Davina Morley died at her home in Gloucestershire after a brief illness on September 2, 2026. She was 75. She was known then as Davina Sheffield, and in 1976 she was dating the future King Charles III, at the time Prince of Wales. The British press had widely tipped her as a possible royal bride.
Her three sons were at her bedside when she died. Confirmation came from them 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 the baronet Sir Berkeley Sheffield. The first Lord McGowan — the Scottish industrialist Harry McGowan, who led Imperial Chemical Industries for two decades — was the father of her mother, Agnes. 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. One of her cousins was Samantha Cameron, née Samantha Sheffield, married to former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Burglars murdered her mother at the family’s home in Oxfordshire on March 11, 1976. She was 62. 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 by her early 20s she was working in a dress shop. In late 1974 she went out to Saigon, in South Vietnam, to volunteer at an orphanage for young boys; photographs from 1975 show her working there. The advancing Vietcong forced her out only weeks after she arrived. A confident rider, she was photographed at the Cotswold Hunt cross-country riding event in 1979.
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 an invitation to Balmoral for the August Bank Holiday followed. She reportedly cleared the so-called Balmoral test there by rising early enough to see the shooting party off, 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 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. No other girlfriend, according to Anthony Holden, a biographer of Charles, pleased the prince as a public photographic subject the way she did. Charles was said to have pinned her photograph inside his locker while commanding the Royal Navy coastal minesweeper Bronington. Some 20 women reportedly dated him across the decade that preceded his marriage.
Accounts from the period portrayed a prince deeply taken with her, and those same accounts reported a warm view of her within his family. “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, and out of him came an account of the pair living together for about six months at a cottage he owned near Winchester. Royal protocol of the day demanded a bride with no such history, and the courtship was over. Nothing in it had been her doing.
Marriage and a Life Out of the Spotlight
She married Jonathan “Jake” Morley on December 21, 1981. He was a commodity broker in the City of London, an Old Etonian, and the son of Brigadier Michael Frederick Morley. It was his second marriage; his first, to the Hon. Kirsty Jane Aitken, 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 described Jake Morley as 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 from his first marriage, Dominic and Sebastian, according to a published death notice. A celebration of life service is set for November 2.