![]() Was she not royal enough? Was he not entirely sure? Was it all becoming too public? “They were ideally suited, we know that now, but it wasn’t possible,” said Charles’s cousin Patricia Knatchbull.Ĭamilla was certainly not on any list of eligible spouses as Charles searched excruciatingly publicly for a bride. Photograph: PAīut somehow Charles hesitated. They had a covert relationship, occasionally snapped by the press during furtive trysts at polo matches.Ĭamilla and Charles leaving the New London Theatre in Drury Lane in 1975. They shared common interests and he was apparently smitten. She was fired from one job for coming in late after a party, working for the fashionable decorating firm of Sibyl, Colefax and Fowler in Mayfair as a receptionist.Ī debutante in 1965, she became one of the group of affluent young women moving in similar social circles to Charles, who was 18 months her junior. She had a private education – one O-level, no university – and went to a Swiss finishing school, rounding off with a French course in Paris. In the words of the royal biographer Gyles Brandreth: “The Shands without question belonged to the upper class, had position … they opened their garden for the local Conservative Party Association summer fete. One of her maternal great-grandparents was Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress.Ĭamilla and her younger brother and sister grew up in East Sussex and central London, the children of privilege and affluence. Her mother, Rosalind, was the daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe and her father, Bruce, was a former major who had become an upmarket wine merchant after leaving the army. Not that Camilla Rosemary Shand, as she was born, is particularly common. Had royal attitudes evolved earlier 50 years ago, when Charles first courted her, and accepted the possibility of the heir to the throne marrying a commoner instead of a princess or a member of the aristocracy – as his son William was eventually able to do – then things might have been a lot less troubled for the royal family.
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