‘You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?’
This extraordinary tale puts the mayor of Chippenham to shame, and many of the prince’s biographers have questioned its reliability. Charles himself, via his semi-official biographer Dimbleby, is quite clear that although he did meet Camilla at the polo from time to time, he first met her properly in London, through his former girlfriend Lucia Santa Cruz, the Chilean research assistant of Lord Butler, who was the master of Trinity, Charles’s college at Cambridge.
Before he became master of Cambridge’s largest and poshest college, Richard Austen Butler, universally known after his initials as ‘Rab’, was a Tory grandee who had occupied numerous Cabinet ranks. But for all his record of public achievement, Rab’s fondest private boast was how he had used the Trinity Master’s Lodge to facilitate the liaison by which a ‘young South American had instructed an innocent Prince in the consummation of physical love’. In 1978 Butler indiscreetly told the author Anthony Holden, who was writing a semi-authorised biography of Prince Charles, that he had ‘slipped’ Lucia Santa Cruz a key to the Master’s Lodge, after Charles had asked if the young lady could stay there with him ‘for privacy’.
When Holden’s book was published in 1979, Buckingham Palace indignantly denied Rab’s suggestion that Lucia had initiated Charles into the delights of the sexual dimension.
‘Most of what Rab Butler says is preposterous,’ complained the prince himself, fiercely denying that Butler was any sort of ‘mentor’, ‘guru’ or ‘éminence grise’ to him.
But Butler’s wife Mollie stood by her husband’s claim in quite explicit terms. Lucia, she wrote in her own 1992 memoir, was a ‘happy example of someone on whom [Charles] could safely cut his teeth, if I may put it thus’.
Sometime in the spring of 1972, Santa Cruz, who had remained friendly with Charles after Trinity, invited him round for a drink at her Cundy Street flat in Victoria, at the back of Buckingham Palace, saying that she had found ‘just the girl’ for the prince. Camilla lived in the same block and Gyles Brandreth, a friend of Charles and a chronicler of the couple’s love affair, favours this version.
By contrast, however, another chronicler, Caroline Graham, sets the meeting on the polo field, quoting an onlooker as saying that Camilla ‘saw the Prince standing alone on the other side of the field. Cool as you like, she walked across and started talking to him.’
So which account is true? We should probably accept the less exciting Santa Cruz-Cundy Street version as the historical truth of the couple’s first meeting, since that is how the prince himself remembers it.
But when it comes to the tale of the polo field and the ‘mistress of your great-great-grandfather’ introduction, that surely expresses the more important emotional truth – that Camilla Shand embodied all the emotional freedom and sense of fun for which the dutiful Prince Charles had been yearning. With the benefit of hindsight, we can certainly cite those personal qualities as the reason why, nearly fifty years later, Charles and Camilla are living their lives together solidly as man and wife.
The fact that such a marriage between a future king and a non-royal divorcee is accepted today, but would have seemed outlandish thirty years ago – not to say improper and impossible – is another example of the social prejudices that confronted Prince Charles as he faced up to the challenge of choosing his partner for life in the mid-1970s.
The newspapers of the time were perfectly candid as they discussed the requirements for his future queen – and they were also perfectly candid that, as tribunes of the people, they had the right to lay down the rules. The candidate should preferably be royal (which meant foreign, exotic and newsworthy) or, failing that, noble – and she should definitely be a virgin, the v-word being deployed unashamedly in the age of free love as if during the reign of the first Elizabeth.
Camilla was none of these things. She had cast off her virginity long before, and she was neither royal nor noble, though she unquestionably came from respectable upper-middle-class ‘county’ stock. Her father, Major Bruce Shand, was a master of foxhounds who was a friend of the Queen Mother. Her mother Rosalind – the money in the family – descended from the Cubitts who had built Belgravia and the smartest swathes of central London. Camilla was not that young – she was two years older than Charles – and, to go back to the v-word, she was quite well known in society circles for being ‘a bit of a goer’.
But Ms Shand herself had the sharpness to see all these drawbacks, and she had the enticing honesty to go for the next best thing. She liked the prospect of some fun with Prince Charles for his own sake. She did not want to collar him just so that she could marry a future king – and that is fundamentally why, of course, she has ended up married to him.
The Goons played a big part in all this. Early in their friendship Charles and Camilla discovered that they shared a fondness for the silly accents and daft looks of The Goon Show – BBC radio’s classic comedy of the absurd, the Home Service predecessor to and, indeed, the original inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The couple rapidly registered their mutual affection by bestowing Goon nicknames upon each other, ‘Fred’ and ‘Gladys’ – which, say friends, Charles and Camilla cheerfully call each other to this day.
‘Your spirits rise whenever Camilla comes into a room,’ recalled Charles’s polo-playing companion, Lord Patrick Beresford. ‘You can tell from her eyes and the smile on her face that you are going to have a bloody good laugh.’
‘They have a terrific sense of humour,’ says another friend, author Jilly Cooper. ‘They laugh together
