His strength and stay: the Queen with common touch

ONE of the greatest assets that Queen Camilla has is that she has never lost the common touch

- Robert Jobson

Even as a young woman she was never fazed by the royal family, and this is something that first made her attractive to the young Charles. Born on July 17, 1947 in London, she grew up in rural Sussex and was educated at Queen’s Gate School in South Kensington, before finishing schools in Switzerland and France.

Charles first met the fun, confident Camilla on Windsor Great Park polo field in 1970 when he had just left Cambridge, a year before he joined the Royal Navy. Legend has it that she was the one to remind him of a long-standing liaison between her great-grandmother Alice Keppel and King Edward VII.

“My great-grandmother was your great-great grandfather’s mistress — so how about it?” she is supposed to have asked Charles.

They first started dating after she and her boyfriend, Andrew Parker Bowles, had split for the first time. But that early love affair — one that was so passionate and real for Charles — ended when Camilla returned to the dashing cavalry officer Parker Bowles and married him in 1973.

The wedding happened while Charles was at sea serving in the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. When he discovered that she was married, he was left with “a feeling of emptiness” that was exacerbated by the fact that his sister Princess Anne — his trusted and loyal confidante — had also wed her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips.