Davina Morley died at 75 on September 2, 2026, after a brief illness. She had recently lived in Gloucestershire. Previously known as Davina Sheffield, she was dating the future King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, in 1976. The British press had widely tipped her as a possible royal bride.
Her three sons — Tom, Billy and Henry — were at her bedside when she died. The death was made public on Friday, September 11.
Born Davina Mary Sheffield on March 1, 1951, she arrived as the younger of two daughters. Her father, Captain George Berkeley Sheffield, served as an officer in the Grenadier Guards and was a younger son of Sir Berkeley Sheffield, 6th Baronet. Her mother, Agnes, was the daughter of the first Lord McGowan — the Scottish industrialist Harry McGowan, who led Imperial Chemical Industries for two decades. The family was neither royal nor of ancient aristocratic lineage, but it carried social standing. Her fifth great-grandfather, John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, built Buckingham House in 1703, the building that became Buckingham Palace; he married Catherine Darnley, an illegitimate daughter of King James II. She was a cousin of Samantha Cameron, née Samantha Sheffield, who married former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Burglars murdered her 62-year-old mother at the family’s home in Oxfordshire on March 11, 1976. The romance with the prince was reported to have grown stronger over the months that followed.
Early Life and a Chance Meeting
She took part in the debutante season after leaving school, and was working in a dress shop by her early 20s. In 1975 she volunteered at an orphanage for young boys in Saigon, in South Vietnam, and left within weeks as advancing North Vietnamese forces closed on the city. Saigon fell that April.
Lady Jane Wellesley, whose father was the 8th Duke of Wellington, introduced the pair at a dinner in 1974; the prince and Wellesley had conducted their own short-lived romance the previous year. Sheffield turned the prince down at first: she was seeing the powerboat racer James Beard, whose account of that relationship would later end her own with Charles. He persisted, and she accepted an invitation to Balmoral for a bank holiday. She reportedly cleared the so-called Balmoral test there by rising early enough to see the guns off in the morning, and she won over the Queen Mother, who was said to have greatly enjoyed her company.
A Courtship in the Public Eye
Photographers were catching the two together on a regular basis by 1976, at polo grounds and side by side in the prince’s open-top Aston Martin. Anthony Holden, a biographer of Charles, wrote that she was the only girlfriend he was happy to be photographed with in public. The prince spent most of that year in command of the Royal Navy coastal minesweeper Bronington, taking the ship over in February and giving it up that December. Some 20 women reportedly dated him across the decade that preceded his marriage.
Reporters at the time described a prince deeply taken with her, and a family that had warmed to her. “She and Charles were wonderful together,” a friend told the Daily Mail. Observers ranked her the most plausible future queen among the women linked to Charles before his marriage, and press reports by October 1976 held that an engagement announcement was imminent.
The Disclosure That Ended It
The man she had turned Charles down for ended it. Reporters from the News of the World tracked down James Beard, the Old Harrovian powerboat racer, who gave them an account of the pair living together at a cottage near Winchester. Royal protocol of the day demanded an unblemished bride, and the courtship was over. She had done nothing to it.
Marriage and a Life Out of the Spotlight
She married Jonathan “Jake” Morley, an Old Etonian and a commodity broker in the City of London, on December 21, 1981. His father was Brigadier Michael Frederick Morley. It was his second marriage; his first, to the Hon. Kirsty Jane Aitken in 1966, had ended in divorce in 1973 and produced two sons. Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in the same year Davina married Jake Morley. Friends and royal correspondents have called Jake Morley the love of her life.
The couple made their home on a large estate in Yorkshire, well clear of the press attention that had trailed her through the 1970s, and later settled in Gloucestershire. Jake Morley was 80 when he died on April 18, 2022.
Davina Morley is survived by her three sons with him — Thomas, born in 1983, William in 1984 and Henry in 1987 — and by her two stepsons, Dominic and Sebastian. A celebration of life service is set for November 2.
