Penny Junor - The Duchess - The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail

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 of her family, that would see her through the nightmare years. Both her parents and her two siblings would stare at one another in mystification. ‘Where did this come from?’ they would ask. Maybe it was being the first-born, maybe it was because she felt so safe in her small world, maybe it was in the genes, inherited from great-grandmother Alice Keppel, another strong and confident woman. Whatever it was, no one else in the immediate family, confident characters though they were, felt they had anything that approached Camilla’s.

As a little girl she marched happily into school without looking back. She galloped her pony, and flew over jumps without an anxious thought. She charged into the sea and laughed at the waves. She was a natural leader, the one everyone wanted as their friend; a pretty, sunny child with fair curls and a calm disposition that everyone liked. She wasn’t rebellious – she left that to her sister Annabel, eighteen months younger. Annabel was the one with all the daring ideas. If ever they hatched a scheme – once it was tying rope across the road outside the house and waiting for cars to drive into it, another time dialling random numbers on the telephone and daring one another to say ‘You’re smelly!’ to whoever answered – Camilla would be in the thick of it, but never the instigator. The two girls were different then and are different now. As they grew older, Camilla was the funnier of the two but Annabel was the one who got things done – and she is the one who has always had a career. Their little brother, Mark, was closer to Annabel in age, and he grew up to be the biggest rebel of the three. As a family they wanted for nothing. There was plenty of money, their parents were devoted to one another, and all three children had supremely secure and happy childhoods.

Major Bruce Middleton Shand and the Honourable Rosalind Maud Cubitt, as she then was, had married in 1946, the year after his liberation from a German prisoner-of-war camp where he had spent two years. Having lived for a year in London, where Camilla was born, they set up home together in the small village of Plumpton, at the foot of the South Downs, near Lewes in East Sussex, a culturally rich part of the world within easy commuting distance of London. Bruce took the train from Lewes to his office in Mayfair most mornings.

Camilla hero-worshipped her father. She adored him without qualification, and he adored her. She loved her mother too, and her mother loved her, but her bond with her father was that very special one that sometimes exists between fathers and daughters, a relationship that lasted from her birth for the remainder of his long life. Her passion for horses came from his, and his passion for books became hers. He was the one who read stories to her when she was a little girl. He was a gentle soul, never judgemental, never sharp or disagreeable, but wise and thoughtful, and funny, and always there for her.