Queen Camilla

1947 – · Generation XXXVIII · Queen consort · House of Windsor

Queen Camilla was born Camilla Rosemary Shand on 17 July 1947 at King’s College Hospital in London. She was the first of three children born to Major Bruce Shand, an army officer who later went into the wine trade, and his wife Rosalind, a daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe. Her great-grandmother Alice Keppel had been a mistress of Edward VII. From 1951 the family lived in East Sussex, with a house in South Kensington as well, and Camilla grew up riding, reading and keeping dogs. She was taught at Dumbrells in Sussex and at Queen’s Gate School in South Kensington, then finished her education at Mon Fertile in Switzerland and the Institut Britannique in Paris. Her sister is Annabel Elliot, and her brother, the conservationist Mark Shand, died in 2014.

In 1973 she married Andrew Parker Bowles, a British Army officer, and they made their home in Wiltshire. They had two children, Tom in 1974 and Laura in 1978, and the marriage was dissolved in 1995. She had reportedly met Prince Charles in the early 1970s, though accounts differ on the occasion, and they had a relationship before her marriage. According to Britannica it had resumed by 1986, while both were married. It became public in 1992 and 1993 and was reported around the world, and in a 1994 television documentary made with Jonathan Dimbleby Charles acknowledged it, saying it had begun again only after his own marriage had irretrievably broken down.

Her best-known cause began with loss. Her mother died of osteoporosis in 1994, eight years after her grandmother had died of the same disease, and Camilla joined the National Osteoporosis Society that year, becoming its patron in 1997 and its president in 2001. She and Charles married in a civil ceremony at the Guildhall in Windsor on 9 April 2005, followed by a service of prayer and dedication at St George’s Chapel attended by Elizabeth II, who gave the reception at Windsor Castle. For the next seventeen years she was known as the Duchess of Cornwall. Elizabeth II made her a Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in 2012, a privy counsellor in 2016 and a Royal Lady of the Garter in 2022.

At the time of the 2005 wedding Clarence House said she intended to be known as princess consort once Charles became king. In her Accession Day message of 2022, however, Elizabeth II said it was her sincere wish that Camilla be known as queen consort. She became queen consort on 8 September 2022, when Charles succeeded his mother, and was crowned beside him at Westminster Abbey on 6 May 2023. Since the coronation she has been styled Her Majesty The Queen. The King has since appointed her a Lady of the Thistle (2023) and Grand Master of the Order of the British Empire (2024), and after the accession she replaced the traditional ladies-in-waiting with “queen’s companions”, whose duties are lighter and less formal.

As of 2025 the Royal Family’s website lists her as patron or president of more than a hundred charities. Beyond osteoporosis, her work centres on literacy, animal welfare and support for survivors of rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence, a cause she took up after visiting rape crisis centres in 2009. An online book club she started in January 2021 became a charity, the Queen’s Reading Room, in 2023, with an annual festival first held at Hampton Court Palace. She has five grandchildren and five step-grandchildren.

Place in the family

Queen Camilla married King Charles III, a son of Queen Elizabeth II.

Images

As Duchess of Cornwall at a Commonwealth Big Lunch event at Barn Croft Primary School, March 2018 (The Big Lunch, CC BY-SA 2.0)
With King Charles III in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 22 October 2024 (NSW Government, CC BY 4.0)

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Partners

Married King Charles III (1948 – ) in 2005

Life

1947 — Born
2005 — Married Charles III

Sources

Queen Camilla · Wikipedia
The Queen · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
Camilla, queen consort of the United Kingdom · Encyclopaedia Britannica