Camilla Parker Bowles Was ‘Forced’ Into Her First Marriage, But Not By the Royal Family
Camilla Parker Bowles‘ longtime love affair with King Charles III has been a prominent storyline in The Crown. Season 3 dramatized Camilla (Emerald Fennell) meeting Charles (Josh O’Conner) in the early 1970s, and implied that Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) stepped in to keep them apart. It’s true that Camilla was “forced” into her first marriage with Andrew Parker Bowles (Andrew Buchan) instead of pursuing her relationship with Charles — but not by the royal family.
Camilla Parker Bowles’ relationship with King Charles had complex origins
The Crown Season 3 episode titled “Imbroglio” was set in the early 1970s when then-Camilla Shand first met then-Prince Charles. At the time, she had been dating Andrew off and on for about five years. And to make things even more complicated, Andrew also dated Charles’ younger sister, Princess Anne (Erin Doherty).
However, one detail that wasn’t quite right about the timeline portrayed on the Netflix series is that Camilla and Anne’s relationships with Andrew didn’t overlap.
“Anne and Andrew started dating in June 1970,” royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith told Vanity Fair. “Anne and Andrew enjoyed each other’s company, but they could never marry because he was a Catholic.”
The future queen consort was ‘forced’ into her first marriage, but not by the royal family
Smith — the author of 2017’s Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life — says that Camilla didn’t meet Charles until the summer of 1972, which was long after Anne and Andrew’s romance ended.
Charles confirmed this timeline with Jonathan Dimbleby when he revealed that mutual friend Lucia Santa Cruz introduced him to Camilla when she invited them both to her London apartment in the summer of ’72 for a drink. He immediately fell in love, but for her, it was a fling with the Prince of Wales while Andrew was away in Ireland and Cyprus.
The Crown depicts a secret meeting between Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies), the queen mother (Marion Bailey), and Princess Anne, where Anne explains that Camilla is in love with Andrew, not Charles. Then, the queen mother requests a meeting with Andrew and Camilla’s parents. Shortly afterward, the pair marry. And it didn’t seem like a coincidence.
But according to Smith, the royal family didn’t “force” Camilla into her first marriage. “Interfering like that is something the queen would never do,” Smith said.
Queen Elizabeth didn’t even know about Camilla Parker Bowles in the early 1970s
The royal author went on to explain that it is “highly unlikely” that Queen Elizabeth knew about Charles and Camilla at that time. Smith also claims that it was common knowledge among British social circles that Camilla was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles at that time.
She insists that the only people who were plotting at that time were Camilla and Andrew’s fathers — Bruce Shand and Derek Parker Bowles — because they “were tired of Andrew’s foot-dragging” after seven years.
It was the fathers who published the engagement announcement in The Times on March 15, 1973 — a move that forced Andrew to propose.
