It sounds bizarre now, but Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker Bowles actually got along pretty well when Diana first started dating Charles.
Before things got messy—and trust me, they got really messy—these two women were chatting, laughing, and even hanging out together in public. Royal historian Catherine Mayer dug into this in her book Divide & Rule, and she brought up something kind of wild: maybe Charles himself pushed Camilla to be friendly with Diana on purpose. Mayer wrote that Diana later felt like Camilla’s warmth was basically spying dressed up as kindness. But Mayer doesn’t think Camilla cooked up that plan alone.
Her theory? Charles figured Camilla knew him better than almost anyone alive, so who better to help Diana learn the ropes of being his partner. Kind of messed up when you think about it, but that’s apparently what happened.
Here’s the backstory nobody can skip: Charles and Camilla fell for each other back in 1970, way before Diana ever showed up on the scene. Camilla ended up marrying Andrew Parker Bowles in ’73, which reportedly broke Charles’s heart a little, but the two never really stopped being close. Mayer described it as Camilla knowing Charles “and his ways intimately,” which, if true, feels less like a normal friendship and more like something a lot colder.
Diana was only 19 when she and Charles started dating, while Camilla was already 33 and acted almost like an older sister figure to her. Problem was, Diana had zero clue about the romantic history simmering underneath. Royal biographer Penny Junor wrote in The Duchess that Diana spent tons of time visiting the Parker Bowles’ home, Bolehyde Manor, and even helped babysit Camilla’s kids since she’d worked as a nanny before.
They were even photographed together at the Ludlow Races in 1980, which happened to be the same day Charles and Diana made their first public appearance as a couple. Tatler noted that Camilla seemed like a calming presence for a nervous, camera-shy Diana. Junor said Camilla thought Diana was “sweet and funny” back then. 🐎
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Once the engagement was announced in February ’81, Camilla sent Diana a cheerful note asking her to lunch while Charles was traveling abroad. They met up, gossiped, had a nice time — or so it seemed on the surface.
We all know now that lunch wasn’t just girl talk, it was Camilla fishing for information.
Years later, Diana told biographer Andrew Morton that she sensed something off almost immediately. She said she felt like “a threat” the moment she was introduced into Charles’s circle, even though she was just a young girl who barely understood what was happening. She recalled staying at Bolehyde constantly and Camilla dropping weird warnings, like telling her not to push Charles into things. At one point Camilla randomly asked if Diana planned on hunting horses once she moved into Highgrove — a strange question that Diana later realized was just another way of gathering intel.
Eventually the pieces clicked together and Diana stopped being naive about it.
Right around this time, everything between the two women turned cold. Two days before the wedding in July 1981, Diana discovered Charles had gifted Camilla a bracelet engraved with “G” and “F” — their private nicknames for each other, Gladys and Fred. Then, while honeymooning on the Royal Yacht Britannia, Diana found a photo of Camilla tucked in Charles’s diary, plus cufflinks stamped with intertwined C’s. Not exactly honeymoon material.
Camilla still showed up to the wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Diana admitted to Morton she scanned the crowd specifically looking for her. She remembered spotting Camilla in pale grey with a veiled pillbox hat, an image she said stuck with her forever.
After the wedding, Camilla mostly kept her distance from the new princess. But by the mid-80s, Diana was convinced the affair had picked back up, and she finally confronted Camilla directly at a party in 1989. Camilla apparently snapped back that Diana had everything — the fame, the adoration, two beautiful kids — so what more could she possibly want. Diana’s answer was simple and heartbreaking: she just wanted her husband.
Diana also told Morton she once overheard Charles on the phone telling someone, “Whatever happens, I will always love you,” which led to a massive fight between them.
By the time Charles and Diana officially split in ’92, and finalized their divorce in ’96, Diana had already delivered her now-iconic line about there being “three of us in this marriage.” According to Junor, Charles never fully explained who Camilla really was to Diana early on — he brushed her off as just a friend instead of admitting she was an old flame, which obviously blew up in his face later.
Camilla’s marriage to Andrew also fell apart around the same period, and after Diana’s tragic death in 1997, Charles and Camilla finally tied the knot in 2005. They just celebrated 21 years together this past April.