Prince Charles’slove forCamillais an enduring one — frequently, and correctly, portrayed as the great romance of the prince’s life.
From falling for her when she was Camilla Shand, soon after they first met in the early 1970s, through rekindling their affair during his marriage toPrincess Diana, (while Camilla was married too) to being a reason the royal couple divorced in 1996. Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, as she was known at the time, didn’t wed until 2005.
As dramatized in season three ofThe Crown, Charles’s main influence in the beginning of their relationship in the ’70s was his great uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten. He is shown in the Netflix’s series as encouraging his young protege to sow his wild oats and enjoy his liaison with Camilla – but not to marry her.
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Charles (who followed in his mentor Mountbatten’s footsteps as a naval officer) was sent away to the Caribbean on HMS Minerva in 1973. But was Mountbatten behind his exile as depicted inThe Crown —or was this just a simple naval posting?
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The Crownshows Louis Mountbatten intervening and getting Charles assigned abroad for several months. But what is much less likely is that he did so in alliance with Charles’s grandmother, the Queen Mother.
“It may be that Mountbatten was involved in something like that but certainly not true that he colluded with the Queen Mother. They loathed each other!” Robert Lacey, author ofThe Crown, The Inside History, tells PEOPLE.
Prince Charles and Camilla in 1975.David Cole/Shutterstock
Rival historian Hugo Vickers agrees on this point, writing inThe Crown Dissected(excerpted inThe Times), “This is of course incredible to anyone with any knowledge of the complete lack of empathy between the Queen Mother and Mountbatten. She was able to get her way quietly over many things and was suspicious of his meddling.”
“It is accepted that at that time Camilla was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles, a good-looking cavalry officer, who knew when to strike. Meanwhile the young Prince of Wales was too unsure of himself to make up his mind. There was no need for any Palace plot,” Vickers writes.
Lacey tells PEOPLE, “It is possible that Mountbatten – and the papers that might confirm that are still not public – acted on family concerns and he would have been the channel to accomplish that. Or it may simply have been that Mountbattten acted off his own bat, thinking the relationship should be tested in the naval way with a period abroad.”
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Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.Chris Jackson/Getty
Charles, who is shown as vulnerable and skeptical of his family inThe Crown,didn’t manage to get his way until much later in life. As Lacey notes, Gyles Brandreth — one of the biographers of the now-happily married couple — stated in his bookCharles and Camilla, “Sometimes the actions we do not take are indeed more significant than those we do.”
source: people.com
