She will never be Queen of England, nor England's Queen of Hearts, but Camilla Parker Bowles has at least gone one better than her best-known ancestor.

Mrs Parker Bowles is a direct descendant of Alice Keppel, a society matron who was the last official mistress of King Edward VII, the Prince of Wales's great-great-grandfather.

The pair met in 1898 when Edward, at 57, was still the Prince of Wales, three years before the death of his mother, Queen Victoria. Mrs Keppel, the wife of a dashing, but impoverished, officer in the Gordon Highlanders, was then aged 29.

It was a relationship that should have shocked polite society, but "Bertie" had already had a string of lovers and mistresses, including the Jersey actress Lilly Langtry and Jennie Jerome, an American beauty best known as Winston Churchill's mother.

Historians say that the Prince was captivated by the wit and beauty of the curvaceous Mrs Keppel. Mrs Keppel, for her part, had her head turned by the Prince's status and was quite happy to ignore his 48-inch waistline, voracious appetite and petulant pranks.

Edward, the oldest heir-apparent in British history, had been married since 1862 to Princess Alexandra, a Danish royal beauty who dutifully bore him six children but had been sidelined for years as the Prince enjoyed a string of conquests.

Mrs Keppel's relationship with Bertie carried on over the next 12 years - she often accompanied him on official trips while Alexandra was left behind - and she was even present at the King's deathbed in 1910 at his express written instruction.

Mrs Keppel died in September 1947 at the age of 78, without ever meeting her great-granddaughter Camilla Shand, who was born in London two months earlier to the Honourable Rosalind Cubitt (whose forebear Thomas Cubitt built much of London's West End) and Major Bruce Shand.

Camilla grew up in rural Sussex and was educated at Queens Gate School in South Kensington, before finishing school in Switzerland and France.

But Camilla was well aware of her family history, and royal mythology has it that when she first met Prince Charles at a polo match in the early 1970s, she said to him: "My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfathers were lovers. So how about it?"

The pair were said to have hit it off as quickly as their ancestors had seven decades earlier, sharing a sense of humour and a love of horses and country pursuits. The young prince was much taken by Camilla's unaffected exuberance, which contrasted with his own anxious diffidence.

Biographers say that the two soon became lovers, even though Camilla was already dating Andrew Parker Bowles, a young officer in the Household Cavalry who was a friend of the young Prince of Wales.

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