Who's Camilla really?
2005-04-08 21:16
London - Friends say Camilla Parker Bowles is a "good egg". Prince Charles clearly adores her. But the British public knows little of the woman who may one day be their queen.
The most strongly worded view came from Charles' first wife, Princess Diana. She saw Parker Bowles as "the rottweiler", a home-wrecker, the third person in a tumultuous and traumatic marriage.
The popular press, and the public, seem largely to have embraced Diana's view. Parker Bowles, lacking the glamour of Diana, has often been held up to ridicule - and a big majority of the public never wants her to be queen.
Through all the gossip and humiliations, Parker Bowles has kept her head down, said nothing, and got on with life in the countryside of western England. And, for decades, she has been part of Charles's life.
Friends say her down-to-earth attitude counterbalances the prince's introspection and tendency to fret about the environment, architecture and other causes.
Jonathan Dimbleby, the prince's biographer, describes the bride as "an unusually resourceful woman with enviable reserves of dignity and resilience" who has restored Charles' faith in himself.
"Through her, he has rediscovered that life on this Earth offers hope as well as despair, happiness as well as sorrow, and even, occasionally, contentment as well as frustration," Dimbleby wrote in Friday's editions of The Times.
The love of Charles's life
Camilla Shand was born in London on July 17 1947, and grew up on a country estate in southern England, a granddaughter of the 3rd Baron of Ashcombe. It was an upbringing that made her very much at home in the upper class circles of the rural rich.
Her great-grandmother Alice Keppel had a love affair with King Edward VII, Prince Charles's great-great-grandfather. Meeting Charles prince at a polo match in the early 1970s, the young Camilla reputedly said, "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress, so how about it?"
Romance blossomed, but Charles didn't propose. He went to sea as a naval officer, and she married cavalry officer Major Andrew Parker Bowles and had a son and daughter, Tom and Laura, in the 1970s.
Charles and his former love remained close friends, even after his marriage to Diana. Since the mid-1980s, a royal watcher say, the relationship has been a romance.
Jennie Bond, the former royal correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp, says Camilla even won some grudging admiration from Diana.
"Even she (Diana) accepted that Camilla was the love of Charles's life - in fact she once told me that she thought Camilla had been loyal and discreet and deserved some form of recognition," Bond wrote on the BBC's website.
- AP