Did you know that Charles and Camilla’s story goes back a very long time? Yes, long before marrying Princess Diana for one, and Andrew Parker Bowles for the other, they fell in love as soon as they met during a polo match organized at Windsor Park in 1970.
According to the legend reported by People, the one who still answered to the name of Camilla Shand had made a strong impression on the prince by saying to him: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather. I feel like we have something in common. »
35 years of winds and tides
Unfortunately, this idyll ended the following year, Charles having then left to serve in the Royal Navy far from the British coast and the Queen not seeing with a very good eye the heir to the throne falling in love with a woman of a year his senior. At that time, it was not done and even less a woman who had already “lived a little”.
Camilla got closer to Andrew Parker Bowles with whom she had had a first relationship a few years before and they married in 1973. The links between Charles and Camilla had not however been distended. Is it worth pointing out that marrying a divorcee was not better seen in the late 1970s? Especially since it brought back (very) bad memories for the crown: the abdication of Edward VIII to marry the divorced American Wallis Simpson… Diana Spencer, a 16-year-old girl who had not yet discovered the world, was the queen’s choice for her son, who complied with protocol.
A marriage, in 1981, which gave two happinesses to Buckingham, princes William and Harry, but also a great misfortune. Lady Diana eventually discovered they were “three in this marriage” and exposed their extramarital affair, resulting in a monumental scandal and two divorces. Camilla ended her marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles in 1995, a year before Charles and Diana’s marriage was finalized.
It will be necessary to wait until 1999, two years after the disappearance of the mother of princes William and Harry in a car accident, for Charles and Camilla to make their first official appearance. Patience was also required for Camilla to be accepted within the royal family, in particular by William and Harry, and especially by the British people, who had a hard time forgiving the betrayal towards their princess of the heart. But is it really a betrayal when a love lasts for so many years, against all odds, starting with the weight of protocol, conventions, and an entire people?
In 2005, Charles and Camilla finally got married, cementing a love born 35 years earlier.