After the freedom of flying, Dartmouth Royal Naval College, where he started in September 1971, was like going back to boarding school all over again, and he hated it. He did an intensive ‘fast stream’ six-week course, again half the length of the normal course. Yet when he graduated, top in navigation and seamanship, neither of his parents came to the ceremony. The only member of the family who showed was his beloved great-uncle, Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the man who had been Supreme Commander in South East Asia during the Second World War, the last Viceroy and first Governor-General of India, First Sea Lord and finally Chief of the Defence Staff. Mountbatten was the man Charles called his honorary grandfather. He had been devoted to him since he was a small child. Realising at the last minute that no one else would be there to watch the graduation, Mountbatten flew down to Devon from his home in Hampshire in a helicopter for the occasion. Weeks later, Charles flew out to Gibraltar to join his first ship, the destroyer HMS Norfolk.
Charles was with Norfolk for nine months, some of which was spent on shore-based training courses in Portsmouth. Mountbatten’s home, Broadlands, was less than half an hour’s drive away and so Charles was a frequent visitor, and this was the time when the two men became especially close. Mountbatten had realised some years earlier that Charles was adrift; his relationship with his parents left a lot to be desired and he needed confidence and guidance in his future role. It was Mountbatten who told him, in regard to women, that it was important ‘in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for … I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.’
In the late autumn of 1972, Andrew Parker Bowles was away with his regiment and Charles was on dry land for long enough to hook up with Camilla. They saw one another whenever the opportunity presented itself. This was quite often at Smith’s Lawn, the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park, where both Charles and Andrew played, for a time in the same team. Camilla had been a regular sight at polo matches for years, watching Andrew and his friends play – and the father of one of her friends was chairman of the club. So she could go and watch Charles play without arousing particular attention. The Prince had not taken up polo until the age of sixteen, but he became a fanatical player, raising vast sums of money for charity in the process. The Duke of Edinburgh was president of the club and a very able player, as was Lord Mountbatten, who had written the definitive book on the sport. Both had been very keen that Charles should play.
By this time, Andrew was serving in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday massacre – a seminal event in which the British army, at the height of the Troubles, fired on unarmed civilians engaged in a peaceful protest and killed twenty-six of them. After Ulster he was posted to Cyprus, so for most of 1972, Charles had Camilla to himself, and the two of them spent very happy times together, quite often at Broadlands, which was a safe place away from the prying eyes of the press. But while Mountbatten was only too happy to play host to the pair, he made it abundantly clear that this relationship could never go anywhere in the long term. Camilla was not sufficiently aristocratic to be the Prince’s wife, and she was not a virgin, which was a prerequisite.
The Prince was falling ever more deeply in love, and although far too reticent to say anything to Camilla was beginning to feel that, despite Mountbatten’s admonitions, he might have found someone he could share his life with. The only cloud on his horizon was that in the New Year he was due to leave for the Caribbean in the frigate HMS Minerva, which would take him away for at least eight months. He joined the ship three weeks before Christmas – and invited Mountbatten and Camilla both for a tour of inspection and lunch.
They were at Broadlands the weekend before he sailed, but he said nothing to indicate his strength of feeling, which was maybe just as well for his pride because Camilla may not have known how to respond. She was hugely fond of Charles, flattered by his attention, and they had had a very good time together, but she was in love with Andrew. To her fury, Andrew was also seeing Princess Anne, Charles’s feisty younger sister. He had never been known to date just one girl at a time, but he seemed to be unusually smitten, and rumour had it that so was Anne. During their time together he was even invited by the Queen to join the family at Windsor Castle for Ascot week. So there was an element of tit-for-tat in Camilla’s fling with Charles. She also enjoyed the historical connections – their great-grandparents’ affair – which had always intrigued her. But her principal motivation was to have some excitement and make Andrew jealous. She knew it would never go anywhere, could never go anywhere.
Might she have felt differently if Charles had told her how special she was, how beautiful and funny, how warm, how sexy? If he had told her that he loved her above all things, that he couldn’t live without her and that he would find some way of marrying her? It is impossible to know; not even those who know her best are convinced she would have said yes to him. Andrew was never very nice to her, never made her feel special, but she was stubbornly determined to marry him. His playing around had hurt her to the core, but her heart was still set on him. The fact that every other woman in London fancied him only made him more attractive to her. She adored him, and she had been dating him through thick and thin for seven years. She wanted to be Mrs Parker Bowles, wife of her handsome cavalry officer, not Princess of Wales, not Queen.
Andrew knew that his relationship with Princess Anne could never end in marriage. However much in love they may have been, he was a Roman Catholic and the 1701 Act of Succession – not changed until 2011 – expressly forbade an heir to the throne to marry a Roman Catholic. Princess Anne at that time was fourth in line and was not about to cause a constitutional crisis. She turned her attentions to a younger model, to Mark Phillips, a captain in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, and a three-day eventer who had just won a gold medal at the Montreal Olympics in 1972. Anne was herself a talented three-day eventer – she had won a gold medal at the European Eventing Championships the year before and been voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1971 – and they had met on the eventing circuit. Theirs was a marriage made in the saddle, though apart from horses they had little common ground.
For a moment, Andrew must have thought he was about to lose both women. And so in March 1973, when Charles was thousands of miles away in the West Indies, Andrew asked Camilla to marry him and she agreed. She wrote to Charles herself to tell him. It broke his heart. He fired off anguished letters to his nearest and dearest. He has always been a prolific letter-writer. It seemed to him particularly cruel, he wrote in one letter, that after ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ fate had decreed that it should last a mere six months. He now had ‘no one’ to go back to in England. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’ He did have one last-ditch attempt to get Camilla to change her mind, however. He wrote to her the week before the wedding asking her not to marry Andrew. Nevertheless, the wedding went ahead. Her mother, Rosalind, was not entirely happy about it – she didn’t think Andrew treated her daughter very well – but Camilla was determined. She foolishly believed that leopards can change their spots.
3
Camilla was the eldest child in the family. She was born with exceptional confidence, and it was that confidence, plus the support