Harry and William’s reaction Camilla news speaks volumes
They are barely speaking but Prince William and Harry’s identical reactions to the news Camilla will be Queen speak volumes.
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There is a charming school of photos out there which consists entirely of Princes William and Harry as little boys doing adorable, matching things.
William and Harry in tiny suits learning how to work a rope line. William and Harry in tiny army outfits on a tank. William and Harry with tiny skis.
Diana, the Princess of Wales was always intent on raising them without any distinction between them despite their totally divergent but set-in-stone futures.
That ersatz version of equality brothers has well and truly shattered in recent years as the realities of adult life have taken hold, with the two men famously having fallen out in the most spectacular fashion.
Finding common ground between them has long since looked like more and more of an impossibility.
It seemed that nothing short of a miracle would unite them again.
Then, Queen Camilla entered the frame.
Over the weekend the actual Queen used her Accession Day statement to drop a bombshell pronouncement: That when she shuffles off the mortal coil and her son gets the top job, something he has been doing since the advent of colour television, she wants his wife the Duchess of Cornwall to be crowned Queen Consort.
This is a dramatic departure from what has been the Windsor party line since the couple announced their engagement in 2005, which was that Charles’ second wife would be known as Princess Consort.
While it has long been speculated on that Charles wanted Camilla to assume the full title to which she will be entitled, it still came as a huge surprise when Her Majesty used the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee to announce that the woman Diana dubbed ‘the rottweiler’ will one day wear a crown too.
The septuagenarian love birds promptly put out a statement congratulating his mother on having made history by hanging onto the throne for long enough to make history and saying they were “deeply conscious of the honour represented by my mother’s wish” in regards to Camilla’s title.
But before anyone cracks out the vintage Pol Roger, Her Majesty’s favourite bubbles, we have to talk about what happened next.
Because as the news sank in that the UK and the Commonwealth are set to get a new Queen in the next five years or so, what was the reaction from other royal quarters?
Total silence.
Silence from William’s Kensington Palace office and silence from Harry’s Montecito compound.
We have now had more than 48 hours of reaction, news follow-ups and think pieces and not one comment from either brother about their stepmother’s elevation has emerged with not even the usual ‘sources close to the royal’ popping up.
This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the historically significant promotion their stepmother has just received.
The Telegraph has reported that William and Harry “are understood to have been made aware of the Queen’s message before it was shared” and that “Prince William is said to be supportive.”
Sure, this is a very sensitive issue but how supportive can he really be if he can’t even get around to rustling up a few limp words of congratulation?
It is hardly as if this development would have come as a shock to the men, according to the Daily Mail, which is reporting that plans have been in place for Camilla to be crowned Queen for “some time” and that it was nearly made public back in 2019 but that the palace “wanted to get [the timing] right,” according to a royal source.
“It’s been a done deal for some time, but the question has been how best to execute it. You are not going to please everyone.”
Given then the inevitability of this announcement and that the royal inner sanctum has known for years this was coming, William and Harry have both had a long time to get some sort of anaemic statement (or statements) ready.
And yet, clearly they have no intention of offering any sort of public support here.
The relationship between the princes and their father’s longtime paramour has been a complicated one, to say the least.
William watched from his Eton housemaster’s study in 1995 as Diana gave her notorious Panorama interview in which she said “there were three of us in the marriage.”
“When, later, his housemaster went to find him, his eyes were red with tears. It’s clearly a deeply traumatic incident,” the royal historian Robert Lacey revealed last year.
Later, after Diana’s death, it was in 1998 that William first met Camilla with the Sun later breaking the news, including the fact that afterwards she had declared, “I really need a gin and tonic”. It was an endearing story and one that, according to longtime royal writer Richard Kay, Charles’ team had leaked as part of “a strategy testing the water” when it came to Camilla.
William felt “used” by the move, Kay told a 2015 documentary, saying that the then-teenager “felt that he was being used by his father’s staff” and that “it explained … why he decided to break away from his father’s people.”
What has been slightly more straightforward, to some degree, is the Duchess of Cornwall’s relationships with her step daughters-in-law, taking Kate out for lunch after her engagement in early 2011 (“If I can give you one piece of advice …” she was reportedly heard saying while the younger woman took notes) and later inviting Meghan for tea.
While things have been decidedly strained between Harry and Charles since the younger royal decided to appear on global TV screens to denounce the royal family with sour-faced vigour last year, this week’s news is hardly likely to improve things.
The William situation is a more complex one.
The palace dramas of recent years – Prince Andrew’s deathly plunge from grace and now legal woes; the Sussexes’ flouncing off to the US – have reportedly only brought father and son closer together.
Last year friends told the Times there had been a “renaissance” in the duo’s relationship.
“Part of William’s evolution is that as he has become closer to his father, he sees their similarities. At William’s wedding there was a gag in one of the speeches that he was more like his father than he’d ever admit, which made a lot of us laugh,” one friend explained to the Times. “As their respective destinies get closer, it weighs more heavily on them and strengthens the bond. The rift with Harry has also brought them closer.”
Still the issue of who gets to be Queen next was always going to be an incredibly sensitive one for Diana’s sons. As her longtime private secretary Patrick Jephson told Vanity Fair in 2013, “You must remember that she didn’t join the royal family to be Princess. She joined the royal family to be Queen.”
Given everything that has come before, seeing the mantle their mother wanted so much going to a woman with such a convoluted history can’t be easy for William and Harry. But for the elder prince, given the steady drumbeat of the message of family unity we have seen over the last year, this week’s muteness is a departure.
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina opens with the famous line, “all happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” and if ever there was a bunch that proves this perfectly it’s the Windsors. Nearly 25 years after the death of Diana, the royal lot of them still don’t seem to be at peace, perpetually ‘unhappy in their own way.’
Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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