Camilla couldn’t have cared less. But what made everyone at Colefax and Fowler laugh was that she was living at Claridges, hardly a minute’s walk away. Her grandmother, Sonia, a very wealthy woman, permanently kept a suite in the luxurious hotel and Camilla had been drying her hair in the window and fallen asleep.
By then, her grandfather was dead and the family fortune had gone to Henry Cubitt, Camilla’s uncle and godfather, known as ‘Mad Harry’, the 4th Baron Ashcombe. He also inherited Denbies. When Rolie died in 1962, the Cubitts were the largest landowners in London after the Westminsters and Cadogans. They owned the whole of Pimlico; there were also vast estates in the South of France and Canada, but Harry was an alcoholic and virtually lost the lot. He moved in glitzier circles than his sister and in the good times had a house in Barbados, where Camilla went for some sunshine in the winter of 1971, taking her friend Virginia Carington with her. Harry was forty-seven and divorced; Virginia was twenty-five and fell for his charms. To everyone’s surprise, they married in 1973, but were divorced in 1979. Virginia now works at Clarence House running Charles and Camilla’s private diaries.
Harry finally got on top of his addiction and was married a third time to another, much younger, woman, Elizabeth Dent-Brocklehurst, the Kentucky-born widow of his friend Mark. Mark Dent-Brocklehurst had died seven years earlier at the age of forty, leaving her two small children, Henry and Mollie; Sudeley Castle, a large 1,000-year-old property in Gloucestershire; and hefty death duties to be paid. Harry, who had never had any children himself, sold his own house, moved into Sudeley and spent the rest of his life helping to restore the castle, where Henry VIII’s widow Katherine Parr died, and turn it into a tourist attraction while working with addiction charities. He died in 2013.
8
Camilla married Major Andrew Parker Bowles on 4 July 1973, shortly before her twenty-sixth birthday. The summer had been cooler than usual but 4 July was one of the hottest days of the month, with temperatures reaching 27 degrees Celsius. The big, lavish society wedding, with a guard of honour and trumpeters, was held at the Guards Chapel, where her parents had been married, and afterwards at St James’s Palace. The guest list included the most illustrious names in the country, amongst them Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret – the Queen’s sister – and Princess Anne. Camilla looked glorious in a traditional long white dress, with a ten-foot train, by Bellville Sassoon, one of her favourite designers. Many of the evening dresses that had passed between her and Lucia Santa Cruz at Stack House were by Bellville Sassoon. Her bridesmaids wore mini-versions of the bridal gown, while the page boys were in nineteenth-century Blues uniforms. The groom wore a morning suit. He had had a punishing stag party at White’s a few nights earlier, which resulted in so much breakage the club couldn’t serve lunch the following day.
Camilla and her family had dined and spent the night before the wedding at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. And it was from there that she and her father made their way to the chapel the next morning. Bruce was fond of Andrew and made him a director of his wine business, but Rosalind had her reservations. She thought him a snob – he enjoyed his association with the Royal Family a little too much for her taste, and his friends all seemed to have double-barrelled names or titles or baronetcies somewhere in the family. Rosalind was no great lover of royalty – the tales she’d heard from her mother about her own childhood with Alice Keppel and the King were enough to put her off all things upper class and royal for life.
The Prince of Wales was invited to the wedding but didn’t come. He was still in the Caribbean and that day he had a commitment in Nassau, representing the Queen at celebrations marking the end of British rule in the Bahamas. He denied it, but it has long been assumed that he stayed away because he couldn’t bear to watch the person he loved walk down the aisle with someone else.
In the summer of 1973, Camilla’s heart belonged to Andrew, the man so many women had wanted but whom she had successfully bagged. She thought he was everything she looked for in a man and he would give her everything she had dreamed of. He was thirty-three, an alpha male, sophisticated and experienced. She liked the fact that he was a cavalry officer, as her father had been, and that like her father he was brave. He hadn’t fought Rommel’s tanks, but in 1969 she’d watched him ride in the 129th Grand National, on a horse called The Fossa. It is one of the most dangerous and challenging races over jumps in the world, and out of a field of thirty that year, only fourteen finished. He was eleventh. By comparison, Charles at twenty-four was still a work in progress and would never match Andrew’s confidence or his masculinity. It is no surprise that at the time she found him the more appealing.
The newlyweds left for the South of France that afternoon and by way of a short honeymoon spent several idyllic days at Cap d’Ail, staying at La Capponcina, a villa owned by Andrew’s uncle, Sir Max Aitken, chairman of Beaverbook newspapers. Afterwards they settled down to married life and a routine of weekdays mostly apart, with Andrew in London, and weekends normally together. Their first house, which they rented for a year while Camilla hunted for something suitable to buy, was near Newbury in Berkshire, not far from Andrew’s parents who had recently downsized to White Oak House at Highclere.
After seven years of courtship, Camilla knew the whole family well. She was particularly fond of Andrew’s father, Derek Parker Bowles, a former soldier with the Royal Horse Guards, a landowner, Justice of the Peace and High Sheriff of Berkshire. Derek was great-grandson of the 6th Earl of Macclesfield, and a thoroughly likeable man, charm personified. The same could not be said of his wife. Dame Ann was Commissioner of the Commonwealth Girl Guides Association, and was nicknamed ‘Rhino’, for obvious reasons; she kept Pekingese dogs, and in the early Seventies, Camilla had a relative of one of them called Chang that she loved dearly. Dame Ann was the daughter of the millionaire racehorse owner Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 4th Baronet, and descended from an old English Roman Catholic family. She was a difficult woman who displayed no great love for her eldest son. Andrew nevertheless inherited from her side of the family his passion for horse racing, which has been a lifelong fascination, as a jockey, breeder and spectator – and he took her religion.
Donnington Castle House, where Andrew grew up and the family were living when Camilla first knew him, was an imposing seventeenth-century brick house with a beautiful garden, built as the lodge to a now-ruined fourteenth-century castle. Newbury racecourse was on the doorstep, with more racing at Ascot, polo at Windsor, Goodwood and Cowdray Park, and rowing at Henley – all the traditional upper-class sporting playgrounds an easy distance away – as well as local pheasant shoots. At weekends, the house was invariably filled with Parker Bowles children and their friends, and great fun was always had by all. Derek was a brilliant cook and had two kitchens, one for himself to use and the other for the