquet was Lilies of the Valley. The wedding was attended by Princess Anne, by Princess Margaret, and by the Queen Mother, three senior royal women whose collective presence signaled that the marriage carried the crown’s social approval, if not by all reports its enthusiasm. The
Prince of Wales was not present. He was, by every account, still on the Caribbean station, still aboard HMS Manurva, several thousand miles from the Guard’s Chapel. Dimbley, drawing on Charles’s own diaries and correspondence in the authorized biography, describes a young man who returned from naval duty in the following months, subdued, distant, and at moments openly bereff.
The friends who saw him in this period gave consistent accounts to several biographers in the years afterward. The prince had not yet learned how to absorb a personal loss of this scale, and there was no one within the institution whose job it was to help him learn. Mountbatton met him on his return. The advice did not change.
The advice was that Charles should now begin in earnest the long search for an appropriate wife. The list of candidates would need to be considered. The bachelor period would in the language of the household be allowed to continue for another year or two, but the project was now urgent. The Prince of Wales was 24 years old.
The institution needed an heir. the institution needed in the formulation that had governed every step of his education and his early adult life a princess. The institution did not need and was not going to consider the woman who had just become Mrs. Andrew Parker BS. The story everyone in royal circles assumed had ended at the guard’s chapel that summer morning had not in fact ended.
It had simply begun a different chapter. The Parker BS marriage settled into the shape of a particular kind of British upper class arrangement. Camila and Andrew bought Bullhide Manor in Wiltshire, a 16th century house with a pond and a long view across farmland. The house was 30 minutes from H Highrove, the country estate the Duchy of Cornwall would purchase for the Prince of Wales in 1980.
The geography would matter later. For the moment, it was simply that Camila had married within the circle into which Charles had been raised. Their first child, Thomas Henry Charles Parker BS, was born in December 1974. The Prince of Wales was named Godfather. The choice was not concealed and was not at the time considered remarkable.
Andrew Parker BS and Charles had known each other for years through Polo and through the household cavalry. Camila’s continued friendship with the prince was in their social world an ordinary fact. Photographs from the mid 1970s show her in headscarves and barbers watching the prince ride at Sirencester. Their daughter Laura was born in 1978.
By the late 1970s, the Parker Bull’s marriage had begun to reveal its asymmetries. Andrew, by the consistent account of multiple biographers, conducted his married life much as he had conducted his bachelor life. His extrammarital interests were not concealed. Penny Junior in the Duchess characterized the dynamic plainly, observing that Andrew was in no position to complain when in turn his wife found her own private accommodation.
What that accommodation amounted to in this period and when exactly it took on the character of a resumed romantic relationship between Camila and Charles is one of the few questions about which the published record genuinely disagrees. Jonathan Dimbleby in the authorized biography published in 1994 placed the full resumption of the affair in 1986 after Charles had concluded that his marriage to Diana had in his own phrase irretrievably broken down.
Andrew Morton working with sources close to Diana has held that the emotional and romantic continuity between Charles and Camila had never genuinely been broken at all and that the period of the 1970s was the interval in which it operated under different conventions. Penny Jr. places the resumption at some point in the late 1970s in the years surrounding Lord Mountbattton’s death.
Other biographers locate the change at different points across the decade between the Parker Bull’s wedding and the Diana engagement. The truthful answer is that the precise timeline is contested and the biographers who have looked closest at the material have reached different conclusions. What is not contested is the framework.
Charles in the second half of the 1970s was a young Royal Navy officer whose closest female confidant was a married woman in Wiltshire. Camila in the same years was the wife of a serially unfaithful cavalry officer whose closest male friend was the prince of Wales. The arrangement in the description given to Guiles Brandth by one of Charles’s godmothers was the kind of thing that worked well enough provided no one outside the circle ever discovered it.
The wider Mountbatten effect on Charles’s life through this period cannot be overstated. The great uncle had not relaxed his interest in the marriage question. His letters to Charles through the late 1970s, partially reproduced in Dimbley’s biography, repeatedly returned to the same theme. Charles must marry.
Charles must choose a sensible girl. Charles must not under any circumstances drift into a position from which there was no marrying out. The favored candidate by 1979 was Amanda Natchbull. by then 22 years old. In August 1979 on his fishing boat Shadow 5 in Magagore Bay in County Siggo, Mount Batton was assassinated by the provisional Irish Republican Army.
The bomb killed him, his 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas Natchbull, the Daager Lady Brayborn, and a 15year-old boy from the village who had been helping on the boat. Charles was 30 years old. The figure who had organized his romantic life for a decade was gone. The expectation that he should now find a wife was not.
The period between Mount Battton’s funeral and the engagement to Diana Spencer is the 18 months during which the Prince of Wales was by general agreement of the British press the most eligible bachelor in the world. The press attention had been mounting through the late 1970s. After Mount Batton’s death, it became something different. The prince was 30.
The queen was in her 50s. The pressure for a public suitable engagement was no longer parliamentary or familial. It was tabloid. The candidates, as cataloged by Sally Bedell Smith in her biography of Charles, were a small group of young women who passed through the prince’s life during this period under continuous press attention.
Amanda Knatchbull herself, the Mountbatten preference, was approached by Charles after the assassination. According to multiple biographers, she declined. The reasons given vary. She did not want, in her own subsequent description, to enter the institution that had made her grandfather a target. She and Charles remained friends.
The proposal, if proposal it was, was the end of that particular line of dynastic planning. Anna Wallace, the daughter of a Scottish landowner, became publicly linked with Charles in 1979 and 1980. She was 25, sharp tonged, and by some accounts uninterested in the deference royal courtship was thought to require. The relationship ended at a ball at Stole Park, Lord Vesty’s estate, after Charles spent the evening dancing with Camila rather than with Anna.
The widely reported account given to biographers by guests present that night is that Anna left the ball early after telling the prince she had no intention of being treated as a substitute for someone else. The pattern was beginning to be noticed. Other names cycled through the columns. Sabrina Guinness, Deina Sheffield, Jane Welssley, the daughter of the Duke of Wellington, Lady Sarah Spencer, the elder sister of Lady Diana.
Each was photographed, named, evaluated by the court of public opinion, and in due course passed over. The recurring difficulty in each case traced by Junor and Charles, victim or villain, was the same. The women in question were judged by the court around the prince to fail one or more of the unwritten expectations.
They had pasts, they had professions, they had opinions of their own. There was also a different difficulty less easily reduced to court politics. Several of the women, according to the biographers, came to feel during their relationships with Charles that they were being measured against something they could not see. The something they could not see was Camila Parker BS, who was now in her early 30s, settled in Wiltshire, a mother of two, and who was present at almost every social gathering at which the prince spent his weekends. By the
second half of 1980, the situation had become untenable. The prince was approaching 32. There was no engagement. The press was beginning to use language about him that had not previously been considered respectful. Phrases like, “Why won’t he marry?” and “Is he ever going to choose?” appeared in the major British dailies through the autumn.
Inside the household, the urgency rose accordingly. It was in this atmosphere in the summer and autumn of 1980 that Lady Diana Spencer began to surface as a serious candidate. She was the daughter of the eighth Earl Spencer. Her family seat was Althorp in Northamptonshire. She had been raised partly at Park House on the Sandingham estate in the very shadow of the Queen’s Norfolk Retreat.
She was 19 years old. She had attended a Swiss finishing school for less than a term and had no other higher education. She had, by every available account, never had a serious adult relationship. She worked by then as a kindergarten assistant at the Young England School in Pimlo.
She satisfied every expectation the court around the prince had spent a decade waiting to see satisfied. She was Protestant. She was aristocratic. She was young. She was in the institution’s preferred euphemism a sensible girl with no public history to manage. She was also, although the court and her own family did not seem to have considered the question in any depth, 12 and a half years younger than the man she was about to marry.
The 1980 summer at Balmoral was the moment in most accounts at which the Diana Spencer courtship became inevitable rather than possible. The prince invited her to join the royal family for the late summer holiday at the Scottish estate. The press, alerted to her presence, descended on the D Valley in the kind of numbers that had not previously been seen at Balmoral.
She was photographed by the river in a light skirt against a sun strong enough to render the skirt transparent. The photograph appeared on the front pages of the British tabloids the following day. From that morning onward, the wider press attention escalated into a force the family was no longer in a position to manage.
The proposal when it came took place in February 1981 in the nursery at Windsor Castle. Charles was 32. Diana was 19. The engagement was announced on 24th of February. The wedding date was set for 29th of July at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The decision to hold the ceremony at St. Paul’s rather than Westminster Abbey, the more conventional venue for royal weddings, was made because St.
Pauls could seat more guests and accommodate a longer procession route. The television audience on the day would be estimated at 750 million people worldwide. It is worth pausing before describing what followed to note how much of the story of the engagement comes to us through one particular source. Andrew Morton’s Diana, her true story, published in 1992, was written with Diana’s covert cooperation.
Many of the most repeated details of the months between the proposal and the wedding originate in that book. They are the princess’s own account of what she experienced. Other biographers working from other sources within the household have given alternative interpretations of the same events where the accounts diverge sharply.
That divergence should be held in view. The bracelet incident is one such moment. According to Morton’s account, in the weeks after the engagement, Diana, going through items at the prince’s office at Buckingham Palace, came across a bracelet inscribed with the initials G and F. The initials, she came to understand, referred to the prince’s private nicknames for Camila Parker BS, Glattis, and Fred, drawn from Goon Show characters of Charles’s childhood.
The bracelet, in Morton’s account, was a parting gift Charles intended to present to Camila before the wedding. In Dimblebee’s authorized account, the bracelet was a piece of friendship etiquette of no particular consequence, the kind of thoughtful object the prince routinely commissioned for friends. The two interpretations of the same object would become, in retrospect, characteristic of how the next 15 years would unfold in the days immediately before the wedding.
According to Morton, Diana told two of her sisters that she did not think she could go through with it. The sister’s response, as Diana later recounted it, was that her face was already on the commemorative tea towels and that it was too late to stop. The princess attended the rehearsal. She lost weight.
The wedding dress made by David and Elizabeth Emanuel had to be adjusted in the final days because of the weight she had shed. The ceremony on 29th of July 1981 was by every measure the crown applied at the time a triumph. The crowds in central London were the largest assembled for a royal occasion in living memory.
The dress with its 25- ft train of ivory silk taffida has been studied since by historians of fashion as one of the most influential garments of the 20th century. The vows were exchanged. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runy, spoke of the wedding as the stuff of which fairy tales are made. The newly married couple appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and kissed in front of a crowd estimated at 600,000.
Camila Parker BS was a guest at the wedding. She was seated in the body of the cathedral in a pale gray hat with Andrew Parker BS who as a serving officer of the household cavalry had a formal role in the ceremonial. By all accounts she did not speak with the prince that day. The prince and the new princess of Wales departed on their honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia the following week.
Among the photographs that in Morton’s account Charles carried with him were a number of images of Camila. Diana, who came across them in the cabin, would later identify the discovery as one of the moments in which she understood that the fairy tale, as the archbishop had described it from the pulpit of St. Paul’s, was not the version of the story she was inside.
Prince William was born on 21st June 1982. Prince Harry was born on 15th of September 1984. The years bracketed by the two births are the period during which the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, as Diana would later describe it, and as the major biographers have since reconstructed it, deteriorated past the point at which either party believed it could be repaired.
It is important to handle the princess’s experience in this period with care because most of what we know about her interior life from these years comes from her own later accounts. Morton’s book, drawing on Diana’s covert testimony, described severe post-natal depression after Williams birth that was not effectively treated by the medical staff around her.
Diana herself in the Panorama interview of 1995 would describe the same period and would speak openly about the bulimia she developed and about a sense in the early months of the marriage that she had been left to deteriorate without serious institutional help. The specific incidents, moments of self harm, episodes of profound distress come to us from the princess’s own account and from the friends and staff she eventually confided in.
They should be reported with that attribution rather than as detached fact. What is clear from multiple sources beyond Diana’s own is that the marriage was failing in ways that the household around it did not know how to address. The princess was 19 years old when she married a man 12 years her senior in an institution she had not been prepared for and a public role she had not yet learned to manage.
Her natural emotional intelligence which would later become one of her defining public qualities was at this stage an instrument she had not yet learned to wield in her own defense. Charles, in the same period, was in his mid30s, married to a young woman with whom he shared neither intellectual interests nor social temperament, and increasingly retreating to the country house at Highrove that he had begun renovating before the marriage.
His established circle was unchanged. Camila Parker BS in Wiltshire remained the friend he called when he needed to be understood. The date on which the friendship between Charles and Camila became something more than friendship again after the long interval since 1973 is as noted earlier contested.
Jonathan Dimbley placed the full resumption in 1986 after Charles had concluded that his marriage to Diana had irretrievably broken down. Andrew Morton’s account drawing on Diana held that the resumption was earlier and that the line between friendship and affair had never been as solid as the authorized version implied. Penny Junior’s account falls between the two.
None of these accounts is settled. What is clear is that by the second half of the 1980s, the Highgrove household was operating with a routine awareness among the staff and the inner circle that the prince’s relationship with Camila Parker BS was no longer simply a residue of his earlier life.
Diana through this period was aware of all of it. By 1989, according to her own subsequent account, she confronted Camila directly at the 40th birthday party of Camila’s sister, Annabelle Elliot. The two women’s recollections of what was said in that conversation have never aligned. They agree on the fact of the conversation. The princess of this period was by the accounts of those closest to her undergoing two collapses simultaneously.
The marriage was failing in a way she could not stop. The institution she had entered at 19 had, in the description she would later give to Panorama, treated her difficulty as a problem to be managed rather than as a person to be helped. The institutional response, in retrospect, is the part of the story the biographers have judged most severely.
The palace’s instinct was containment. The queen, by all accounts, was sympathetic to the princess, but reluctant to intervene in what she viewed as a private matter between her son and his wife. The prince’s office increasingly treated Diana as a public relations difficulty. The princess’s office increasingly treated the prince’s office as the adversary.
By 1992, the year that would end with a formal separation, both households were briefing the press against each other through intermediaries. The marriage at the center of the late 20th century British monarchy was in the description Andrew Morton would publish that summer no longer a marriage in any functioning sense.
It was a war over who would shape the public memory of the failure. The war was about to become audible. On 18th of December 1989, a private mobile telephone call took place between the Prince of Wales calling from a country house in Cheshire and Camila Parker BS who was at home in Wiltshire. The call lasted approximately 11 minutes.
It was intercepted by an unknown person using a radio scanner recorded and circulated for the better part of 3 years through a small underground network of royal tape collectors before reaching the British and Australian tabloid press in January 1993. The Daily Mirror in the United Kingdom and the magazine New Idea in Australia published transcripts within days of each other.
The contents of the call were intimate. They included extended affectionate banter, much of it consistent with the established familiarity of a long-standing relationship between two people who had been in each other’s lives for two decades. The single passage that the British press fixated on and that would attach the recording forever to the nickname Tampon Gate was a moment in which the prince made a joking remark about wishing to be reincarnated as a particular item of feminine hygiene in order to be perpetually close to Camila.
The publication of the tape was the most humiliating moment of Charles’s adult life to that point. The Australian and British tabloid coverage was sustained, lurid, and unrelenting through the early weeks of 1993. The image of the Prince of Wales as a figure of mild distance and earnest interest in architecture was almost overnight replaced in the popular mind by the recording Diana’s side had been recorded too.
The so-called Squidgy Gate tape, an intercepted telephone call between Diana and her close friend James Gilby in which Gilby repeatedly addressed her by the nickname that gave the recording its later title, had been published in The Sun in August 1992. The contents were less explicitly intimate, but suggested an emotional reliance on a man who was not her husband.
The two leaks together established for any reader of the British press in 1992 and 1993 that both halves of the most famous marriage in the country had been conducting their lives in parallel for years. The formal separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales was announced in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister John Major on 9th of December 1992.
The announcement said that there were no plans for a divorce and that the constitutional position of the princess as future queen consort would not be affected. The constitutional reassurance turned out to be temporary. In June 1994, in an interview filmed at High Grove and broadcast on ITV, Charles sat with Jonathan Dimbley and in answer to a direct question about his fidelity to his wife, confirmed that he had been unfaithful.
He added a qualifying phrase that this had happened only after the marriage had irretrievably broken down. The phrase supplied with the precision of a man who had thought a long time about how to put it did not survive the public reception of the interview. What survived was the admission. In November 1995, in an interview filmed at Kensington Palace with the BBC journalist Martin Basher, Diana sat across from a single camera and gave the most damaging interview by a senior member of the royal family in the 20th century. She spoke of her bulimia, her
depression, the coldness of the institution around her, and the breakdown of her marriage. On the question of Camila Parker BS, she delivered the sentence that would replace in public memory every other sentence she ever spoke. She said, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.
It is necessary to record that in 2021, the BBC formally acknowledged that Basher had obtained the interview through deception, including the use of forged bank statements shown to Diana’s brother to win her confidence. Diana’s words in the interview were her own. The means by which Basher secured the sitting were not legitimate.
The line, however, was hers. By December 1995, the queen had instructed the prince and princess in writing to divorce. The divorce was granted in August 1996. Diana lost the title her royal highness. Andrew and Camila Parker BS had divorced earlier on 3rd March 1995 in a brief family division hearing on grounds of irretrievable breakdown.
Three of the four people in the original arrangement of the 1970s were now legally unattached. The fourth was a year away from a tunnel in Paris. Just after midnight on 31st August 1997, a black Mercedes-Benz S280 carrying Diana Princess of Wales, her companion Dodie Fed, the driver Henri Paul, and the bodyguard Trevor Ree Jones entered the Pond Lama underpass on the right bank of the Sen.
The vehicle struck the 13th pillar at high speed. Henry Paul and Dodie Feed were pronounced dead at the scene. Trevor Reese Jones, severely injured, was the only person in the car who survived. Diana was extracted from the wreckage and transported to the PTA Salpetriè hospital. She was pronounced dead at 4 in the morning Paris time.
She was 36 years old. The reaction in Britain reorganized the politics of the monarchy. The queen in Balmoral with the young princes William and Harry was criticized by the press and the public for the initial absence of any flag at halfmast at Buckingham Palace and for what was perceived as a delayed return to London.
The Prince of Wales flew to Paris on the morning of the 31st to accompany Diana’s body home. The funeral on 6th of September at Westminster Abbey drew a public mourning in central London on a scale unseen in modern British history. Camila Parker BS in the months that followed withdrew almost entirely from public view.
The strategic advice she received at the time from Charles’s then press secretary Mark Balland was that she had to disappear from the public narrative while the country grieved. She did. There were no photographs. There were no statements. The relationship continued but in private at Highgroveve and at her house at Raymill in Wiltshire which she had purchased after the divorce as a refuge separate from the prince’s establishment.
The rehabilitation project when it began in 1998 and 1999 was the long deliberate carefully calibrated campaign of public reintroduction that Baland would conduct over the next several years. It is one of the most studied royal public relations exercises of the modern era. The strategy proceeded in graduated stages.
A first joint appearance in January 1999 at the 50th birthday party of Camila’s sister at the Ritz Hotel. The first photograph of Camila and Charles together walking out of the Ritz at the end of the evening was published the following morning in every British paper. A first social engagement with William and Harry.
The following year, a first state occasion appearance in 2001. The pace was slow. The choreography was exact. By 2003, the British public in the polls had returned a slight majority in favor of Charles, eventually being permitted to marry her. In 2002, the general senate of the church of England had relaxed the prohibition on remarage in church of divorced persons whose former spouses were still living, but only at the discretion of the bishop.
Andrew Parker BS was alive. The Anglican wedding option for Charles and Camila remained constitutionally and ecclesiastically complicated. The solution settled on by the palace after extensive consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Lord Chancellor’s office was a civil ceremony at Windsor followed by a religious blessing in St.
George’s Chapel. The engagement was announced on 10th of February, 2005. The ceremony was scheduled for 8th of April. The date had to be moved by 24 hours when Pope John Paul II died on 2nd April and Charles as a senior representative of the British crown was required to attend the funeral in Rome. On the morning of 94 on 9th April 2005, Camila Parker BS in a pale gold dress and matching feathered hat by Philip Tricy entered Windsor Guild Hall for the civil ceremony.
She walked in as Camila Parker BS. She left by marriage and under common law as the wife of the heir to the throne and therefore legally as princess of Wales. The title was hers automatically. She did not, however, use it. The decision agreed across the family in advance was that she would be styled instead as her royal highness, the Duchess of Cornwall.
The Princess of Wales title remained in the popular memory of the country the title of the woman buried in the lake at Althorp. The new wife of the prince did not take it on in public and the choice was understood in the palace’s careful framing as an act of respect. The religious blessing followed at St. George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle.
The queen, who had not attended the civil ceremony, hosted the reception afterward at the state apartments. Her brief speech to the assembled guests has been quoted in several biographies. Drawing on the Grand National Horse Race run that afternoon, she remarked that she had two announcements to make. The horse she had backed had won.
So had her son. The marriage that had been refused 34 years earlier was at long last the marriage that existed. On 5th of February 2022, in a written message to the nation marking the 70th anniversary of her accession, Queen Elizabeth II addressed in a few measured sentences, a question the country had been holding for 17 years.
It was her sincere wish, she wrote that when the time came, Camila would be known as Queen Consort as Charles continues his own service. The phrasing was deliberate. It was the first time the reigning monarch had publicly endorsed for her daughter-in-law a title and a public role the institution had spent half a century withholding.
Elizabeth II died at Balmoral on 8th September 2022 at the age of 96. Charles who had been the longest serving heir apparent in British history became King Charles III. Camila by virtue of the marriage of 2005 and the explicit blessing of the late queen became queen consort. She was 75 years old. The coronation took place at Westminster Abbey on Saturday 6th May 2023.
It was the first British coronation in 70 years. From the day of the ceremony forward, official and public usage moved decisively to King Charles III and Queen Camila. The qualifier consort fell away in most everyday reference in line with the long historical convention by which the wives of reigning kings have been called simply queen.
The crown placed on Camila’s head was Queen Mary’s crown originally made for the consort of King George V’s in 1911. It had not been used at a coronation since. The decision to reuse an existing crown rather than commission a new one was the first such choice in recent royal history. and was characterized by the palace as a gesture toward sustainability and continuity.
The crown was modified for the occasion to include Cullinin III, Cullinin the four and Cullin and fave diamonds drawn from the largest gem quality rough diamond ever found. The Cullinin diamond presented to King Edward 7th in 1907. The choice to use Queen Mary’s crown also avoided by design any need to bring forward the crown made for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother which contains the Coenor diamond and which had become a source of significant diplomatic and historical contestation in the years before the coronation. The ceremony itself returned
to forms that had not been seen at a British coronation in living memory. Camila was anointed and crowned in the same ceremony in which Charles was anointed and crowned. She wore a robe of estate embroidered with the names of her grandchildren and Charles’s. Her son Tom Parker BS was present in the abbey as was her daughter Laura Lopes.
So were the prince and princess of Wales. William and Catherine so was Prince Harry who traveled from California without his wife and flew back the same evening. The coronation by every contemporary assessment was the formal end of the half ccentury process that the introductions of 1970 had set in motion.
The woman whom the advisers of an earlier generation had quietly judged unsuitable for the role of princess of Wales was placed under the crown of the queen’s consort of England in the same church where Anne Bolin and Catherine of Aragan had been crowned before her by the Archbishop of Canterbury. She has not sought and does not have the public adoration that attached to Diana.
Recent polling places her approval rating somewhere short of the Princess of Wales of the Next Generation and well above any approval rating she registered before 2005. She has spent the years since the coronation visiting hospices, championing the cause of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault and maintaining the regimen of public engagement that is the principal duty of a modern queen.
The legacy is in part the institution she now embodies. The expectations that excluded her in the early 1970s. the requirement of youth, the requirement of a public life without complication, the requirement of an unblenmished biography, no longer govern the marriages of senior British royals, and have not done so since the day she walked into Windsor Guild Hall.
Her marriage, simply by being permitted, closed the era in which the British crown could publicly demand of a future queen the kind of life history the crown had once required. The polo grounds at Smith’s Lawn and Windsor Great Park are still in use. The household cavalry still gather there on summer weekends. From the spectators lawn, it is possible to see across the trees of the great park, the towers of Windsor Castle, where Camila and Charles were married in 2005, and where the state apartments now serve as one of their working
residences. The distance between the polo ground and the castle is just under 2 m. It took 53 years to close.
