Bolland’s attraction for Charles was unsurprising. The prince was animated by new personalities, especially a self-confident, streetwise soothsayer. For his part, Bolland offered loyalty and true friendship, especially to Camilla. She quickly passed on one observation she had learned early about her partner’s limitations. ‘Never push Charles too hard,’ she advised. ‘Always remember his terrible childhood, and how he was bullied at school and by his parents.’
Bolland understood his terms of employment, but first he had to assess the people close to the prince. He was struck by the extent to which Charles disliked critical advice and surrounded himself with sycophants. Chief among them was Michael Fawcett, the son of an accountant from Orpington. Officially, Fawcett was Charles’s principal valet, but in reality he was his closest aide and most trusted comforter. Known as ‘the Fixer’ and ‘the Enabler’, he seemed omnipresent, loading Charles’s guns at Sandringham, wrapping his Christmas presents and caring for Camilla. An indispensable perfectionist, he smoothed his master’s existence. Unseen by outsiders, he also dominated a mendacious war zone competing against Paul Burrell, his opposite number in Diana’s court. Employed initially at Buckingham Palace in 1976, the nominal butler Burrell had next worked for Charles and Diana at Highgrove, and after the separation moved with Diana to Kensington Palace. Ever since, he had become a confidential accomplice in Diana’s life, witnessing her extreme moods and secret affairs.
Of the two, Michael Fawcett’s position was the more uncertain, because Richard Aylard was plotting his removal. Bolland took a different view. ‘Fawcett is a good and decent man,’ he concluded after a short time, opting to conceal his antagonism towards Aylard, who he recognised was under threat.
‘I know why you’re here,’ said Sandy Henney, the deputy press officer at St James’s Palace, on the day Bolland was formally appointed, 12 May 1996. ‘It’s to make Camilla Parker Bowles acceptable.’ Bolland smiled. He had agreed with Charles that this often unkempt, horsey countrywoman should be transformed into the prince’s future wife, dressed by the best couturiers.
The impetus for Charles’s instructions to Bolland often followed an agitated telephone conversation with Camilla. ‘You know, Mark,’ Charles would say, in what became a familiar routine, ‘I think people should be told about …’ The public should be aware, he complained, of his family’s demand that he abandon Camilla. The pressure on him, he continued, was unrelenting. On one occasion he read out a letter from his father urging him not to marry Camilla; Bolland was told to leak its contents, and Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, so often the royals’ first port of call, was duly briefed. Bolland also briefed the Daily Telegraph that after his divorce Charles would remain celibate, and would never see Camilla again.
Disseminating that canard served several purposes. In their eagerness to stay close to Charles, few of his old circle welcomed Camilla’s proximity to the throne. Soon after Bolland’s appointment, Nicholas Soames, Berkshire landowner Gerald Ward, the Palmer-Tomkinsons and Charles’s other close friends visited him at St James’s Palace to ask about Charles’s relations both with other members of the royal family and with Camilla. The ‘three in the marriage’ scenario painted by Diana, they said, was not the whole story. There had always been other women in Charles’s life, including Eva O’Neill, a statuesque German blonde, and of course the Australian Dale ‘Kanga’ Tryon, whom he would visit as he drove between London and Gloucestershire (on which occasions Kanga’s husband conveniently made himself scarce). Charles, they said, was unlikely to marry Camilla.
Bolland was not yet in a position to judge his employer’s intentions. He quickly saw that Camilla, like so many hunting women, was fun and fearless. Her romantic adventures as a teenager were no secret, nor was her unusual relationship with her husband Andrew. The husky captain in the Royal Horse Guards, ‘the Blues’, was famous for his affairs, and so had been unconcerned about Camilla’s first meeting Charles in the early 1970s, before their marriage. In Andrew and Camilla’s banter – she was prone to exaggeration – she had laughed about the prince being an emotionally immature boy suitable for a fun fling until, seven years into her relationship with Parker Bowles, she persuaded the captain to propose to her.
Their engagement was presented by Charles, through Jonathan Dimbleby, as the missed opportunity of his life. At the time he was serving as a Royal Navy officer in the Caribbean. Ignoring the reality that Camilla neither loved him nor was interested in marriage other than to Parker Bowles, he lamented not having proposed before his rival. ‘The surge of raw feelings,’ wrote Dimbleby, ‘reduced him to tears of impotence and regret, the more severe because he was lonely and so far from home.’ (Twenty-three years later, Camilla’s biographer would claim that Charles had written to her one week before her wedding, urging her not to marry – but no letter has been produced.)
From the outset, the Parker Bowles’s marriage was unusual. Army officers expected their wives to play their part in regimental life, tolerate regular relocations of home, and maintain appropriate standards in dress and housekeeping. Among her husband’s fellow officers, Camilla was known to avoid all that, not least because, as he admitted to his friends, ‘she’s bone idle’. Andrew Parker Bowles circumnavigated their untidy country home by living in London during the week.
‘Camilla was unhappy,’ observed a friend, ‘because Andrew was always putting her down.’ Sensing her disdain for army life, Parker Bowles avoided any permanent relocations abroad, not least because he was conducting successive affairs in London. By 1979, after he had been posted to Rhodesia as the last military liaison officer before independence, Camilla started seeing Charles. Few were shocked. Her family was known for adultery, desertion and divorce, and Parker Bowles made no protest. On the contrary, he preferred a bachelor’s life in Rhodesia while his wife enjoyed Wiltshire – and Wales. For Charles, Camilla was a relief after Amanda Knatchbull, Earl Mountbatten’s granddaughter, had rejected his proposal of marriage.
At the time, Mrs Parker Bowles was the perfect match for Charles. Sexually experienced, she was content to accommodate herself to his demands and his schedule – polo, shooting, fishing and his royal duties. Most of all, she showed genuine interest in everything he said. Her husband only became aware how far the relationship had progressed when in 1980 he invited his wife to Salisbury, Rhodesia’s capital. One week later, she welcomed Charles as the queen’s representative at the country’s independence ceremonies. While Parker Bowles spent most days in a helicopter in the company of an attractive American woman photographer (and was also beginning an affair with Charlotte Hambro, the married sister of Nicholas Soames), gossip columnists hinted that Camilla was the perfect escort for Charles. Typical of the risqué nature of their social set, Charlotte’s husband Richard was the brother of Rupert Hambro, Camilla’s first serious boyfriend. Tactful understanding precluded anyone frowning over Andrew’s behaviour. ‘Always one of the lads, but not a lad himself,’ said a fellow officer with a smile. Parker Bowles, promoted to major, may have resented the suggestion that Charles and Camilla had flown out to Rhodesia together and had isolated themselves in Charles’s private quarters on the plane, amid sniggers that they were joining the mile-high club, but generally her affair was acceptable so long as it remained discreet.
Charles broke that rule after all three had returned from Africa and met again at the annual Cirencester Ball. Parker Bowles watched the prince kiss Camilla passionately while dancing with her. ‘HRH is very fond of my wife,’ he told friends flatly, ‘and she appears very fond of him.’ Parker Bowles’s circle assumed that he was thrilled that Charles was in love with his wife. Their marriage could continue so long as the façade did not jeopardise his good relations with the queen, and especially the queen mother. Invitations from Buckingham Palace for shooting and fishing holidays, and hospitality at Ascot and Cheltenham, were invaluable. Nor was he perturbed when in 1980 Charles bought Highgrove, near Parker Bowles’s family home in Gloucestershire. For their part, Charles and Camilla felt no guilt about their affair until February 1981, when he announced his engagement to Diana.
Both Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles individually