Along with the shared silliness went a mutual delight in country pursuits. Charles and Camilla were both devotees of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – seldom happier than when decked out in their Barbours, tweeds and welly boots. Thanks to her father, Camilla could ride to hounds as well as the prince, and by the summer and autumn of 1972 the couple were wrapped up in a roaring affair.
‘She was affectionate, she was unassuming,’ wrote Jonathan Dimbleby, recording and reporting Charles’s feelings for this new girlfriend, ‘and – with all the intensity of first love – he lost his heart to her almost at once.’
Lord Mountbatten encouraged the romance. He entertained the couple frequently at discreet weekends at Broadlands, his estate in Hampshire. In 1971–2 Charles was starting his naval career at Portsmouth, just half an hour to the south, and Camilla was precisely the companion Uncle Dickie had in mind to keep Charles busy until young Amanda came of age.
But by the late autumn of 1972 Charles was starting to appreciate Camilla Shand as rather more than Uncle Dickie’s temporary ‘wild oats’. The prince was coming to feel so at ease in Camilla’s company that he dared to hope she could one day be his lifelong ‘friend and companion to love and to cherish’. And ‘to his delight’ (Jonathan Dimbleby again) she was sending back the message that ‘these feelings were reciprocated’.
Naval duties, however, stood in the way. Charles’s frigate HMS Minerva was due to set sail for the Caribbean early in the new year – and was not going to return until the following autumn. On the weekend of 9–10 December, the prince took Camilla and Mountbatten down to Portsmouth for a guided tour of the vessel, then lunch, and the next weekend he was back at Broadlands with Camilla – ‘the last time,’ he wrote sadly to Mountbatten, ‘I shall see her for eight months’.
Thirty-five years later the prince revealed that weekend in December 1972 as the moment when he first realised for sure that he wanted to marry Camilla – that she was his life’s soulmate. But he did not have the courage to tell her properly or strongly enough.
‘Charles declared his love,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth in 2005, ‘but not his hand. He whispered sweet nothings, but said nothing of substance. He made no commitment and he asked for none.’
Just twenty-four years old in November 1972, Charles felt too young to get involved in the whole complicated process of engagement and marriage as heir to the British throne. In the most banal sense, the prospect would have meant too many practical details to be fitted in before Minerva set sail – starting with an approach to his parents with whom he had not begun to broach his feelings. They would undoubtedly have raised some questions, since their views about Camilla’s suitability were not that different from Uncle Dickie’s. She was a nice horsey woman and excellent girlfriend material – but she was not an obvious future queen, especially since there was no need to hurry. So Charles did not hurry either.
‘Sometimes,’ as Gyles Brandreth shrewdly put it, ‘the actions we do not take are indeed more significant than those we do.’
Camilla herself was not really surprised – nor greatly cast down. For half a dozen years she had been busily engaged in a colourful on-and-off relationship with Captain Andrew Parker Bowles, a handsome and eligible officer in the Household Cavalry, and a highly desirable catch in his own right, both in terms of his personal charm and his own royal connections. In 1953, aged thirteen, Andrew had been a pageboy, dressed in silk and satin, at the Queen’s coronation, and his father Derek, High Sheriff of Berkshire, was a member of the Queen Mother’s horse-racing and social circle.
The on-and-off aspect of their romance reflected Parker Bowles’s foreign assignments – he had served in Germany, Cyprus and Ulster, as well as a spell in New Zealand. But the principal ‘off’ factor was his appalling infidelity. Major ‘Poker’ Bowles, as he was known in the regiment, was irresistible to other women, and he wasted little energy in denying their temptations.
From time to time, Camilla struck back – and this was one explanation of her direct approach to Charles in the spring of 1972. Andrew had been enjoying a fling with the still unmarried Princess Anne in the early months of that year – and it was soon after this that Camilla made her bid for Charles. Her approach to the prince was a lowly matter of tit for tat.
‘She was determined to show [Andrew],’ recalled one of the polo community, ‘that she could do as well in the royal pulling stakes as he had done.’
By early 1973, however, both Andrew and Camilla had disentangled themselves from their royal relationships. They had been dating in their on-off way for nearly seven years, and Camilla’s father was losing patience. The major had been amused by his daughter’s relationship with Charles but, like Camilla herself, he did not believe it could possibly lead to a top-level royal marriage. So this was the moment, with the prince on the other side of the world. According to John Bowes-Lyon (Andrew’s cousin), in March 1973 Camilla’s family decided to force Andrew’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in The Times.
Andrew Parker Bowles allowed himself to be trapped with good grace – the game was up. Aged thirty-three, it was a good time for him to settle down – and Camilla, coming up to twenty-six in July, had had enough of being always a bridesmaid never the bride. So on 4 July that year the Shand and Parker Bowles clans came together in the elegant surroundings of the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks with dress uniforms and three senior members of the royal family – Princess Anne, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. It was
