Battle of Brothers

‘Most of what Rab Butler says is preposterous,’ complained the prince himself, fiercely denying that Butler was any sort of ‘mentor’, ‘guru’ or ‘éminence grise’ to him.

But Butler’s wife Mollie stood by her husband’s claim in quite explicit terms. Lucia, she wrote in her own 1992 memoir, was a ‘happy example of someone on whom [Charles] could safely cut his teeth, if I may put it thus’.

Sometime in the spring of 1972, Santa Cruz, who had remained friendly with Charles after Trinity, invited him round for a drink at her Cundy Street flat in Victoria, at the back of Buckingham Palace, saying that she had found ‘just the girl’ for the prince. Camilla lived in the same block and Gyles Brandreth, a friend of Charles and a chronicler of the couple’s love affair, favours this version.

By contrast, however, another chronicler, Caroline Graham, sets the meeting on the polo field, quoting an onlooker as saying that Camilla ‘saw the Prince standing alone on the other side of the field. Cool as you like, she walked across and started talking to him.’

So which account is true? We should probably accept the less exciting Santa Cruz-Cundy Street version as the historical truth of the couple’s first meeting, since that is how the prince himself remembers it.

But when it comes to the tale of the polo field and the ‘mistress of your great-great-grandfather’ introduction, that surely expresses the more important emotional truth – that Camilla Shand embodied all the emotional freedom and sense of fun for which the dutiful Prince Charles had been yearning. With the benefit of hindsight, we can certainly cite those personal qualities as the reason why, nearly fifty years later, Charles and Camilla are living their lives together solidly as man and wife.

The fact that such a marriage between a future king and a non-royal divorcee is accepted today, but would have seemed outlandish thirty years ago – not to say improper and impossible – is another example of the social prejudices that confronted Prince Charles as he faced up to the challenge of choosing his partner for life in the mid-1970s.

The newspapers of the time were perfectly candid as they discussed the requirements for his future queen – and they were also perfectly candid that, as tribunes of the people, they had the right to lay down the rules. The candidate should preferably be royal (which meant foreign, exotic and newsworthy) or, failing that, noble – and she should definitely be a virgin, the v-word being deployed unashamedly in the age of free love as if during the reign of the first Elizabeth.

Camilla was none of these things. She had cast off her virginity long before, and she was neither royal nor noble, though she unquestionably came from respectable upper-middle-class ‘county’ stock. Her father, Major Bruce Shand, was a master of foxhounds who was a friend of the Queen Mother. Her mother Rosalind – the money in the family – descended from the Cubitts who had built Belgravia and the smartest swathes of central London. Camilla was not that young – she was two years older than Charles – and, to go back to the v-word, she was quite well known in society circles for being ‘a bit of a goer’.

But Ms Shand herself had the sharpness to see all these drawbacks, and she had the enticing honesty to go for the next best thing. She liked the prospect of some fun with Prince Charles for his own sake. She did not want to collar him just so that she could marry a future king – and that is fundamentally why, of course, she has ended up married to him.

The Goons played a big part in all this. Early in their friendship Charles and Camilla discovered that they shared a fondness for the silly accents and daft looks of The Goon Show – BBC radio’s classic comedy of the absurd, the Home Service predecessor to and, indeed, the original inspiration for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The couple rapidly registered their mutual affection by bestowing Goon nicknames upon each other, ‘Fred’ and ‘Gladys’ – which, say friends, Charles and Camilla cheerfully call each other to this day.

‘Your spirits rise whenever Camilla comes into a room,’ recalled Charles’s polo-playing companion, Lord Patrick Beresford. ‘You can tell from her eyes and the smile on her face that you are going to have a bloody good laugh.’

‘They have a terrific sense of humour,’ says another friend, author Jilly Cooper. ‘They laugh together a huge amount. And Camilla’s ability to see the funny side of life has made an enormous difference over the years.’

Along with the shared silliness went a mutual delight in country pursuits. Charles and Camilla were both devotees of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – seldom happier than when decked out in their Barbours, tweeds and welly boots. Thanks to her father, Camilla could ride to hounds as well as the prince, and by the summer and autumn of 1972 the couple were wrapped up in a roaring affair.

‘She was affectionate, she was unassuming,’ wrote Jonathan Dimbleby, recording and reporting Charles’s feelings for this new girlfriend, ‘and – with all the intensity of first love – he lost his heart to her almost at once.’

Lord Mountbatten encouraged the romance. He entertained the couple frequently at discreet weekends at Broadlands, his estate in Hampshire. In 1971–2 Charles was starting his naval career at Portsmouth, just half an hour to the south, and Camilla was precisely the companion Uncle Dickie had in mind to keep Charles busy until young Amanda came of age.

But by the late autumn of 1972 Charles was starting to appreciate Camilla Shand as rather more than Uncle Dickie’s temporary ‘wild oats’. The prince was coming to feel so at ease in Camilla’s company that he dared to hope she could one day be his lifelong ‘friend and companion to love and to cherish’. And ‘to his delight’ (Jonathan Dimbleby again) she was sending back the message that ‘these feelings were reciprocated’.

Naval duties, however, stood in the way. Charles’s frigate HMS Minerva was due to set sail for the Caribbean early in the new year – and was not going to return until the following autumn. On the weekend of 9–10 December, the prince took Camilla and Mountbatten down to Portsmouth for a guided tour of the vessel, then lunch, and the next weekend he was back at Broadlands with Camilla – ‘the last time,’ he wrote sadly to Mountbatten, ‘I shall see her for eight months’.

Thirty-five years later the prince revealed that weekend in December 1972 as the moment when he first realised for sure that he wanted to marry Camilla – that she was his life’s soulmate. But he did not have the courage to tell her properly or strongly enough.

‘Charles declared his love,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth in 2005, ‘but not his hand. He whispered sweet nothings, but said nothing of substance. He made no commitment and he asked for none.’

Just twenty-four years old in November 1972, Charles felt too young to get involved in the whole complicated process of engagement and marriage as heir to the British throne. In the most banal sense, the prospect would have meant too many practical details to be fitted in before Minerva set sail – starting with an approach to his parents with whom he had not begun to broach his feelings. They would undoubtedly have raised some questions, since their views about Camilla’s suitability were not that different from Uncle Dickie’s. She was a nice horsey woman and excellent girlfriend material – but she was not an obvious future queen, especially since there was no need to hurry. So Charles did not hurry either.

‘Sometimes,’ as Gyles Brandreth shrewdly put it, ‘the actions we do not take are indeed more significant than those we do.’

Camilla herself was not really surprised – nor greatly cast down. For half a dozen years she had been busily engaged in a colourful on-and-off relationship with Captain Andrew Parker Bowles, a handsome and eligible officer in the Household Cavalry, and a highly desirable catch in his own right, both in terms of his personal charm and his own royal connections. In 1953, aged thirteen, Andrew had been a pageboy, dressed in silk and satin, at the Queen’s coronation, and his father Derek, High Sheriff of Berkshire, was a member of the Queen Mother’s horse-racing and social circle.

The on-and-off aspect of their romance reflected Parker Bowles’s foreign assignments – he had served in Germany, Cyprus and Ulster, as well as a spell in New Zealand. But the principal ‘off’ factor was his appalling infidelity. Major ‘Poker’ Bowles, as he was known in the regiment, was irresistible to other women, and he wasted little energy in denying their temptations.

From time to time, Camilla struck back – and this was one explanation of her direct approach to Charles in the spring of 1972. Andrew had been enjoying a fling with the still unmarried Princess Anne in the early months of that year – and it was soon after this that Camilla made her bid for Charles. Her approach to the prince was a lowly matter of tit for tat.

‘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.’

By early 1973, however, both Andrew and Camilla had disentangled themselves from their royal relationships. They had been dating in their on-off way for nearly seven years, and Camilla’s father was losing patience. The major had been amused by his daughter’s relationship with Charles but, like Camilla herself, he did not believe it could possibly lead to a top-level royal marriage. So this was the moment, with the prince on the other side of the world. According to John Bowes-Lyon (Andrew’s cousin), in March 1973 Camilla’s family decided to force Andrew’s hand by publishing an engagement notice in The Times.

Andrew Parker Bowles allowed himself to be trapped with good grace – the game was up. Aged thirty-three, it was a good time for him to settle down – and Camilla, coming up to twenty-six in July, had had enough of being always a bridesmaid never the bride. So on 4 July that year the Shand and Parker Bowles clans came together in the elegant surroundings of the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks with dress uniforms and three senior members of the royal family – Princess Anne, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. It was the ‘society wedding of the year’, with eight hundred guests in attendance.

Though Charles had been invited, he sent his regrets on the grounds of ‘duty’, since he was representing his mother in Nassau, where the Bahamas were about to celebrate independence. But no one who knew the story believed him. The prince had locked himself in his cabin on Minerva on first hearing the news of the engagement, writing forlornly in a confidential letter, ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’

It took some time, but his sad feeling did pass – to some degree. By the mid-1970s the prince had begun dating again, enjoying the company of quite a number of eligible young women.

So had Andrew Parker Bowles. The galloping major had not waited that long after his 1973 wedding to resume his skirt-chasing ways, and his wife tolerated his philandering as she had done before their marriage. Enjoying domestic life in the country, Camilla concentrated on the raising of her two children, Tom (b.1974) and Laura (b.1978). She also maintained her friendly contact with Prince Charles, who had agreed to be the godfather of Tom.

Then, in August 1979, Lord Mountbatten was assassinated with members of his family by an IRA bomb on board his fishing boat off the coast of Mullaghmore, County Sligo. Charles was devastated and in his sorrow he turned to Camilla. He regarded her as his best friend – the person, above all, in whom he could totally confide. His former lover remained his ‘touchstone’ and ‘sounding board’, as he put it to Jonathan Dimbleby. From Camilla’s point of view, her once-casual ‘revenge bonk’ over Andrew and Anne had become deeply serious.

Speaking mainly, and at length, on the telephone, Charles poured out his heart to Camilla, and she gave him the solace that only she could provide. In a matter of months their best friendship had turned again into love – certainly in the spiritual sense. There were some who believed that in 1979 and 1980 the pair secretly resumed a clandestine affair, and one or two members of the royal family were so concerned that they warned the prince directly of the damage his persistent ‘illicit liaison’ would do to the reputation of the monarchy. A feeling was growing that Charles, approaching the age of thirty-two, should be getting on with the job of finding himself a future queen – and that very summer of 1980 he was photographed at Balmoral in the company of Lady Diana Spencer.

Still only nineteen years old in September that year when she was caught in fishing mode with Prince Charles on the banks of the River Dee by a Fleet Street lens, Lady Diana Spencer had known the prince for some time already. Her elder sister Sarah had actually dated him for a spell in Silver Jubilee year (1977), while her maternal grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a confidante of the Queen Mother and one of her ladies-in-waiting.

The Queen had invited Diana to Balmoral so that she and her husband could take a closer look at the young woman whom insiders were even then tipping as her future daughter-in-law. In the 1960s Diana had been one of the children who came to play with Andrew and Edward at Sandringham – happening to fall between the two younger brothers in age, and joining them to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the comfy sofas of the house’s ‘cinema’. Notably demure and polite in those days, how had the girl developed?

Diana passed the test with flying colours.

‘We went stalking together,’ remembered fellow guest Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. ‘We got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, her hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

Both the Queen and Prince Philip eyed Diana approvingly. Edward and Andrew competed to sit beside her at evening picnics, and the whole family liked her. Just a year after the death of his beloved honorary grandfather, Charles felt he had finally located ‘the sweet-charactered girl’ for whom Uncle Dickie had urged him to search – and the British press felt the same. Media around the entire world went so ‘Di-crazy’, in fact, that Charles’s father became alarmed. As the press coverage intensified, Prince Philip told his son in a blunt intervention that Charles must either propose to the girl or walk away ‘immediately’ for the sake of her good name.

‘Whichever choice he decided to make,’ Charles later recalled his father counselling, ‘he should not delay.’

That is how marriages get ‘arranged’ in the age of mass media scrutiny. Charles bowed to his father’s ‘advice’ and proposed to Diana at the beginning of February 1981. The couple announced their engagement at the end of the month, and Britain became even more hysterical in the weeks leading up to their spectacular union on 29 July. Over six hundred thousand people packed the pavements to cheer the couple to and from the wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral, in front of an invited congregation of 3,500 and an estimated 750 million global viewers – then the largest TV audience in history.

The bride’s intricate ivory taffeta gown was paired with a lace veil no less than 153 yards long, together with an eighteenth-century heirloom tiara, while her silk bridal slippers were embroidered with 542 sequins and 132 matching pearls – the heels kept deliberately low so as not to upstage the groom: at five foot ten, Diana was exactly the same height as Charles.

When it came to the couple’s wedding vows, Diana was the first bride in royal history to promise to love, honour and cherish her husband but not necessarily to ‘obey’.

4

Agape

‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’

(Meghan Markle, Graduation Speech at Immaculate Heart School, 3 June 2020)

On 4 August 1981, less than a week – just six days – after the wedding of Charles and Diana in London, Rachel Meghan Markle was born in Canoga Park, Los Angeles. Most of the sixty thousand inhabitants of this leafy suburb in the San Fernando Valley had access to a television that ‘royal summer’, and those who were watching on 29 July would have had little choice about their viewing. The Royal Wedding from London was carried all day long by every US network.

If they had been among the millions watching the London wedding in the week before their baby’s birth, Meghan’s parents Tom and Doria Markle could hardly have failed to notice the difference between the classical dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the gold orb-topped turrets of the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard where they had married eighteen months earlier. With its strikingly exotic Moorish entrance arch and plastic Buddhas, the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple stood out in the middle of LA’s red-light district – it was just a stone’s throw from where Hugh Grant would be caught in his car enjoying oral sex with prostitute Divine Brown in June 1995.

‘A fresh new day … and it is ours,’ read the opening line of the Markles’ wedding invitation, with the promise of ‘happy beginnings …’

Their ceremony of union had been presided over by Brother Bhaktananda, an ordained Buddhist priest in glowing orange robes who had been born Michael Krull in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1920 by Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, the Fellowship Temple preached a gospel of ‘spirituality and self-knowledge through meditation and Kriya yoga’ and had been the choice of Doria, twenty-three years old at the time of her marriage to the thirty-five-year-old Thomas. According to her half-brother Joseph Johnson – Meghan’s uncle – Doria ‘was fascinated by alternative religions and yoga’.

Joseph would give Doria the credit for instilling in his niece Meghan her expansive self-confidence, along with the buoyant belief she developed early in her childhood that ‘she could be anything and achieve anything’. Joseph traced this back to the profusion of striking female role models in the family – ‘culturally our family did not have male figures around’ – and especially to Doria’s mother Jeanette, Meghan’s grandmother, who was the daughter of a Cleveland bellhop and lift operator in a ‘fancy whites-only hotel’.

Joseph recalled the searing experience of crossing America as a child with his half-sister in the days of segregation. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Doria had been just a baby when her mother packed her up to head west. Arriving one night in a small ‘all white’ town in the middle of Texas, they were cold and hungry, but no one would rent a room to them as non-whites.

‘We wanted food and shelter, but we were turned away because of the colour of our skin.’ It was the first time that Uncle Joseph, then seven years old, had experienced racism.

‘I was young,’ he recalls, ‘but I remember one guy pointing off into the snow saying, “The highway is that way. Get going! You are not welcome here.”’

Life got better in Los Angeles, where Doria was bussed with other black pupils under the recently passed desegregation laws to Fairfax High, a mostly white Jewish school.

‘We were raised together,’ Uncle Joseph recounted to the Mail on Sunday’s Caroline Graham. ‘There was an age difference [seven years] with Doria. She was the youngest. But, like Meghan, she’s whip-smart and always wanted more out of life.’

Priding herself on her hair, Doria grew ‘a big beautiful Afro’ and started work as a trainee make-up artist on the daytime TV show General Hospital – which was where, in her early twenties, she met Thomas Markle, twelve years her senior, recently divorced and working on the soap opera as the lighting director. The attraction was instant. On the highly successful long-running show nurses and doctors would engage in ‘lusty’ love affairs while performing heroic heart transplants. Tom and Doria couldn’t match the medical heroics, but their love affair proved both powerful and immediate, and they wasted no time in getting married.

Thomas had arrived from the east coast where he had grown up in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of three sons in a talented Anglo-German family – known as ‘Merckel’ before they anglicised the name. One of his brothers joined the US air force and was later an international diplomat, while the other became a bishop in the small Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America – its motto ‘God became human in order that human beings might become gods’.

Leaving school in his teens, the young and artistic Thomas had moved to the nearby Pocono Mountains, where he found backstage work in playhouses catering to the tourist trade – before relocating to Chicago. In the Windy City he married for the first time, fathering two children, and became a lighting director.

The equivalent of the director of photography in movies or television, a lighting director inspired and set the ‘mood’ or look of any scene, and Tom Markle had a light touch. Although physically heavy-set, he was creatively twinkle-toed, taking his inspiration from the Busby Berkeley movies he had loved to watch as a child with their extravagantly illuminated parades of elegantly clad dancers.

In later years, and certainly at the time of her marriage to Prince Harry, Thomas Markle would come to play the villain in Meghan’s life, taking money for clunky press interviews in which he was outspoken in his criticism of his daughter. Eventually, and notoriously, he would fail to feature at her wedding to Harry. But as a young father by all accounts – including Meghan’s own – Thomas’s creativity and commitment were a parental inspiration.

‘It’s safe to say,’ Meghan stated at the time of her engagement, ‘I have always been a “Daddy’s Girl”.’

One Christmas Tom tackled the central question of his daughter’s mixed-race identity by purchasing two sets of Barbie dolls – one black and one white. He took them apart and re-mixed them to create her own customised personal set – ‘a black mom doll, a white dad doll and a child in each colour’. When Meghan went to school and found herself confronted by a tick-box form to complete about her ethnicity and realised that she did not fit in to just one category, ‘my dad said words that will stay with me forever: “Draw your own box.”’

Thanks to Tom Markle’s earning power – swollen by a $750,000 win in the California State Lottery in 1990 – Meghan’s upbringing was not as deprived as some have imagined. Canoga Park where she spent much of her childhood is a respectable blue-collar and middle-class suburb of Los Angeles – not fancy, perhaps, but cheerfully green and racially mixed.

When Meghan was six, Doria and Tom separated and divorced, and she went to live with Doria. But Tom remained a hands-on father. ‘He taught me how to fish,’ recalled Meghan, ‘to appreciate Busby Berkeley films, write thank you notes and spend my weekends in Little Tokyo eating chicken teriyaki with vegetable tempura.’

It was her father’s care and belief, she later said, that inspired her ‘grand dream’ of becoming an actress – and in a very practical sense. With Doria working – at jobs as a travel agent, a clothing designer and later a social worker – Tom would be the one to pick Meghan up from school and take her to work with him.

Her assurance and her familiarity with show business would come from nearly a decade of doing her homework on the sets of the sitcom Married … with Children and General Hospital – on which her father was the lighting supremo. In 1982, the year after Meghan’s birth, Tom Markle had won a Daytime Emmy Award for his lighting direction of General Hospital and four years later he had been nominated for an award for his lighting work helping to stage the 58th Academy Awards – the Oscars.

Meghan was not obviously thrown off course by her parents’ separation and divorce in 1987. If anything, it increased her self-reliance. Early in 1991, aged only nine, she was filmed by a local news channel holding up an anti-war protest sign in a demonstration against the first Gulf War that she herself had organised in the school playground. A boy in her class had burst into tears because his elder brother was heading out to fight against Iraq, and the boy thought he was going to die. So Meghan drew a sign saying ‘Peace and Harmony for the World’ and gathered her classmates into the protest.