Queen Camilla

She is the love of Charles's life, his confidante since they were young and his wife of 17 years. And now, she is his Queen Consort. The public has got used to seeing Camilla by her husband's side at key national and international events and celebrations, but as she has admitted, it has been far from easy. Few women have been as publicly vilified as Camilla Parker Bowles. She was "the other woman" in the marriage break-up of the century, endlessly compared to Diana, Princess of Wales. In choosing Charles, she upended her life. For years she was hounded by the press, her character and appearance relentlessly attacked. But she weathered the storm and gradually cemented her position as the most senior female member of the Royal Family. It has been quite a journey for the woman who, it is said, Prince Charles immediately fell for when they met in their early 20s. Full acceptance from Queen Elizabeth II took time, but in her final years she was unequivocal in her support for Camilla. The new Queen may never achieve full acceptance from the public, but as she said herself, in an interview with Vogue magazine earlier this year: "I sort of rise above it and get on with it. You've got to get on with life." Marrying the heir to the throne would not have been the future predicted for Camilla Rosemary Shand, who was born on 17 July 1947. Her family were upper-class, wealthy and well-connected, but definitely not royal. She grew up in a close-knit, loving environment, playing with her brother and sister on a picturesque family estate in Sussex. Her father, Bruce Shand, a retired Army officer, liked to read her bedtime stories, and her mother, Rosalind, ferried the children to school, activities, and the beach. It was a very different childhood to that of Charles, who had long periods of time without his parents as they travelled the world. A finishing school in Switzerland prepared Camilla for life as a debutante in London society. She was popular, and from the mid-60s she was in an on-off relationship with a Household Cavalry officer called Andrew Parker Bowles. In the early 1970s she was introduced to the young Prince Charles. According to Jonathan Dimbleby, who wrote a biography of the prince, "she was affectionate, she was unassuming, and - with all the intensity of first love - he lost his heart to her almost at once". But the timing was not right. Charles was still in his early 20s and pursuing a career in the Navy. He set off on an eight-month deployment overseas in late 1972. And while he was away, Andrew proposed to Camilla, and she accepted. Why not wait for Charles to ask? Friends have speculated she simply never saw herself as Queen material. However spurned Charles might have felt, they continued to be a part of each other's lives. They moved in the same social circles, Charles and Andrew played polo together, and the couple asked Charles to be godfather to their first child, Tom. Photographs of Charles and Camilla at polo meets show a relaxed intimacy. By the summer of 1981, Charles had met and proposed to the young Lady Diana Spencer. Still Camilla was a part of his life. In Diana: Her True Story, author Andrew Morton detailed how Diana almost called off the wedding two days before it was due to take place after finding a bracelet Charles had had made for Camilla engraved with the letters "F" and "G" - their pet names for each other were Fred and Gladys. That Diana struggled with Camilla's relationship with her husband is without question. Charles insisted that they only rekindled their romance when his marriage had "irretrievably broken down". But as Diana so memorably stated in the now-discredited 1995 Panorama interview "there were three of us in this marriage". As both Charles and Camilla's marriages deteriorated, some of the headlines were excruciating, perhaps none more so than the details of a late night phone call secretly recorded in 1989 and made public four years later. Charles's expressed wish to be