Davina Morley — known as Davina Sheffield in 1976, when she dated the future King Charles III while he was Prince of Wales — has died at 75 after a brief illness, having been widely tipped in the British press as a possible royal bride. Her three sons were at her bedside when she died on September 2, and her family confirmed the death on Friday, September 11.
She was born Davina Mary Sheffield on March 1, 1951, the younger of two daughters of Captain George Berkeley Sheffield, a Grenadier Guards officer and a younger son of the baronet Sir Berkeley Sheffield. Agnes, her mother, was a daughter of the first Lord McGowan — Harry McGowan, the Scottish industrialist who led Imperial Chemical Industries for two decades. The family had neither royal blood nor an ancient aristocratic lineage, though it carried real social standing: the Sheffield line traces back to King Charles II, and she counted Samantha Cameron — born Samantha Sheffield, and the wife of former Prime Minister David Cameron — as a cousin.
In February 1976, burglars murdered her mother at the family’s home in Oxfordshire, an attack described as a “brutal murder.” She was 62. In the months that followed, her romance with the prince was reported to have grown stronger.
Early Life and a Chance Meeting
She joined the debutante season after leaving school, and she was working in a dress shop by her early 20s. 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. The advancing Vietcong forced her out only weeks after she arrived. She rode confidently, and photographers caught her at the Cotswold Hunt cross-country riding event in 1979.
Lady Jane Wellesley introduced the two over dinner in 1974. Her father was the 8th Duke of Wellington, and she had had a short-lived romance with the prince the previous year, in 1973. Sheffield was already seeing someone and hesitated at first, according to Penny Junor, a biographer of Charles. The prince then invited her to Balmoral for the August Bank Holiday, where she was reported to have passed the so-called Balmoral test, rising early enough to see the shooting party off.
A Courtship in the Public Eye
Photographers caught the pair together again and again through 1976: 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. Of all the prince’s girlfriends, according to Anthony Holden, another biographer of Charles, she was the only one he was happy to be pictured with in public. Charles, then commanding the Royal Navy coastal minesweeper Bronington, was said to have pinned her photograph inside his locker. In the decade before his marriage, he was reported to have dated some 20 women.
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. Among the women linked to Charles before his marriage, she was regarded as the most plausible future queen, and press reports by October 1976 held that an engagement announcement was imminent.
The Disclosure That Ended It
What ended the courtship was a disclosure by a former boyfriend, the Old Harrovian powerboat racer Jake Beard. The Telegraph’s obituary says in its standfirst: “When Jake Beard revealed that he had had a ‘full sexual relationship’ with Davina, Palace protocol forbade a royal marriage.” 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.
Marriage and a Life Out of the Spotlight
Her husband, Jonathan “Jake” Morley, was an Old Etonian and a brigadier-general’s son who worked as a commodity broker in the City of London. They married in 1981, the same year Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. Friends, along with royal correspondents, have described him as the “love of her life.”
The couple settled on a large estate in Yorkshire, well away from the press attention that had followed her in the 1970s. Jake Morley died in April 2022 at the age of 80.
She is survived by her three sons with Jake Morley — Thomas, Dominic and Sebastian — and by two stepsons. Her family said a celebration of life service is being arranged for November.
A royal insider told New Idea, in comments published September 14, how Queen Camilla reacted to the press coverage of the old romance. “Camilla was profoundly upset to hear Davina described as Charles’s soulmate,” the insider said, adding: “It was a shock to hear another woman be described as his ‘soulmate’. For the past 30 years, Charles has told her in no uncertain terms that she was his ‘soulmate’.”
