Meet Queen Camilla’s Children

Camilla Shand married British Army officer Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973. She had already dated and broken up with Prince Charles, but they remained friends. So, it raised a few eyebrows when the couple asked Prince Charles to be the godfather of the first child, Thomas Henry Charles, born December 18, 1974. Their daughter, Laura Rose, completed the family when she was born on January 1, 1978.

“People blame their upbringing for everything, but my childhood—and my sister’s—was absolutely idyllic,” Tom said in an interview with The Telegraph. The couple raised their children on large, shabby-chic estates in the Wiltshire countryside. According to Queen Consort, they were very close to Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot’s children, Ben, Alice, and Catherine. While Andrew was often away for work, Camilla was a lively, hands-on, easy-going mother. “Don’t worry, darling,” Tom once recalled her saying whenever he got in trouble.

According to Angela Levin, author of Camilla: From Outcast to Queen Consort, the children loved when Prince Charles, who they called “Sir,” would come to visit. “I’ve always adored my stepfather; he’s always been kind and good and a lovely man,” Tom has noted, per Camilla. “He is a man of warmth, intelligence and humanity.”

But occasionally the children were part of the dramas enfolding their parents’ lives, even if they didn’t know it. According to Penny Junor’s Queen Consort, Diana, already aware of Prince Charles and Camilla’s continuing relationship, firmly vetoed Tom serving as a page at their 1981 wedding. Prince Charles relented, and Tom instead attended the ceremony with his mother, according to Queen Consort, standing on his seat at times for a better view.

This innocence would be shattered in the early ’90s, when Prince Charles and Camilla’s affair became a worldwide scandal. “When it first started we thought it was entirely normal growing up to have five or six paparazzi hanging around—we would go up there with binoculars and say, ‘Oh, look, Mummy, there’s five today,’” Tom once recalled, according to Queen Consort. “They’re bullies…and they made you very angry. When you were 15 or 16 and you’re coming out of an airport and they were really winding you up, all I wanted to do was smack them in the face and beat the hell out of them. But you couldn’t do that.”