Could Camilla’s grandfather’s brutal attack on his pregnant wife be the driving force behind the Queen’s heartfelt war against domestic violence?

It is the cause closest to Queen Camilla’s heart. She has been speaking out against domestic violence for more than a decade, and almost her first act upon becoming queen was to convene a conference at Buckingham Palace to draw the world’s attention to the rising violence against women.

Her new status meant her message was heard by a powerful audience, including government ministers such as Interior Secretary Suella Braverman and Health Minister Steve Barclay, the Queens of Jordan and Belgium, Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska and anti- violence activist and ex-Spice Girl Melanie Brown.

In a candid speech, Camilla spoke of “the global pandemic of violence against women” and described her grief at meeting many of the victims and their families. Her sincerity and passion were evident.

Yet it has never been fully explained why Camilla has such a strong opinion on this issue – perhaps above all others.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal one possible reason: a horrific episode of domestic violence in her own family that devastated her father’s life, leaving him at times parentless and in the misery of his childhood.

Major Bruce Shand, who died in 2006 at the age of 89, was the son of writer Philip Morton Shand and his first wife Edith.

Morton, as he preferred to be called, came from a wealthy background and was educated at Eton and Cambridge, the Sorbonne and the University of Heidelberg.

Edith came from a different class, a descendant of Essex farmers who grew up in an old-fashioned London suburb.

It was a strange match, but it was wartime. The couple married in April 1916. Edith soon became pregnant.

But as disturbing documents pulled from the records of the National Archives by The Mail on Sunday last week show, Camilla’s paternal grandfather was a wife beater and serial womanizer, leaving a trail of destruction in three marriages.

On August 17, 1916, when Edith was four months pregnant with the baby who would become Camilla’s father, her husband assaulted her at their country house overlooking Battersea Park in southwest London.

Official divorce papers (Edith sued for divorce in 1919) state: “The said Philip Morton Shand violently assaulted (his wife) by dragging her by the arms from her bed to a guest room in her nightgown, bruising her breasts and knees and striking her against hitting her head, causing (she) to faint.

“At the time (she) was pregnant, and in view of her condition she was transferred by (Shand’s) father on doctor’s advice to his home in Edwardes Place.”

Not surprisingly, after such cruelty, the marriage was over after just a few short months.

Shand joined the Royal Fusiliers – “a short and unremarkable service” as he described it – while Edith was left alone to give birth to their son.

Three years later, when Shand returned from the war, he arranged what men of his class did to provide grounds for divorce: he allowed himself to be discovered by a private detective in a room at London’s Strand Palace Hotel with an unknown woman.

However, this was not an orchestrated one-night stand with a lady of easy virtue to satisfy the divorce judge’s requirements. Shand spent a long and enjoyable weekend with the woman.

So when the case went to court, the horrific episode of domestic violence was overshadowed by the (at the time) much more socially unacceptable event of being found in bed with another woman.

Shand himself was an unrepentant, complex character.

“Extroverted, storyteller, and eccentric, he irritated many with his outspokenness,” wrote one biographer.

His impatience and intolerance were legendary. And he bore all the hallmarks of upper-middle-class bigotry — he was racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic — though he was undeniably smart.”

His friend Sir John Betjeman, later Poet Laureate, chose his words carefully when contributing to Morton’s 1960 obituary in The Times.

“His fastidiousness, honest expression and sharp wit separated him from the crowd,” he wrote—in other words, poetic license for “he was a reprehensible man.” The consequences of this lack of self-control were significant.

During the time Morton Shand was at war, his estranged wife Edith – Camilla’s grandmother – fell in love with a shocked former infantry officer named Charles Tippet and, after her eventual divorce from Shand, they married.

It meant her son Bruce had a troubled, unhappy and itinerant childhood, living with his grandparents some of the time, other times with his mother and stepfather.

In his memoir, titled Previous Engagements, he makes no mention of his mother and barely acknowledges his father. In his mind he had grown up as an orphan.

His grandparents paid for him to attend rugby school, which he said he “detested”. He joined the army at the age of 18, where he finally found the family framework he believed he had been denied.

Meanwhile, Bruce’s bully father blundered on and married the daughter of an Indian police administrator.

That union lasted a few years and she successfully sued for divorce in 1924 on the grounds of “cruelty, adultery and desertion.”

There was a daughter from the marriage – Camilla’s half-aunt Doris – who is believed never to have met her father.

Morton Shand breathed shortly after this second divorce, but then, while living in France, met a wealthy 29-year-old who rejoiced in the name of Georgette Elisabeth Edmée Thérèse Avril.

At their wedding in Lyon, Morton described himself as a director of a company, in addition to the many other labels he had given himself over the years – including writer, journalist, private secretary and literary agent.

Georgette’s father owned a velvet factory and Morton was put on the board – but even that could not ensure his loyalty.

After the couple moved to London, he began an affair with the wife of a retired naval officer and shared a flat with her not far from his matrimonial home.

At that time, his mistress was pregnant. He may have been the girl’s father. Anyway, Morton and the woman had a daughter together – who grew up to be the wife of Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe.

When the inevitable divorce proceedings between Shand and Georgette came along, the same old tale of adultery was easily proven – though no cruelty involved.

At the High Court divorce hearing, the judge, Lord Merrivale, cracked Shand: “There is, of course, no legal means of preventing a man like (him) from playing the havoc he apparently can play, but perhaps a little healthy publicity could be restrict activities a bit – at least in this country.’

Georgette received the equivalent of £15,000 a year in upkeep – an amount easily payable from his wealthy mother’s Liverpool shipping empire family.

If Bruce Shand’s childhood had been miserable, so had his father’s. A biographer described it as ‘unhappy’, explaining: ‘His father’s lifestyle was that of a dilettante, while his mother was religious, narrow-minded and energetic.

“Persistently pursuing good works and personally vague and hopeless, she expressed concern for her son’s education, but then largely left that responsibility to nannies.”

Philip Morton Shand died in 1960 in Lyon – home of his third wife – with his fourth wife by his side.

What exactly Camilla thinks of the black sheep of the family, only those close to her know. Maybe she’s glad her grandfather became a writer of funny books.

But as official documents in the National Archives reveal, his ultimate legacy is an act of barbarism against a pregnant woman, which may have inspired Camilla to spend a lot of time defending the victims of domestic violence.

A spokesperson for Queen Camilla said she would not comment on her late grandfather.

Christopher Wilson is the author of The Windsor Knot: Charles, Camilla, and The Legacy of Diana. Additional research by Cameron Charters.