Davina Morley, who as Davina Sheffield dated the future King Charles III in 1976, when he was Prince of Wales, and was widely tipped in the British press as a possible royal bride, has died at 75 after a brief illness.
She died on September 2, with her three sons at her bedside, and her family confirmed the death on Friday, September 11.
Born Davina Mary Sheffield on March 1, 1951, she was the younger of two daughters of Captain George Berkeley Sheffield, a Grenadier Guards officer and a younger son of the baronet Sir Berkeley Sheffield. Her mother, Agnes, was a daughter of the first Lord McGowan — the Scottish industrialist Harry McGowan, who led Imperial Chemical Industries for two decades. Her family was neither royal nor of ancient aristocratic lineage, but it carried social standing: she was a cousin of Samantha Cameron, born Samantha Sheffield, the wife of former Prime Minister David Cameron, and the Sheffield line traces back to King Charles II.
Early in 1976, her mother was murdered by burglars at the family’s home in Oxfordshire. She was 62. The romance with the prince was reported to have grown stronger in the months that followed.
Early Life and a Chance Meeting
After leaving school she took part in the debutante season, and by her early 20s she was working in a dress shop. In late 1974 she traveled to Saigon, in South Vietnam, to volunteer at an orphanage for young boys; photographs from 1975 show her at work there. She left only weeks after arriving, forced out by the advancing Vietcong. A confident rider, she was photographed at the Cotswold Hunt cross-country riding event in 1979.
The two were introduced in 1974 at a dinner hosted by Lady Jane Wellesley, whose father was the 8th Duke of Wellington and who had herself had a short-lived romance with the prince the previous year, in 1973. Penny Junor, a biographer of Charles, wrote that Sheffield hesitated at first because she already had a boyfriend. The prince invited her to Balmoral for the August Bank Holiday, where she was reported to have passed the so-called Balmoral test by rising early enough to see the shooting party off.
A Courtship in the Public Eye
By 1976 the two were being photographed together regularly: at Smith’s Lawn, at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, carriage-driving at Windsor and side by side in the prince’s open-top Aston Martin. Anthony Holden, another biographer of Charles, has said she was the only girlfriend the prince was happy to be pictured with in public. While commanding the Royal Navy coastal minesweeper Bronington, Charles was said to have pinned her photograph inside his locker. He was reported to have dated some 20 women in the decade before his marriage.
Accounts from the period described the prince as deeply taken with her and said his family viewed her warmly. “She and Charles were wonderful together,” a friend told the Daily Mail. Royal author Michael Rhodes described her as “a great match” for the future king. Of the women linked to Charles before his marriage, she was regarded as the most plausible future queen, and by October 1976 press reports held that an engagement announcement was imminent.
The Disclosure That Ended It
The relationship collapsed after a former boyfriend, the Old Harrovian powerboat racer James Beard, disclosed publicly that he and Sheffield had shared a home. Reporters from the News of the World tracked Beard down and drew from him an account of living with her at a cottage he owned near Winchester. Royal protocol of the day demanded a bride with no such history, and the courtship was over. Obituary writers have since suggested that, painful and embarrassing as the rupture was at the time, she may have had reason in hindsight to count herself fortunate.
Marriage and a Life Out of the Spotlight
In 1981 she married Jonathan “Jake” Morley, an Old Etonian commodity broker in the City of London and the son of a brigadier-general. It was the same year Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. Friends and royal correspondents have described Jake Morley as the “love of her life.”
The couple settled on a large estate in Yorkshire, far from the press attention that had followed her in the 1970s. Jake Morley died in April 2022 at the age of 80.
Davina Morley is survived by her three sons and by two stepsons. Her family said a celebration of life service is being arranged for November.