This Christmas there will be more place settings at the royal dinner table at Sandringham. For the first time, Queen Camilla’s children, Tom Parker Bowles and Laura Lopes, along with her five grandchildren, will reportedly join the royal family’s holiday festivities.

They will be a merry addition. Tom is a London party scene legend—a charming, aristocratic bon vivant of the old-school mode—outspoken, cynical, and wry. A prolific food writer and critic, and radio and tv personality, he has written many books including E Is for Eating: An Alphabet of Greed, The Year of Eating Dangerously, and Fortnum and Mason: Christmas and Other Winter Feasts. His sister, an art curator, while private, is known as a down-to-earth, gregarious, and warm woman, who is close to her mother.

Throughout it all, both Laura and Tom have been ferociously protective of their mother. “What pisses me off most of all is when someone who doesn’t know her says she’s been a bad mother,” Tom once said in an interview with The Telegraph. “A couple of times I’ve read how she’s put her children through this hell. She’s been an exemplary mother. She never judges, she’s very funny, she cooks the food I like and coming home is a joy. When I go back to Wiltshire for the weekend with my mother I feel cocooned, totally happy and safe.”

This loyalty has now been rewarded with a coveted invitation to spend Christmas at Sandringham. For King Charles and Queen Camilla, the blending of their two families on the holidays is no doubt a happy occasion. For Tom and Laura, it is a new chapter, after decades as supporting players in their mother’s dramatic trajectory. “My mother married into [the royal family],” Tom noted in an interview with Good Morning Britain. “She’s part of it. We’re the common children. We’re just on the side.”

Camilla Shand married British Army officer Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973. She had already dated and broken up with Prince Charles, but they remained friends. So, it raised a few eyebrows when the couple asked Prince Charles to be the godfather of the first child, Thomas Henry Charles, born December 18, 1974. Their daughter, Laura Rose, completed the family when she was born on January 1, 1978.

“People blame their upbringing for everything, but my childhood—and my sister’s—was absolutely idyllic,” Tom said in an interview with The Telegraph. The couple raised their children on large, shabby-chic estates in the Wiltshire countryside. According to Queen Consort, they were very close to Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot’s children, Ben, Alice, and Catherine. While Andrew was often away for work, Camilla was a lively, hands-on, easy-going mother. “Don’t worry, darling,” Tom once recalled her saying whenever he got in trouble.

According to Angela Levin, author of Camilla: From Outcast to Queen Consort, the children loved when Prince Charles, who they called “Sir,” would come to visit. “I’ve always adored my stepfather; he’s always been kind and good and a lovely man,” Tom has noted, per Camilla. “He is a man of warmth, intelligence and humanity.”

But occasionally the children were part of the dramas enfolding their parents’ lives, even if they didn’t know it. According to Penny Junor’s Queen Consort, Diana, already aware of Prince Charles and Camilla’s continuing relationship, firmly vetoed Tom serving as a page at their 1981 wedding. Prince Charles relented, and Tom instead attended the ceremony with his mother, according to Queen Consort, standing on his seat at times for a better view.

This innocence would be shattered in the early ’90s, when Prince Charles and Camilla’s affair became a worldwide scandal. “When it first started we thought it was entirely normal growing up to have five or six paparazzi hanging around—we would go up there with binoculars and say, ‘Oh, look, Mummy, there’s five today,’” Tom once recalled, according to Queen Consort. “They’re bullies…and they made you very angry. When you were 15 or 16 and you’re coming out of an airport and they were really winding you up, all I wanted to do was smack them in the face and beat the hell out of them. But you couldn’t do that.”

They found some solace at school, with Laura boarding at St. Mary’s in Shaftesbury, and Tom at Eton. “Friends and family were everything,” Tom said in an interview with The Telegraph. “At home there wasn’t a newspaper. At school, I’ve been lucky in having two or three friends—including my cousin Ben Elliot—who’ve been with me all the way through. By the time you are in your final year at Eton no little bugger is going to talk and if they do, friends would jump in. That gives you a security that runs deeper than anything.”

In 1993, the furor over their mother’s affair reached an all-time high when the infamous “Camillagate” tape was released, in which Tom made a cameo:

Camilla: “Can I talk to you, I hope, before those rampaging children…”

Charles: “What time do they come in?”

Camilla: “Well, usually Tom never wakes up at all, but as it’s his birthday tomorrow, he might just stagger out of bed. It won’t be before half past eight.”

Now a student at Oxford, Tom tried to avoid the uproar. “I sort of remember not looking at the paper,” he recalled in an interview with The Times. “Because, you know, Jesus, the things that we’ve all said to people that we love that or girlfriends or boyfriends that you wouldn’t want the world reading! I just felt pissed off. I wasn’t going to read that sort of stuff about my mother, just as much as she wouldn’t want to read it about me.”

More strife came in 1995 when Camilla and Andrew finally divorced. “Laura is very close to her father and was upset when her parents finally parted,” one source told the Daily Mail. “She has always resented the idea of another man taking her father’s place, even if he is a prince.”

Laura, a history of art and marketing major at Oxford Brookes University, allegedly clashed with her future stepbrother Prince William, as their parents’ relationship became more public following Princess Diana’s death. “William and Laura used to have terrible fights over who was to blame for their broken homes,” Katie Nicholl, Vanity Fair’s royal correspondent, writes in William and Harry: Behind the Palace Walls. “William would blame Camilla for all the hurt she had caused his mother, which would send Laura into a rage,” according to family friend, per Nicholl, “Laura was not having any of it. She would take a hard line and fire back at William: ‘Your father has ruined my life.’”

Tom acted out in other ways. In 1995, he was arrested at a nightclub for possession of marijuana and ecstasy (he was released with a police caution). Rumors of his drug use persisted, and in 1999 he was the victim of a sting set up by the tabloid News of the World, according to Queen Consort. “The paper had dispatched a pretty young female reporter undercover to the Cannes film festival … where Tom was working as a publicist,” Junor writes. “She said she was a friend of his cousin Emma Parker Bowles, and asked him if he knew where she could get some coke. He admitted he used it but couldn’t help.”

The headline blared “This is Camilla’s Son High on Coke,” according to Junor, featuring a picture of 24-year-old Tom looking disheveled. Tom took complete responsibility. “I was stupid, young, and I got caught. Tough,” he said to the Sunday Mirror. “The second time, I was just showing off to a pretty girl. Even when I took drugs I never sold any. Why would I?”

Tom found himself in the middle of a national uproar. The abuse heaped on his mother for years was now transferred to him. Public pundits claimed he must be kept away from influencing Queen Elizabeth’s grandchildren Prince William and Prince Harry at all costs, and Prince Charles apparently agreed, reportedly giving his sons a scared-straight lecture after the sting. He was also furious with Tom, telling him he had been a “bloody fool,” according to Junor’s Queen Consort.

But it seems the media overestimated his relationship with the princes. “I don’t think I became an elder brother to them at all,” Tom once noted to The Telegraph. “They are both incredibly nice, charming, well-mannered men and they have enough on their plate without me banging on about them.”

The furor died down, and Laura and Tom began to find their way. Laura worked at Tatler and Prince Charles also helped her obtain a job at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice so she could pursue her passion for art curation, according to the Daily Mail. “She always knew what she wanted,” a friend has said of Laura to the Daily Mail.

Both Laura and Tom became It people of the early 2000s social scene in London, though the demure Laura couldn’t keep up with her boisterous brother. “He always reminds me of Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh, he bounds around with enthusiasm,” one friend told Newsweek of Tom.

Tom also began to experience success in his career, working as a food columnist at Tatler. “I was naughty, partied a bit hard. When I was younger I got sacked all the time,” Tom said in 2017 to Stellar. “But I loved eating and could just about string a sentence together, so I thought I could write about food.”

Tom’s writing was vibrant, and his taste in food eclectic. “I find that you can learn more about other cultures through food than you can through history,” he noted to Town & Country. “You can get straight to the heart of the culture. Even if I don’t speak Arabic or Cantonese or very bad Spanish, you can still rub your tummy and smile and say ‘yum,’ and people will like you immediately. It cuts through all the crap basically, food.”

Their personal lives evolved as well. In 2005, Tom married editor and writer Sara Buys, at a society wedding whose guests reportedly included Hugh Grant, Mick Jagger, and Joanna Lumley.

That same year Camilla finally married Prince Charles, with her children by her side. Laura was reportedly wary of the hoopla surrounding the upcoming wedding. “She wanted to be abroad when the engagement was announced but events got ahead of her,” one friend told the Daily Mail. “She got into a bit of a tizz about it all. She really doesn’t like the attention.”

But as always Laura was there for Camilla. She stayed with her mother at Clarence House the night before the ceremony, according to Levin’s Camilla, and Tom acted as a witness at the wedding alongside Prince William. When asked if the rumors were true that he and Laura were given trust funds by their new stepfather he scoffed. “Absolute bollocks,” he previously joked to the Sunday Mirror. “I wish it were true. But I’ve got a mortgage to pay and I have to work for a living.”

A year later, Laura tied the knot with former Calvin Klein model turned chartered accountant Harry Lopes, the grandson of both Lord Astor of Hever and the 2nd Baron Roborough. The elegant wedding was attended by Prince Charles, Prince William, and Prince Harry. “I got married in May, surrounded by the smell of lily of the valley,” Laura gushed to Town & Country.

Like Tom, Laura’s career as an art curator and gallerist has continued to soar. She worked at Eleven Fine art gallery and currently presents exhibits (including the 2023 British Art Fair) as part of the curation team Barber Lopes. However, just recently she announced the closure of her boutique, Mojo & McCoy.

The siblings have also given Queen Camilla five grandchildren. Tom and Sara had two children, Lola was born in 2007 and Frederick followed in 2010. In 2008, Laura and Harry welcomed Eliza. Their twins, Gus and Louis, came a year later. Laura was “rather thrown” when she was told she was having twins but not her mother. “We have never had them in the family before and I for one can’t wait,” Queen Camilla said at the time to the Daily Mail.

The queen is said to be a doting grandmother and has admitted that she spoils them, giving them “more of the things that their parents forbid them to have.”

But there has been heartbreak in the family in recent years. Queen Camilla’s beloved brother, Mark, a legendary raconteur travel writer and, according to Queen Consort, a “hero” to his nephew Tom, died in a freak accident in 2014. Tom and Sara separated in 2018 and later finalized their divorce. In 2021, Tom was reportedly “devastated” when his girlfriend, journalist Alice Procope, died of cancer at the age of 42.

Tom and Laura, and their peculiar position as royal stepchildren, again became a topic upon the accession of their stepfather, Charles, in 2022. Again, Tom had to shoot down rumors he and Laura would be given titles or money on the occasion. “You’re not going to find us with great estates and being called the duke of whatever,” he said at the time. “No. That would be appalling.”

But Queen Camilla has included her family in more royal occasions. Laura is often seen accompanying Camilla at events and is so entwined with her mother that she has been accused of copying her style. She also serves as a voice of reason. According to Junor’s Queen Consort, Laura is “the only person [Camilla] is afraid of.”

Queen Camilla also included her family in the pomp and circumstance of the coronation. Her grandsons served as pages of honor alongside Prince George.

This year, as Camilla has weathered allegations leveled at her in Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, Tom, as always, defended his mother; this time with measured reserve. “I think change happens, but I don’t care what anyone says—this wasn’t any sort of endgame,” he noted. “She married the person she loved and this is what happened.”

But despite Laura’s insistence on a normal, private life, and Tom’s rather flippant attitude towards being a peripheral branch on the royal family tree, Tom is aware that his status comes with some advantage. In the fall of 2023, he announced that his new book Cooking and the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to Charles III, will be published in the fall of 2024. “Well,” he cheekily tweeted, “they say you write what you (sort of) know.”