Davina Morley, who as Davina Sheffield dated the future King Charles III in 1976, when he was Prince of Wales, and who was widely tipped in the British press as a possible royal bride, has died at 75 after a brief illness. Her three sons were with her when she died on September 2, 2026, and they confirmed the death, which the family announced on Friday, September 11.
Captain George Berkeley Sheffield, a Grenadier Guards officer and a younger son of the baronet Sir Berkeley Sheffield, had two daughters, and Davina Mary Sheffield, born March 1, 1951, was the younger of them. Her mother, Agnes, was a daughter of the first Lord McGowan — Harry McGowan, the Scottish industrialist who spent two decades at the head of Imperial Chemical Industries. The family was neither royal nor of ancient aristocratic lineage, yet it carried social standing: the Sheffield line traces back to King Charles II, and she was a cousin of Samantha Cameron, born Samantha Sheffield, the wife of former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Burglars murdered her mother, then 62, at the family’s home in Oxfordshire in February 1976. In the months that followed, the romance with the prince was reported to have grown stronger.
Early Years and a Chance Meeting
She took part in the debutante season after leaving school, and by her early 20s she had a job in a dress shop. Late in 1974 she traveled to Saigon, in South Vietnam, to volunteer at an orphanage for young boys, and photographs from 1975 show her at work there. Her stay ran only weeks before the advancing Vietcong forced her out. A confident rider, she was photographed at the Cotswold Hunt cross-country riding event in 1979.
Lady Jane Wellesley, a daughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington, introduced the two at a dinner in 1974, having had her own 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 was seeing someone. Charles invited her to Balmoral for the August Bank Holiday, and she was reported to have passed the so-called Balmoral test there by rising early enough to see the shooting party off.
A Romance Played Out in Public
Photographers caught the pair together again and again through 1976 — at the Guards Polo Club’s Smith’s Lawn in Windsor, carriage-driving at Windsor and sitting side by side in the prince’s open-top Aston Martin. Charles also took her as his guest to a wedding, and she was seen sitting with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at an equestrian event; at Balmoral she met the Queen Mother and reportedly won her approval. Royal watchers at the time called her Charles’s “soulmate.” Anthony Holden, another biographer of Charles, has said she was the only girlfriend the prince was happy to be pictured with in public. Charles was said to have pinned her photograph inside his locker while he commanded the Royal Navy coastal minesweeper Bronington. In the decade before his marriage he was reported to have dated some 20 women.
Accounts from the period had the prince deeply taken with her, and his family warm toward her. “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 by October 1976 press reports held that an engagement announcement was imminent.
The Revelation That Ended the Romance
It fell apart after a former boyfriend, the Old Harrovian powerboat racer James Beard, was tracked down by News of the World reporters and, in The Telegraph’s account of the episode, apparently conned into revealing that he and Sheffield had had a “full sexual relationship” while living together at a cottage he owned near Winchester. Royal protocol of the day demanded a bride with no such history, and the courtship was over. It was the same convention that had kept Charles from marrying Camilla Shand, who wed Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973 — a relationship his biographers say he never truly got over.
Marriage and Life Away From the Spotlight
In 1981, the year Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, she married Jonathan “Jake” Morley, an Old Etonian commodity broker in the City of London and the son of a brigadier-general. Friends and royal correspondents have described Jake Morley as the “love of her life.”
They made their home 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 leaves her three sons and two stepsons. A celebration of life service is planned for November 2.
