by Robert Lacey
‘She was determined to show [Andrew],’ recalled one of the polo community, ‘that she could do as well in the royal pulling stakes as he had done. There was always that element of pursuit by her, the feeling that she was determined to show him that she was as good as him, in no matter what.’544
There could be no future, however, for Parker Bowles’s romance with Anne. The Princess would have had to renounce her succession rights if she had married him – Andrew was a Catholic – and, anyway, by the autumn of 1970 her friendship was deepening with her fellow equestrian Captain Mark Phillips, whom she would marry in 1973. Parker Bowles’s relationship with Camilla was further complicated by his military duties that took him out of the country to Germany, Cyprus and Northern Ireland – which gave Camilla the chance to get started seriously on her relationship with Prince Charles.
In 1972 the couple spent time with friends at Annabel’s nightclub in Berkeley Square and were seen dancing together at the Argentine Embassy. Charles was a regular visitor to Cundy Street, and he loved the weekends he spent in Sussex with Camilla’s family, where he got on famously with her father Major Bruce Shand. Warm and welcoming, the Shands were not stuffy in the slightest, and they made Charles feel very much part of the family – giving him the chance, for the first time, to experience a relatively normal, relaxed and intimate family life.545
The approval of ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, Charles’s ‘honorary grandfather’, was a crucial step in the right direction. During Charles’s naval courses at Portsmouth the Prince was permitted to stay at ‘Dickie’s’ nearby Hampshire home, Broadlands, instead of bunking at the officers’ mess, and Uncle ‘Dickie’ was delighted for Camilla to join the party. To keep up appearances, she was allotted the Portico Room, the same room in which Elizabeth and Philip had consummated their marriage on their honeymoon in 1947. Charles was assigned the suite next door, with an interconnecting door, and at Broadlands the couple – still not on the press radar – could go fishing, riding and on long walks around the estate, openly holding hands, laughing and joking.
‘When Uncle Dickie approved of Camilla, that was the final seal of approval as far as Charles was concerned,’ explained John Barratt, Mountbatten’s private secretary for many years. But there was a catch involving Amanda Knatchbull, Mountbatten’s 14-year-old granddaughter, for whom the old man had long-term plans. ‘Mountbatten knew Camilla would make a perfect mistress for Charles until Amanda was of marriageable age,’ says Barratt. ‘So he gave the blossoming love affair his full blessing.’546
In this episode the writers depict Prince Charles confiding his feelings about Camilla to his Great Uncle David, the former Prince of Wales, whose royal destiny was to be so complicated by love. It is certainly true that Charles did correspond with his great uncle over the years, but it is not known if he ever mentioned Camilla to him, and the Duke certainly never passed on such correspondence to Charles’s mother, as shown in the final scenes. The role of the dying ex-king at this point in the drama is to provide historical context to these early months of the relationship between Charles and Camilla, setting the couple’s romance into the wider dynastic framework.
Despite the fun of her visits to Broadlands in 1972 and her growing love for Charles, Camilla’s emotions remained complicated, since she still carried a torch for Andrew. She was torn. ‘I love Charles very much,’ she told a friend, ‘but I simply cannot forget about Andrew. I often wonder where he is or what he’s doing. I think of him all the time. Is it possible to love two men at the same time?’547
Camilla could not believe that she could possibly marry Charles – let alone ride in the Gold State Coach to Westminster Abbey one day. Having grown up around the royal family, she knew what royal marriage involved and required, and as quite a shy woman in some respects, living in the public eye did not appeal to her. Then there was another issue that mattered more in the early 1970s than it would today. As Patricia, Lord Mountbatten’s elder daughter, and the mother of Amanda Knatchbull, disdainfully put it, the problem with Camilla was that she had quite a spicy ‘history’ that everyone knew about: ‘You didn’t want a past that “hung about”. And she was a subject … Nobody marries a subject.’548
When Andrew Parker Bowles returned from his posting in Germany, he was flattered to discover that Camilla had been having a fling with Charles. It lent him extra status – but it also meant that Camilla could play a stronger hand. If Andrew wanted her now, he would have to do the decent thing – and Camilla took some pleasure in playing a delicate juggling game between her two beaux. Mountbatten started to worry that his honorary grandson was getting too serious with his ‘mistress material’, and, according to author Sarah Bradford, he arranged a distant naval posting to help things cool down. Towards the end of 1972 it was announced that the Prince would be joining HMS Minerva on a six- to eight-month commission in the West Indies.
On the weekend of 9/10 December 1972 Charles went to stay with Mountbatten at Broadlands – and Camilla was invited as well. Charles took them both down to Portsmouth for a tour of Minerva and went back to Broadlands again the following weekend, again with Camilla. Both knew this was the last time they would see each other before Charles’s eight months at sea, and the Prince declared his love, but not his full hand. He offered no long-term commitment to Camilla – and he certainly did not propose marriage or anything like it.
‘Sometimes,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth, Charles’s biographer, ‘the actions we do not take are indeed more significant than those we do.’549
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘IMBROGLIO’
JUNE 1972–JULY 1973
‘IMBROGLIO’ IS A LONG-WINDED NOUN OF ITALIAN ORIGIN meaning ‘muck-up’, ‘muddle’ or quite simply ‘mess’ – and this episode centres on two major British messes of the early 1970s: the ongoing drama of Prince Charles’s tangled relationship with Camilla Shand (still not yet ‘Parker Bowles’), and Prime Minister Edward Heath’s tragic lack of relationship with the National Union of Mineworkers that led to the power cuts and national chaos of 1974’s notorious ‘Three-Day Week’.
In retrospect, it is easy to see that Prince Charles committed a fatal romantic error when he failed to offer a solid emotional commitment to Camilla Shand before he set off for the West Indies on HMS Minerva early in 1973. ‘This is the last time I shall see her for eight months,’ he wrote longingly to ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten.550
But the Prince had not conveyed his longing to Camilla in any concrete terms, and he is not known to have written longingly to her from Minerva. Charles might, for example, have hinted that he would hope to make some sort of engagement proposal to her on his return in the summer, since, coming up to her twenty-sixth birthday in July, Camilla was entering the ‘engagement’ stage of life. Her flatmate Virginia Carrington got married that January of 1973, and most of Camilla’s contemporaries from her debutante season were already married with children. She needed to catch up.
Subsequent history has shown that, through all their ups and downs, Charles and Camilla were clearly soul mates. But this was not the message left in Camilla’s heart and head as Charles went to sea in 1973 – while Andrew Parker Bowles was right beside her in London, moving ahead with his British Army career. Camilla’s father, Major Bruce Shand, was becoming irritated by Andrew’s dithering. He had been delighted at his daughter’s relationship with the Prince of Wales, but, like Camilla herself, he did not believe it could possibly lead to a top-level royal marriage and all that entailed. Now was the time, in Charles’s absence, to exert some pressure, and according to John Bowes-Lyon (Andrew’s cousin) Camilla’s family decided to force Andrew’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in The Times in the middle of March 1973.551
That spring Charles had a week’s break from Minerva, but he did not fly home to Camilla. Instead he accepted Uncle ‘Dickie’s’ invitation to join him and his daughter Patricia Knatchbull’s family on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Staying in the maid’s room at the back of the house
, Charles spent happy days skinny dipping and painting seascapes, and he began to take notice, as Mountbatten had long plotted, of Patricia’s 15-year-old daughter, Amanda.
‘I must say,’ he wrote to her grandfather, who was also his own, thoroughly delighted great-uncle, ‘Amanda really has grown up into a very good-looking girl – most disturbing.’552
Charles and Amanda began writing to each other, and Mountbatten noted frankly in a letter to Charles that he hoped something ‘permanent’ would come of it.553 Reporting back for duty to Minerva, Charles felt desperately lonely, describing to the Knatchbulls a ‘ghastly feeling of empty desperation and apparent hopelessness … so utterly similar to going back to school that it frightened me’.554 It was in this mood, while docked in English Harbour in Antigua, that he heard of Camilla’s engagement, and he could not believe that ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ could have lasted only six months.555 If the story was true that the Shands had published the engagement notice to force the hand of the galloping major, Andrew ‘Poker’ Bowles evidently did not mind getting cornered.
Out in the Bahamas the Prince locked himself in his cabin when he heard the news, emerging three hours later with red-rimmed eyes to join his fellow officers for dinner, mourning that he would have ‘no one’ to go back to and forlornly hoping ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually’.556 Then early in May, Charles received another blow with the news that his sister Anne had become engaged to her fellow equestrian Captain Mark Phillips. Within a matter of months, Charles had lost two of his closest female companions.
As the Queen’s two elder children grew up together, Anne had become quite a close element in her brother’s life, a straight-talking companion in whom he could confide naturally. Now Anne would belong to someone else, with whom Charles also happened to feel that she was badly mismatched557 – and he finally began to worry about his own marriage prospects. ‘I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly,’ he fretted, ‘otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable!’558
Meanwhile Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles were enjoying all the fun of preparing for their wedding, which they celebrated on 4 July 1973 at the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks in London. Their guests included the Queen Mother and Princess Anne – proof of how well liked and well connected the Parker Bowles and Shand families were.
Charles was invited, but he did not attend on grounds of ‘duty’, as he was the official representative for the Queen in Nassau, where the Bahamas were about to celebrate their independence. He sent a telegram to explain his absence, but no one bought his excuse. The Prince simply could not face seeing Camilla getting married, and his personal frustrations began to boil over into trivial matters. During a polo match in which he played poorly he stormed off the field after the American polo player/commentator twice called him ‘Prince Philip’ accidentally-on-purpose, and sarcastically shouted out ‘Great shot!’ after Charles missed the ball.
‘I was forced, in a rage, to stump up to the top of the commentary box,’ recorded Charles in his diary, ‘and ask him to stop making pathetic remarks.’559 As one of the Prince’s aides later confided to biographer Sally Bedell Smith, this ‘irritability and blackness’ was very much part of Charles’s nature.560
‘Irritability and blackness’ were two equally key words at the heart of Episode 309’s other great mess, the Conservative premiership of Edward Heath from June 1970 to March 1974, and particularly the disaster of the Three-Day Week. The stiff and humourless personality of Heath, aged 53 when he came to power, did not make for easy or genial royal audiences, and it did not help that the very unmarried Prime Minister was indifferent to – and even sometimes contemptuous of – women.
‘Harold [Wilson] was fine, because he loved her [the Queen] and treated her marvellously,’ confided one courtier to biographer Ben Pimlott. ‘But Ted was tricky – she was never comfortable with him.’561 According to another account, Private Secretary Michael Adeane soon found himself preparing detailed agendas for Elizabeth’s audiences with Heath to help push through the awkward silences.562
Paradoxically, Heath enjoyed a very warm relationship with the Queen Mother. In 1962 she had danced the twist with the young Lord Privy Seal – then an up-and-coming Tory-hopeful leading Britain’s first attempt to join the European Common Market – at a dinner party held by the still-respectable John Profumo. In June 1970 Heath attended the senior Queen Elizabeth’s seventieth birthday party, held the night after he entered No. 10, and whenever he was up at Balmoral he would escape for drinks with her at nearby Birkhall. Their friendship was based on their shared love of music – whatever his shortcomings, Heath holds the undisputed claim to have been the finest concert-grade pianist ever to occupy Downing Street. In March 1972, he sat down at the keyboard to provide musical entertainment for the Queen Mother at a seventieth birthday party for the composer William Walton, with her friend Benjamin Britten among the guests.
Unlike Harold Wilson, Edward Heath had an ‘undisguised dis-respect’ for the British Commonwealth,563 and he liked to downplay its importance to his Common Market pals like France’s President Pompidou in order to demonstrate that Britain’s modern spirit was truly European. This set the new Prime Minister at odds with the Queen, for whom the Commonwealth mattered deeply – and in 1971 matters rapidly came to a head over CHOGM, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was due to be held that year in Singapore.
On becoming Prime Minister, Heath had controversially jettisoned Harold Wilson’s arms embargo against white-ruled apartheid South Africa. This British move was vehemently opposed by all the other 47 Commonwealth members, except for the maverick regime in Malawi, with two nations threatening to leave the organisation. Several African leaders spoke of expelling Britain, and in the hopes of avoiding a confrontation Heath prevented Elizabeth from going to Singapore, a ban that she found deeply upsetting. Had she been allowed to attend, Martin Charteris later commented, it would have actually diminished the chances of bad temper and conflict.
‘If she’s there, you see, they behave,’ explained Adeane’s 1972 successor as private secretary. ‘It’s like Nanny being there. Or perhaps it’s Mummy. Anyway she demands that they behave properly in her presence. Never by saying anything, but by looking like a Queen – “and no bloody nonsense from you!” It also works because she knows them all, and they like her.’564
As it turned out, the Singapore CHOGM proved particularly sour, and Elizabeth was determined that it would not happen again. In December 1972 she exploited the fact that she was Head of State in Canada, (as she was and is Head of State of Australia, New Zealand and a total of 16 Commonwealth countries) to accept a formal invitation directly from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000, the father of Canada’s current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau) to the 1973 CHOGM in Ottawa without deigning to consult No. 10.
Edward Heath’s Europhilia was never especially popular in Britain, but EEC membership came to be the central feature of his legacy. In 1971 French President Pompidou ignored de Gaulle’s 1967 veto to approve Britain’s application, and in January 1972 Heath signed the Accession Treaty. In July 1972 Parliament passed the European Communities Act after a free vote, and on 1 January 1973 Britain entered officially.
‘The new links with Europe will not replace those with the Commonwealth,’ Elizabeth was careful to say in her Christmas speech for 1972. ‘They cannot alter our historical and personal attachments with kinsmen and friends overseas. Old friends will not be lost.’565
So the Queen and Philip were shocked in January 1973 when they attended the opening gala of the Fanfare for Europe intended to celebrate EEC entry. As they arrived at the Royal Opera House with Edward Heath, several hundred anti-marketeers booed and chanted ‘Sieg Heil!’ It was the beginning of Brexit. The Guardian described the royal couple as ‘momentarily shaken by the size and noise of the demonstration – the largest involving members of the Royal Family seen in
London’.566
The most lethal and bloody issue of these years was the growth of Anglo-Irish conflict that came to be known as ‘The Troubles’. In February 1971 the first British soldier was killed in Ulster, and in August Home Secretary Reginald Maudling introduced the controversial policy of internment without trial. With the confinement and torture of Irish Republican Army internees in barbed wire complexes like Long Kesh, Heath’s Ulster policy soon became internationally contentious. The shooting of 28 unarmed civilians (14 died) by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday, 13 January 1972, raised tensions still further, and ‘Operation Motorman’, the capture of IRA ‘no-go areas’ in July 1972, proved to be the biggest deployment of British troops since Suez. As for the IRA, they soon brought their campaign to the British mainland, with a bomb going off every day in London over Christmas 1973.567
‘The Queen received me at one of my regular audiences,’ Edward Heath later recalled, ‘after she had been watching coverage of riots in Belfast on the television, and was obviously shaken by the ferocity of the events in a part of her Kingdom. In particular, she was horrified by the film of women’s faces contorted with hate as they clung to the high-wired fences protecting British troops. Whenever the Queen is accused of remoteness or indifference towards the tribulations of her subjects, I think back to that moment.’568
The backdrop to all these dark events was a crumbling British economy which was becoming increasingly uncompetitive, with unemployment rising at the same time that global commodity prices – and oil prices, in particular – were pushing up inflation. In January 1972 the number of Britons out of work and claiming benefits rose to over a million for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s – and when the news was announced, parliamentary uproar was so great that Prime Minister’s Questions were suspended for the first time in the twentieth century.