The harshest past of Queen Camilla has just come to light thanks to royal expert Valentine Low. The journalist has focused on a specific episode in the life of the wife of King Charles III that was especially painful for her.
His book covers this and other aspects of Camilla's life that show us a life full of difficulties and challenges. Even after becoming queen, her image continues to be the subject of debate and analysis.
Valentine Low brings to light the most painful episode in Queen Camilla's life
Valentine Low has brought to light an unknown episode from Queen Camilla's past. Low is a well-known expert on the British royal family whose latest work focuses on the wife of King Charles III. Thanks to his book Power and Palace, the journalist has made Camilla and the misfortunes she has suffered newsworthy.
Valentine reveals in his work the sad past of Queen Camilla and, specifically, talks about an episode that was especially painful for her. When the current Duchess of Cornwall was about 16 or 17 years old, she suffered an assault on a train traveling to Paddington.
Low recounts how a man attacked the now Queen of England and how she was able to free herself from her striker. "I did what my mother taught me, I took off a shoe and hit him with the heel," Camilla herself said about what happened. This and her attitude made it possible for the man to be arrested upon arrival at Paddington station.
There she found "a uniformed man" and, without thinking twice, she went to him. "She said to him: 'That man just attacked me,' and he was arrested immediately," they say. According to the book, the story is shared by Valentine Low thanks to what Boris Johnson recalled at a 2008 meeting.
The account reached Low through Johnson's former communications director, who reconstructed that moment. The truth is that Queen Camilla has never publicly shared this painful moment from her past. However, she has made sure that her experience has helped other victims by opening specialized centers for this type of incident.
The complicated life of Queen Camilla beyond Valentine Low's account
Valentine Low hasn't been the only one to bring to light the most complicated moments from Queen Camilla's past. Beyond the assault, Charles III's wife experienced difficult episodes before taking on her current role. She was a debutante in 1965 and studied in Switzerland and Paris, but her adolescence and youth were not free from personal conflicts and social repression.
She lost her mother in 1994, which marked an especially tough moment in her life. But what undoubtedly shaped her future was her relationship with then-Prince Charles. This was scandalously exposed during the 1990s, when images emerged that seriously damaged her public image.
Since then, she has been under scrutiny both publicly and within the royal family. The relationship with Elizabeth II was not particularly good, precisely because of the scandals of her romance with Charles, who was still married to Lady Di.
To this was added her divorce from British Army officer Andrew Parker Bowles, with whom she had two children. This was something Queen Elizabeth did not take particularly well. Nor did the children of the now King of England, who never accepted Camilla as their stepmother.
Now, thanks to Low, we know another episode in the turbulent and complicated life of Queen Camilla. An assault she managed to escape from on her own, which proves the resilience that the current Queen of England has always shown.