Camilla: Queen Consort’s transcendence from wicked witch to happy ever after
Sure-footed, loyal and resilient, the Queen Consort will play a key part in the reign of King Charles III.
The week has been so momentous and discombobulating that Camilla becoming Queen Consort has passed largely unremarked. Yet it has been a remarkable trajectory.
Twenty-five years ago, she was one of the most reviled women in the country, detested for her role in the break-up of the “fairytale” marriage of Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales.
That this union had clearly been ill-conceived did not seem to bother anybody. Diana was far too young and naive, Charles was far too much in love with Camilla, and the whole thing, hingeing on the creepy idea that the future king must have an aristocratic virgin bride, was surely doomed.
People want fairytales, happy endings, goodies and baddies. As soon as news of Charles’s infidelity was made public Diana was cast, in part by herself, as a monstrously wronged saint-martyr, and Camilla as a witch without morals, a wicked enchantress with no care for anything other than her own base lust.
That she had a sexual relationship with Charles while she too was married to someone else, with whom she had young children, was the marmalade dropper to end them all, regardless of the fact that sleeping with other people while in possession of a spouse has long been considered a perfectly jolly way of passing the time in that particular social milieu (Camilla was at this point a character straight out of Jilly Cooper – roast chicken in the Aga, paw prints in the hall, flirting in the kitchen, glass in hand. The plot twist is that Cooper has said that “the best bits” of her great rakish hero, Rupert Campbell-Black, were based on Camilla’s first husband, the retired army officer, Andrew Parker Bowles).
You will note that it was the women who were pitted against each other in this reductive and caricatured way: the future king, though humiliated by the leaking of an intimate telephone conversation with Camilla, was – well, the future king, and a man. He could be forgiven. Camilla could not.
So she endured stoically, for years and years. She gritted her teeth, kept her head down, never publicly made even a squeak of complaint at the crude and brutal treatment doled out by both media and public, and quietly stood by her man.
It must have taken extraordinary resilience and strength of character to refuse to be ground down, particularly around the time of Diana’s death, but she clearly believed she and Charles were a true love match, and that the relationship was more meaningful than anything that could be thrown at it.
In tiny, imperceptible increments, she became admirable in her fortitude.
She and Parker Bowles divorced amicably in 1995, and in 2005, 34 years after their first meeting – not at the polo, as in The Crown, but at a party thrown by one Lucia Santa Cruz, according to Charles’s official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby – Camilla and Charles were finally married.
Like him, she liked dogs, horses, The Goon Show and being in the country. The wedding, a civil ceremony, was small and was followed by a televised blessing. Afterwards there was a reception for 800 people at Windsor Castle, at which the late Queen made a toast to the couple: “They have overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair [fences at Aintree] and all kinds of other terrible obstacles. They have come through and I’m very proud and wish them well. My son is home and dry with the woman he loves.”
Camilla, after all this time, had finally been forgiven by the public, and Windsor was festooned in bunting and flags. About 20,000 people lined the streets to wish the couple, both in their fifties, well. You only have to look at them, then or now, to see how contented and comfortable they are with each other: they are the sort of couple rendered helpless with laughter by their private jokes. She gives the impression of having a light heart: she is sunshine, not showers, and he basks in her rays.
The Queen became so fond of Camilla that this year, in a message to coincide with her Platinum Jubilee, she wrote: “When, in the fullness of time, my son Charles becomes King, I know you will give him and his wife Camilla the same support that you have given me; and it is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort as she continues her own loyal service.”
The fullness of time is now. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that we were looking for fairytales in all the wrong places.
The happy ever after came not to the beautiful ingenue but to a middle-aged couple who had loved each other deeply and inescapably for decades and who this week became our King and Queen.
For all the undeniable pain their relationship caused at the time – and its reverberations nearly broke the monarchy – it is, in the end, a powerful love story. Real life, even for royals and aristocrats, is knotty and complicated, and it is the knots that build character.
King Charles thanked “my darling wife Camilla” in his address on Friday, and it is obvious that she is the person responsible for his happiness.
She is his own “strength and stay”, sure-footed and loyal, and she will play a huge part in whatever success he makes of his reign.
He will now lean on her to an unprecedented extent, and she will, as she has always done, put him first.
It must be exhausting work, to turn your whole being into an emotional support network for someone, especially if that someone is the King of England – but she will do it, as she has always done. We’re lucky to have her.
Sunday Times
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