“My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-grandfather. I feel we have something in common.” The 24-year-old Camilla Shand immediately transfixed the Prince of Wales upon their first meeting at the Windsor Great Park polo field in 1970. A relationship began, ended, then was rekindled years later in an affair. Camilla “arrived at the party with one boyfriend and left with another”, and set down the long and winding road to the throne.
Twenty years ago this Wednesday, the woman Diana nicknamed “the rottweiler” entered Windsor Guildhall in a tasteful oyster-silk coat and a big white hat, and walked out with her prince. Onlookers back then were respectful and cheery; the late Queen remarked that her son was at last “home and dry with the woman he loves”. And over the intervening years, “the most hated woman in Britain” has been transformed into “the nation’s grandmother”; harmless, homely and horsey. These days she more resembles her mother in law than a minxy Jezebel. This is, after all, a woman who relishes “cooking her own simple supper on the Aga leaning over her dogs… listening to The Archers”. How could one resent that?
But our Queen’s status as “the other woman” has never quite left her, despite the tradition of royal mistresses being far more conventional than the romantic fairytale marriage Diana represented. Joking about ancestral infidelities (that of Edward VII and Alice Keppel) on their first meeting marked Camilla out as a consummate aristocrat — a realist who accepted the chasm between love and marriage, passion and practicality, which persisted in high society. When Charles and Diana became engaged, Prince Philip was pleased because the leggy Spencer girl would “breed in some height”. We commoners find this hard to accept, the judging of the quality of a match by hands, like the purchasing of a racehorse. Hilary Mantel, though, knew that royals are a “breeding stock, collections of organs”. The legs, then, were just part of the cynical selection process for admission into monarchy, and Camilla, so long content with remaining the “Gladys” to her “Fred”, understood this.
Quite different from the moral codes the commoner abides by, the gentry have until recently always maintained fashionable French-court conventions of infidelity; the role of maîtresse-en-titre was formalised in Paris and emulated in England by Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, the Boleyn sisters et al. Other European monarchies exercised more pious discretion; Spain, for example, labouring under austere confessional Catholicism and the long shadow of the Inquisition — with its emphasis on moral surveillance — couldn’t tolerate such transgressions. Conversely, in 14th-century England, affairs of both men and women in the landholding classes were “far from uncommon”.
Camilla’s story represents an adherence to, not a departure from, the sexual mores of the haut monde: the expectation of romantic love within the practical and contractual alliance-and-dowry structure of marriage — an expectation naively held by the teenaged Diana — is a relative innovation. The late Queen’s temporary froideur towards Camilla — “that wicked woman” — was connected not to the existence of the affair, but the fact that it was permitted to derail the marriage of her heir, a betrayal of convention rather than morality. She herself had never strayed, but it is almost certain her husband and various of her children had. Do what you will, but don’t rock the boat.
Noble mistresses existed precisely because the requirements of matrimony were more stringent than in general society: Camilla was, let’s not forget, discounted from the role of Charles’s wife as recently as 50 years ago because she was not a virgin. Prevented from marrying a paramour for arbitrary reasons of protocol, the nobility accepted the role of mistress as a satisfying, if cynical, alternative. Of course, this arrangement is unacceptable to the British public, whose views on infidelity are exceptional in having remained unchanged despite other attitudes on sex and the family liberalising. One study from 2023 found that, over the course of 40 years, people had become overwhelmingly more tolerant of same-sex couplings, premarital sex and having children out of wedlock — yet the figure who now agreed that extramarital sex was “always wrong”, 57%, was a slip of just 1% from 1983.
Against the force of these baked-in attitudes, how was Camilla to be brought into the fold? In practice, her rehabilitation involved a series of carefully stage-managed photocalls, a modern royal tradition; this remains one of the few elements of royal life I covet — how I’d have relished being papped looking conspicuously serene after any number of my own romantic clangers. The setting was chosen as Camilla’s 50th at Highgrove; unfortunately she was rather upstaged by Diana’s appearance in a revenge swimsuit, which plastered the tabloid’s front pages that same day. She went quiet after Diana died in Paris just two months later; as every Sex and the City devotee knows, you cannot compete with a dead wife.
“As every ‘Sex and the City’ devotee knows, you cannot compete with a dead wife.”
An attempt was revived a couple of years on, with a well-choreographed exit from a party at the Ritz. It seems incredible now to think of Camilla as having to be introduced to the public like vegetables hidden in a fussy child’s pasta sauce — but we must remember that the Camilla-Diana melodrama was not just about two women, but about how we expect women to conduct themselves as wives and mothers.
Just as with Angelina Jolie, Monica Lewinsky or indeed Helen of Troy, the greatest moral outrage is generally reserved for the woman who strays, not her partner in crime. Society affords men more forgiveness than it does women; the poor helpless darlings submit to what is so often framed as an insurmountable biological instinct. Women, though, are encouraged to be understanding of their partners’ toddler-level command of their impulses; no such grace is afforded to the Camillas of this world. Why?
Here, the mysterious workings of love are depressingly explicable with science. The theory goes like this: men tend to cheat more frequently and with many more partners via one-night stands; women tend to be unfaithful only in order to “trade up”, carefully risk-assessing a tactical punt for better security and resources for their children via a “mate-switch”. Evolutionary biologists theorise that these behaviours are connected to genetic imperatives: while infidelity can be disruptive in a community, it can also diversify the gene pool, produce more young and provide children with the most suitable substitute fathers possible.
The double standard in shaming, by extension, makes sense — evolutionarily, high-risk sexual behaviours are more detrimental in women than in men, and so sexual prejudice in attitudes towards infidelity was useful in the world of animal skins and clubs. This also explains women’s particular ire for other women who cheat (in a recent conversation with my mother about this very issue, she said “well, look at Anthea Turner”, still tutting over beef from 30 years before). Women are gatekeepers of sexual morality because of their compulsory caretaking role; it is they, then, who are the most repulsed by peers — or indeed royals — who cheat.
Camilla has been up against royal convention, the romantic fantasies of the public and evolutionary biology… but has her rehabilitation worked? At the Coronation two summers ago, the new Queen seemed born to it; she has broadly commanded the respect of the public in the wake of her husband’s cancer diagnosis, and only been burnished by barbs from Harry. She is pleasant, uncomplaining and traditional, qualities that have evaded the Sussexes; she is stoic in the face of her forever-oddball husband’s fits of pique. Her approval rating has gradually ticked up over time, the fruits of a decades-long master plan. Yet it is difficult to imagine history remembering Camilla more for this latter-day golden age than for the carnage of the Nineties, deliciously scandalous as it was.
The curious history of Camilla Shand, the plucky girl from the polo, tells us more about ourselves than anything else: it shows the British public its own sexual conventionality, the ways in which it remains stubbornly conservative. We may have forgiven, but forgetting is quite another matter. So exercise caution, lusty ladies — and if you must step out, make it worthwhile. Only an heir to a throne will do.
