Season five takes us, once more, behind the scenes of Diana, Charles and Camilla’s fraught relationship

All hell broke loose on the 1995 Panorama interview between Martin Bashir and Princess Diana when she delivered the immortal line: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”. She was, of course, talking about Prince Charles and his then-mistress Camilla Parker Bowles.

As The Crown has detailed in series five, this messy love affair dominated all three of the party’s lives for many years; leading to two divorces and one marriage that’s still standing today. So what’s the full history behind this regal three-some that led to the path of Charles becoming King, and Camilla his Queen consort?

The beginning

Charles and Camilla Shand’s relationship dates back to way before Diana – the couple started dating after being introduced by a mutual friend, Lucía Santa Cruz, in 1970. Some reports say Camilla’s opening line to Charles was: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather. I feel we have something in common.” If this is the case, then way to shoot your shot, Camilla! After dating for a while, they eventually split when Charles went to serve in the Royal Navy.

In 1973, Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, but she and Charles remained close friends – Charles was even made godfather to their son, Tom. It took Charles seven more years to find a bride, Diana Spencer, and after getting engaged in February 1981 (in which he famously made the comment: “Whatever love means”, the old romantic) they married in July of the same year.

However, alarm bells started ringing for Diana when just a few days before she married, she discovered a specially-designed bracelet from Charles to Camilla, engraved with their pet-name initials for each other, F & G, Fred and Gladys, apparently taken from a sketch from The Goon Show. According to royal sources, Camilla also presented Charles with a pair of cufflinks with the initials CC on them (representing Charles and Camilla) and Charles proudly wore them on honeymoon. Congratulations to all on the least subtle affair behaviour of all time!

The affair

It’s been reported that Charles and Camilla’s affair was rekindled in about 1986. By 1989, Diana plucked up the courage to confront Camilla about it, as detailed in the Diana’s tell-all for Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story and the tapes she recorded about her life, she said: “I know what’s going on between you and Charles and I just want you to know that. She said to me: ‘You’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got all the men in the world fall in love with you and you’ve got two beautiful children, what more do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want my husband.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way…and it must be hell for both of you. But I do know what’s going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.’”

Diana and Charles continued their turbulent relationship at the behest of the royal family until 1992, when they separated. Then the bombshell dropped: the Tampongate tapes. An amateur radio enthusiast had recorded Charles and Camilla in cringey sex chat back in 1989 in which Charles wondered out loud what it would be like to be Camilla’s tampon. The Daily Mirror not only published the transcript of their excruciating conversation, but set up phone lines to call and listen to the tape in full. Charles’ approval level with the public bottomed out, and in a bid to restore some of his reputation, he gave a 1994 TV interview to Jonathan Dimbleby in which he was asked if he was “faithful and honourable” to Diana. Charles replied: “Yes, absolutely… until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.” Again, this caused uproar as the king-in-waiting all but publicly confirmed adultery, but added of Camilla: “She has been a friend for a very long time – and will continue to be a friend for a very long time.”

The “just a friend line” was trundled out for quite some time, and Diana detailed her knowledge of the affair – and the emotional impact on her – in her hit-back 1995 Panorama interview. Earlier in 1995, the Parker Bowles’ announced their marriage was over, and given the amount of royal dirty laundry being aired by the Prince and Princess of Wales on national television, it was agreed by the Queen that the best thing to do was to allow Charles and Diana to formally divorce as well.

As portrayed in The Crown, a PR campaign was put into place to change the public’s perception of Camilla and the PR professional Mark Bolland was brought in to rehabilitate Camilla’s reputation. However, the tragic death of Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997 put the spotlight back on the monarchy again, as the public voiced their displeasure in the family’s reaction to Diana’s death.

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When did Charles and Camilla marry?

Things were kept low-key between Charles and Camilla around the time of Diana’s death, and Camilla’s first public engagement with Charles wasn’t until 1999, when they both attended a birthday party at London’s Ritz Hotel, alongside hundreds of global photographers to capture the moment.

A year later, Camilla was officially introduced to the Queen at a birthday party in Greece, and this was said to be the “seal of approval” from the Queen on her son and Camilla’s relationship. In February 2005, the couple announced their engagement.

There was a bit of outcry from some factions about whether the future head of the Church of England could marry a divorcee (honestly, in 2005?), but handily enough, the Queen managed to pull a few strings and the wedding went ahead on April 9, 2005. Some eyebrows were raised when neither the Queen nor Prince Philip attended the ceremony, to which royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell told the BBC: “We can say with some degree of confidence that the Queen has, in the past, not been the greatest fan of Mrs Parker Bowles, and that she’s had reservations about the implications of such a marriage for the monarchy. But she does take her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England very seriously, and has said that while she lends her support to the rest of the process she feels it would be inappropriate to attend that particular part of the wedding.” The newlyweds then honeymooned in Scotland.

In February 2022, a few months before the Queen died, she released a statement saying: “It is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort.” As Vogue noted at the time, it was “the ultimate stamp of approval from ‘the boss’” that had been achieved by Camilla’s long-game tactics of “public service and keeping one’s head down.” Camilla told the publication: “It’s not easy. I was scrutinised for such a long time that you just have to find a way to live with it. Nobody likes to be looked at all the time and, you know, criticised…But I think in the end, I sort of rise above it and get on with it. You’ve got to get on with life.” Or, as the memes would have it: “Queen Camilla, giving side pieces hope since 2005.”

Camilla became Queen Consort in September 2022 upon Charles’ accession as King, and the coronation of Charles III and Camilla will take place on May 6 2023.