Pointed message hidden in King Charles’ speech
In King Charles’ nine-and-a-half minutes-long first speech, there was a specific line laden with special significance.
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In King Charles’ nine-and-a-half minutes-long first speech, there was a specific line laden with special significance.
While most of the attention was heaped on what the monarch said about his late mother Queen Elizabeth II or his olive branch to Harry and Meghan, there was a revealing paragraph he reserved for Camilla, now the Queen Consort.
“I count on the loving help of my darling wife, Camilla. In recognition of her own loyal public service since our marriage 17 years ago, she becomes my Queen Consort. I know she will bring to the demands of her new role the steadfast devotion to duty on which I have come to rely so much.”
Those are carefully crafted words designed to evoke specific associations for Camilla, a woman who was once persona non grata to not just to the royal family but the hoi polloi.
Mocked for her appearance, regarded as severe and undesirable, and castigated for being the “other woman” who made the in-contrast-saintly Diana miserable, Camilla was deemed too controversial to hold the title that should have passed from Diana to Kate Middleton through her, that of Princess of Wales.
Charles was so eager to reinforce the distance between now and then he was at pains to point out he and Camilla have been married for 17 years. Charles and Diana were only married for 15 – they were separated for a good chunk of that and miserable for most of the years they weren’t.
That Camilla is now Queen Consort, a prospect thought impossible 20 years earlier, is due to a decades-long rehabilitation process.
Diana famously said in the notorious 1995 BBC Panorama special, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
The third party was technically Camilla, but when you consider how far back Charles and Camilla’s romance dates and that it continues to burn strong, arguably the third party was Diana.
It’s not what Diana signed up for and it’s certainly not what he committed to in his marriage vows, but 50 years after Charles and Camilla first met in the summer of 1972, there is a vindication of sorts.
For those who remember the tabloid furore in the early 1990s, of leaked phone calls and bruising accusations, the new King and his then-mistress had less-than-sterling reputations.
For others, the vivid portrayal of the royal love triangle in Netflix’s sumptuous royal epic The Crown is what they know of that scandalous time.
It’s only a dramatisation to be certain, imagined conversations behind closed doors, but did The Crown’s portrayals help or hinder the reclamation of Charles and Camilla’s relationship?
A bit of both. It humanised them – especially Charles – before tearing strips off him for his coldness towards Diana. With The Crown back in Netflix’s top 10 most watched list following Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the series will continue to be a blessing and a curse for King Charles.
With its exemplary production values, extraordinary performances and soap opera-level drama with the sheen of prestige, The Crown is another exercise in royal soft power. Super-staunch royalists may object to Peter Morgan’s series, pointing out inaccuracies or blanching at the show’s “treatment” of their beloved Windsors.
But The Crown is actually a reverent series. In aiming to reveal something of the humanity behind the throne, the series turns symbols and figureheads into relatable people.
Charles’ flaws are contextualised within a restrictive institution which didn’t allow him to choose neither his school nor his wife. The third season of The Crown and Josh O’Connor’s Emmy-winning performance turned him into a sympathetic character, someone with a discernible inner life.
That’s not something the real-life royals have ever been allowed to display. No matter what compassion you may muster for Charles, the Queen, William or Harry, it’s always a projection of yourself, not anything real or tangible you know of them.
The Crown closes that distance, even if it’s not “real”. It fills a gap in what you know about the British Royals with what you want to know.
Given that the public’s experience of them is through carefully managed appearances, The Crown’s dramatised versions may as well be as real to you or me as the flesh-and-blood royals. Our experiences of them – unless you lined up behind barricades for a glimpse during a tour – are what’s beamed through pixels and code.
So, these fictionalised versions of Charles and Camilla begins to stand-in for the real Charles and Camilla because you probably know about them than you do the other ones.
And if you go by how The Crown presents them, it’s a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, the series makes clear that they have a strong foundation and a clear love for each other – and that if not for outdated traditions as well as anachronistic expectations of women, they would’ve shacked up long ago.
Underplaying even Camilla’s relationship with her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, The Crown suggests she and Charles were always each other’s endgame romance. That’s an idea that’s in direct conversation with Charles’ speech this weekend.
And who can’t get behind the idea of destined lovers? Even the most hardened cynic is a romantic at heart.
On the other hand, once Diana is on the scene, in no way is Charles a loyal or dutiful husband. He’s distant, dismissive and occasionally cruel to his young bride. He’s an adulterer. While The Crown does not let him off easy, the show’s commitment to humanising Charles and his behaviour does make relatable, even if you judge him for it.
He’s not a cartoon villain. He’s a person whose barely fettered desires and frustrations, whose imprisonment within a musty institution lead him to do awful things to another human.
The upcoming fifth season of The Crown, in which Charles will be portrayed by Dominic West, Camilla by Olivia Williams and Diana by Elizabeth Debicki, could prove thornier for King Charles.
Covering the early 1990s, it’s a turbulent period in which Charles takes an absolute battering to his reputation thanks to the separation, Diana’s public statements and the leaked tapes between the royal and Camilla.
The Crown is not expected to give Charles any quarter but given the show’s strong writing and characterisations, it’s also not expected to be one-dimensional.
There’s speculation the series, due to land in November, will now be delayed given the timing of the Queen’s death. That may serve King Charles well. He won’t want to re-litigate that time so soon after his elevation to the throne.
But it may be exactly what the royals need – a work of art which argues, above all, that the Windsors are human, that they have flaws but they have feelings.
A monarchy that is to survive in the 21st century – leaving aside questions over whether or not it should – cannot be emotionally distant to its subjects. It cannot remove itself from the banalities and grandiosities of the human experience.
They must be, to an extent, like us. They must be able to fall in love.
If the real-life royals can’t go into lurid and florid details of their lives, a reverently crafted, fictionalised version of their lives can.
Charles’ former press secretary Colleen Harris told once told biographer Penny Junor about Camilla’s image, “[The media] all made a lot of money out of the story that Camilla was this evil, horrible person who ruined Diana’s life and was ruining the children’s lives, and they wanted that story to continue.
“The more we made Camilla acceptable, the less the story had traction. The idea was to make her more human without making her more popular than him – we didn’t want any of that rivalry again – to show she was a real person with real feelings and interests.”
The Crown is streaming on Netflix
Originally published as Pointed message hidden in King Charles’ speech
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