Courting Camilla - A QUEEN LIKE NO OTHER

The one-time party girl never believed she was royal wife material – but her Prince Charming won her over

- Judy Kean

According to rumour, when Camilla Shand first met Prince Charles in 1971, she joked, “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?”

Regardless of whether that actually happened, who could ever have predicted all those years ago the bubbly army officer’s daughter would one day go one better than her ancestor Alice Keppel (who had a long-standing affair with Edward VII) and be crowned Queen?

It was unthinkable to many people back in the 1990s, when it was revealed that Charles and Camilla had had an affair when he was married to Princess Diana. For many years, the then Mrs Parker Bowles was the most reviled woman in the UK. Yet in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in public opinion in history, Camilla is now accepted as a fitting partner to support the King throughout his reign.

Even Camilla herself doubted she would ever be Queen. During the brief but passionate romance she and Charles enjoyed back in the early ’70s – which started when she was 24 and he was 22 – she was under no illusion that it would last because she knew she was not royal wife material.

Although she came from a well-to-do family and her grandfather was a baron, she was not the aristocrat the future king was expected to marry. Nor was she the chaste virgin deemed to be appropriate for a prince.

Says royal expert Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers, “With neither a grand title or a record of chastity, the chances of the Prince of Wales proposing to Camilla were slim.”