Queen Camilla left school with one O-level and ended up crowned in Westminster Abbey
Camilla Shand left her London school in 1964 with a single O-level; her parents saw no need for her to stay on for A-levels. She went to a Swiss finishing school, did secretarial jobs, and was reportedly sacked from one for arriving late after a dance. In May 2023 she was crowned queen beside Charles III.
She was born on 17 July 1947, the eldest child of Major Bruce Shand, an army officer turned wine merchant, and grew up between a country house in East Sussex and a home in South Kensington. Her father read to her constantly, making her a keen reader, and she rode in Pony Club camps from a young age. Biographer Gyles Brandreth notes that her upbringing is often called Enid Blyton-like but was in truth far grander, with staff in the house and garden. One of her great-grandmothers, Alice Keppel, had been a mistress of Edward VII.
After Queen's Gate School, where the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald taught her French and remembered her as bright and lively, she studied in Switzerland and spent six months on French literature in Paris. She was one of 311 debutantes in 1965. She painted, though she admitted most of it ended up in the bin, and loved fishing and gardening.
In 1973 she married Andrew Parker Bowles, a cavalry officer, in what was called the society wedding of the year, with 800 guests. They had two children, Tom and Laura, and divorced in 1995. Her relationship with Charles, whom she met in the early 1970s, ran through both their first marriages and drew intense press attention in the 1990s. Most royal biographers agree that palace opinion of the time would not have allowed him to marry her then.
They finally married in 2005 at the Windsor Guildhall, followed by a televised blessing at St George's Chapel, and she was styled Duchess of Cornwall until Charles became king on 8 September 2022. Her best-known cause is osteoporosis, which her mother died from in 1994; she has campaigned on it since that year, alongside literacy, animal welfare and support for survivors of sexual abuse.
Source: Queen Camilla
