House Where Duchess of Cornwall Grew Up on the Market for £3.25M - Will Charles Buy It?

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Actor James Wilby's home  is clearly one people don't like to leave. James, best known for his aristocratic roles in Maurice, Gosford Park and  A Handful Of Dust, has lived here for 18 years.  He and his wife Shana brought up their four children in the one-time rectory set in five acres at the foot of the South Downs in East Sussex. 

And they are not the only long-term residents in the Grade II listed house's history. They bought it from Camilla Parker Bowles's father Major Bruce Shand, then a widower, whose home it was for 45 years.

Camilla has described her childhood here  as 'perfect in every way'. It's easy to imagine a perfect childhood here.  The Laines, on the edge of Plumpton village near Lewes, has a paddock, wide lawns for playing games, a secret garden, a swimming pool and tennis court.

More: Duchess of Cornwall's childhood home on the market for £3.25m | Mail Online

Cindy

[Limabeany]

Will Prince Charles buy Camilla house where her brother nearly murdered her? | Mail Online

This is the house where she was nearly murdered. The home where, legend has it, her father carpeted Prince Charles and thundered: 'What are your intentions towards my daughter?'
A mansion chock-full of royal secrets, but also the place which retains fondest memories in the heart of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

It has just been put on the market and the big question is — will Charles buy it back for his wife? The Laines, a seven-bedroom former rectory near Plumpton, East Sussex, is for sale at £3.25 million, 18 years after it passed out of Camilla's family hands. It's a price Charles can afford — his Duchy of Cornwall turned a £19 million profit last year.

It was from here that Camilla, aged four-and-a-half, started out for her first school, Dumbrell's — a scary Victorian establishment which would make Harry Potter's Hogwarts seem like a summer holiday.
'The place was a time capsule, frozen in the days of Queen Victoria, grimly hanging on to values and virtues which had long since perished,' remembered one old girl.

Arriving at such a tender age, Camilla was terrified by the large 'crucified' bat with wings outstretched which dominated the entrance hall.

There was no central heating in the bedrooms, and on winter mornings the ice had to be cracked in the washing-water ewers; cold baths were the year-round norm. Wellington boots were worn at all times because it was said the orchard was permanently infested with snakes.

The Deb of the Year that year was not Camilla, but a girl called Lady Mary Gaye Curzon, daughter of the 6th Earl Howe and not only titled and loaded, but dazzlingly beautiful, too.

Girls such as 'Milla', as she was briefly known around that time, could not hold a candle to Mary Gaye's luminosity. Though fast-forward nearly half a century — with Mary Gaye's daughter Cressida Bonas and Camilla's stepson Prince Harry in a failed relationship (and Mary Gaye's other daughter Isabella in an unsuccessful try-out with Prince William) — and of these two debutante rivals, who, in the long run, burned the brighter?

Before long, Camilla was preparing for marriage — gels didn't hang around in those days — and thus it was dashed inconvenient, having announced her engagement to cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles, to discover the Heir to the Throne had fallen in love with her. Still, Camilla pluckily went ahead with Plan A, and the rest is history.

The Laines wasn't quite done with history yet. Prince Charles came to visit, both before Camilla's marriage and also later while on shore posting at Portsmouth during his Royal Navy service in the early Seventies.

However, it was at Camilla's grandmother's pile, Hall Place at West Meon, where the couple made their secret assignations — the butler later recalling them in the garden 'up against a tree doing what Lady Chatterley enjoyed best'.

But it was to take many years for the public to learn of this clandestine relationship, and then only through the broadcasting of the Camillagate Tapes which blew apart any pretence that the marriage of either party was rock-solid.

Camilla came under intense public scrutiny — to a distressing degree — and it is then, it was claimed, that Major Shand hauled the Prince to The Laines to give him a carpeting.