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

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СКАЧАТЬ The summer had been cooler than usual but 4 July was one of the hottest days of the month, with temperatures reaching 27 degrees Celsius. The big, lavish society wedding, with a guard of honour and trumpeters, was held at the Guards Chapel, where her parents had been married, and afterwards at St James’s Palace. The guest list included the most illustrious names in the country, amongst them Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret – the Queen’s sister – and Princess Anne. Camilla looked glorious in a traditional long white dress, with a ten-foot train, by Bellville Sassoon, one of her favourite designers. Many of the evening dresses that had passed between her and Lucia Santa Cruz at Stack House were by Bellville Sassoon. Her bridesmaids wore mini-versions of the bridal gown, while the page boys were in nineteenth-century Blues uniforms. The groom wore a morning suit. He had had a punishing stag party at White’s a few nights earlier, which resulted in so much breakage the club couldn’t serve lunch the following day.

      Camilla and her family had dined and spent the night before the wedding at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. And it was from there that she and her father made their way to the chapel the next morning. Bruce was fond of Andrew and made him a director of his wine business, but Rosalind had her reservations. She thought him a snob – he enjoyed his association with the Royal Family a little too much for her taste, and his friends all seemed to have double-barrelled names or titles or baronetcies somewhere in the family. Rosalind was no great lover of royalty – the tales she’d heard from her mother about her own childhood with Alice Keppel and the King were enough to put her off all things upper class and royal for life.

      The Prince of Wales was invited to the wedding but didn’t come. He was still in the Caribbean and that day he had a commitment in Nassau, representing the Queen at celebrations marking the end of British rule in the Bahamas. He denied it, but it has long been assumed that he stayed away because he couldn’t bear to watch the person he loved walk down the aisle with someone else.

      In the summer of 1973, Camilla’s heart belonged to Andrew, the man so many women had wanted but whom she had successfully bagged. She thought he was everything she looked for in a man and he would give her everything she had dreamed of. He was thirty-three, an alpha male, sophisticated and experienced. She liked the fact that he was a cavalry officer, as her father had been, and that like her father he was brave. He hadn’t fought Rommel’s tanks, but in 1969 she’d watched him ride in the 129th Grand National, on a horse called The Fossa. It is one of the most dangerous and challenging races over jumps in the world, and out of a field of thirty that year, only fourteen finished. He was eleventh. By comparison, Charles at twenty-four was still a work in progress and would never match Andrew’s confidence or his masculinity. It is no surprise that at the time she found him the more appealing.

      The newlyweds left for the South of France that afternoon and by way of a short honeymoon spent several idyllic days at Cap d’Ail, staying at La Capponcina, a villa owned by Andrew’s uncle, Sir Max Aitken, chairman of Beaverbook newspapers. Afterwards they settled down to married life and a routine of weekdays mostly apart, with Andrew in London, and weekends normally together. Their first house, which they rented for a year while Camilla hunted for something suitable to buy, was near Newbury in Berkshire, not far from Andrew’s parents who had recently downsized to White Oak House at Highclere.

      After seven years of courtship, Camilla knew the whole family well. She was particularly fond of Andrew’s father, Derek Parker Bowles, a former soldier with the Royal Horse Guards, a landowner, Justice of the Peace and High Sheriff of Berkshire. Derek was great-grandson of the 6th Earl of Macclesfield, and a thoroughly likeable man, charm personified. The same could not be said of his wife. Dame Ann was Commissioner of the Commonwealth Girl Guides Association, and was nicknamed ‘Rhino’, for obvious reasons; she kept Pekingese dogs, and in the early Seventies, Camilla had a relative of one of them called Chang that she loved dearly. Dame Ann was the daughter of the millionaire racehorse owner Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 4th Baronet, and descended from an old English Roman Catholic family. She was a difficult woman who displayed no great love for her eldest son. Andrew nevertheless inherited from her side of the family his passion for horse racing, which has been a lifelong fascination, as a jockey, breeder and spectator – and he took her religion.

      Donnington Castle House, where Andrew grew up and the family were living when Camilla first knew him, was an imposing seventeenth-century brick house with a beautiful garden, built as the lodge to a now-ruined fourteenth-century castle. Newbury racecourse was on the doorstep, with more racing at Ascot, polo at Windsor, Goodwood and Cowdray Park, and rowing at Henley – all the traditional upper-class sporting playgrounds an easy distance away – as well as local pheasant shoots. At weekends, the house was invariably filled with Parker Bowles children and their friends, and great fun was always had by all. Derek was a brilliant cook and had two kitchens, one for himself to use and the other for the cook they employed, but the meals everyone remembers were those created by Derek himself. He was also a very good gardener and was a nephew of the great horticulturalist, plantsman and writer, E. A. Bowles. Sadly, Parker Bowles senior had suffered badly from tuberculosis in earlier life and had only half of one lung, and he died in 1977 at the age of sixty-one. Dame Ann lived on for another ten years.

      Andrew was the eldest of four; next was his brother, Simon, who also went into the Army and then the wine trade, before founding Green’s, the well-known restaurant and oyster bar in St James’s. The only girl, Mary Ann, married Nic Paravicini, who after the Army became a merchant banker and dabbled in the property business with Andrew. Their son is the blind, autistic musical genius, Derek Paravicini. Rick, the youngest, was a bloodstock agent and great character but sadly became an alcoholic, and died in 2010 at the age of sixty-three.

      Camilla and Nic both loved Derek Parker Bowles and got on with him famously, but neither of them could cope with their mother-in-law, and it became a running joke about which of them was more in favour. Camilla would say, ‘You’re leading at the moment, I’m right at the bottom.’ But the next time they saw each other their status would be reversed. She would laugh her deep laugh about it and pull faces; laughter is her way of coping with every difficulty.

      Camilla found a house to buy near Chippenham in Wiltshire, about an hour west from Newbury, and she and Andrew moved there in 1974, when Camilla was pregnant with their first child. Tom Henry Charles was born on 18 December 1974. Bolehyde Manor was a big medieval property in the village of Allington, just south of the M4 motorway. It was ideal for Andrew, with London less than two hours away by car and a fast, mainline station nearby. There were good schools in the locality, and they had friends in the area. But a big attraction for Camilla was that it was just inside Beaufort country, the oldest and biggest fox hunt in England. Andrew hunted occasionally but he didn’t find it particularly interesting – his enthusiasm was for racing and polo – but Camilla had hunted since she was a little girl with her father. And like her father, if she wasn’t curled up with a good book, she wanted to be on a horse.

      Bruce had learnt to ride at Rugby but his hunting career began as a young cavalry officer, in the pre-war years when there was a good railway network and people travelled all over the country in pursuit of sport – even more than they do today. Strong friendships were forged at Sandhurst, and in soldiering generally – and the upper classes at that time still had large country houses and sporting estates, where friends congregated for weekends. Bruce frequently found himself at Dauntsey Park, in north Wiltshire, where his friends Hugh and Joyce Brassey lived. Brassey was a fellow officer and hunting enthusiast and the house was in the heart of the Duke of Beaufort’s hunting estates. After the war, in 1949, they had moved from the big house, but were still living in north Wiltshire and the friendship and the visits continued. When Camilla and Andrew moved to Bolehyde, her father no longer needed the Brasseys’ as a base – he stayed and hunted with his daughter instead – but they often came to dinner with her father afterwards.

      Camilla gave great dinner parties – her time in Switzerland had not been wasted. A house filled with friends, good food and good wine was what she had grown up with and what she loved, and Andrew was the same. Initially they started off rather СКАЧАТЬ