What Did Queen Camilla Do With Her First Engagement Ring From Andrew Parker Bowles?

A mix of fact and fiction suggests that King Charles III and Queen Camilla have been in love for most of their lives, despite being married to other people for much of that time. The royals, who dated before Charles married the late Princess Diana in 1981, were confidants and companions—and, per Diana’s infamous interview with Martin Bashir, much more than that—throughout the duration of both their first unions. By the time of their salacious 1986 affair, which resumed a relationship they first cultivated in 1970 after they were introduced by a mutual friends, Camilla was reportedly unhappy with Major Andrew Parker Bowles, the military man she married in 1973 (just a few years after she and Charles parted ways, when he went overseas to fulfill his duty of joining the Royal Navy). If the rumors are true, the beginning of Camilla and Andrew’s marriage was as tumultuous as its ending—so tumultuous, in fact, that it’s unlikely that he proposed traditionally with an engagement ring in tow.

Here’s how the story goes: Camilla and Andrew actually dated on and off throughout the 1960s, before Charles came into the picture. After the future king appeared to move on, the former couple reconciled—and by 1973, after almost a decade-long, albeit intermittent relationship, “pressure was building on Andrew Parker Bowles to make a commitment,” royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith wrote, per Town & Country. That pressure was primarily being applied by the couple’s fathers. “And so eventually, according to Andrew's cousin John Bowes Lyon, his father, Derek Parker Bowles, and Camilla's father, Bruce Shand, published an engagement notice in The Times for their children,” Sally explained. In short, the patriarchs forced Andrew’s hand to take Camilla’s—which calls his proposal, and whether or not he asked Camilla to marry him with a diamond or some other gemstone, into question.

Photo evidence (or a lack thereof!) supports that he proposed without a ring. When Camilla and Andrew tied the knot on July 4, 1973, in the society wedding of the season, she wore only a simple gold band; by the time of their union, it doesn’t appear as though Andrew ever presented his wife with a proposal piece. Of course, a lack of jewelry wasn’t an indicator of a lack of love. In fact, despite their unusual engagement, they were reportedly very taken with each other. “Camilla was very much in love with [Andrew]," the groom’s cousin told Sally. “Her parents were very keen that Andrew should marry her.”

Though little is known about whether or not Andrew added to Camilla’s left ring finger over the course of their 20-year-long marriage, she was photographed wearing a large piece of jewelry stacked over her wedding band towards its end, while attending the Queen's Cup polo match at Windsor, on June 7, 1992. The chunky blue topaz ring, which she had placed over the gold ring she slipped on when she first tied the knot in the 1970s, might have the same one she continued to wear after the couple divorced in 1994 (she was photographed wearing a similar style, still on that finger, a few years after the breakup). 

If this ultimately was her engagement ring from Andrew Parker Bowles, we then have our answer; she kept it (and continued to wear it) after the couple called it quits. She might even have still been wearing it when she and Prince Charles publicly reconciled—they announced their relationship to the public one year after Princess Diana’s death—in 1998. It’s just as possible that she passed it on to her and Andrew’s daughter, Laura, ahead of her wedding to Harry Lopes in 2006 (to the best of our knowledge, however, she has never been photographed wearing it).

Ultimately, though, that blue topaz completely faded from view when it was replaced with the engagement ring Charles presented Camilla with ahead of their 2005 nuptials. There was no question about that piece: The five-carat, emerald-cut diamond with baguettes on the side once belonged to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who he was very close to. Camilla has worn that ring from the moment they announced their engagement to the present day.