Our new King and Queen have weathered more storms than most – but their unique bond has prepared them for their next endeavour.
In a week’s time, when Charles Philip Arthur George is crowned King in Westminster Abbey and his wife, Camilla Rosemary, becomes Queen, it will, amidst all that pomp and ceremony, be the culmination of a remarkable love story.
Scandal and misery, media humiliation and public opprobrium shrouded their relationship for so long that it was easy to forget that at its heart was this extraordinary, enduring love. The couple’s situation is pretty much unique, with no historical precedent I can think of. Imagine if the Montagues and Capulets had been at daggers drawn for 50 years and Romeo and Juliet had somehow stuck it out, their hair grey, their youthful faces lined, their bond undying.
“They have walked through fire,” says an old friend of the new Queen, who will be at the Coronation. “They went through a horrible, horrible time. We forget, but she was the most vilified and shamed woman in the country. It got so bad that she had to go into hiding. God knows how they got through it. A lesser relationship would have crumbled under the pressure. No one back then would have believed they would ever get to this point. I think Camilla will be pinching herself next Saturday.”
The very private woman who, a quarter of a century ago, responded, “You must be joking” to a suggestion that, one day, she would be Queen, has come a long way. For Charles his relationship with Camilla, regardless of the disapproval of his parents (his mother liked her personally – she was a no-nonsense horsewoman like Her Majesty – but she wasn’t “suitable”) and of the world at large, was always “non-negotiable”. He would not give her up. When people talk about them, the word they reach for again and again is “umbilical”.
Back in 1997, when I spoke to the couple’s friends for a profile in The New Yorker magazine, the designer and society wit Nicky Haslam, who had known Camilla Shand since her debutante days, said something I have never forgotten: “It’s not calf love, it’s hooks into the heart. It’s like a rope attached from him to her. There’s something very very strong – umbilical. I think it’s much stronger than sex, it’s a great need, this love.”
You have to admire the quiet success of the PR operation which, two decades ago, set out to rehabilitate the then battered and badly bruised reputation of the Prince of Wales’s long-time mistress. Now, here comes the “but”. However skillful and stealthy the Palace has been in making Camilla acceptable as Charles’s Queen, and however much the King may wish it for “my darling wife”, a section of the public will never be reconciled to the former Mrs Parker Bowles wearing a crown (although that opinion is steadily diminishing). The deeply religious find adultery (and divorce) unacceptable under any circumstances and fans of the late Princess of Wales know full well how Diana would have hated the idea of the woman she called the Rottweiler becoming Queen. Even among ardent monarchists there is some unease that the late Queen Elizabeth II’s stated wish for her daughter-in-law to be known as “Queen Consort”, not Queen as she now will be, appears to have been subject to a certain sleight of hand. (Charles insisted on it, apparently, and no courtier could persuade him otherwise. Non-negotiable.)
It got so bad that she had to go into hiding. A lesser relationship would have crumbled under the pressure
For all these reasons, Queen Camilla might never enjoy the widespread popularity that many now believe this warm, funny, friendly and shrewd countrywoman deserves. If she hangs back a little at joint public engagements, a shadow of apprehension scudding across that naturally sunny face, it is not merely out of deference to her husband. “Camilla definitely has scar tissue from the past, when she was Public Enemy No1,” says another friend. “She still doesn’t quite believe that she’ll get a warm reception, although crowds are always happy to see her.”
Now in their mid-70s, Charles and Camilla have known each other for over half a century. There is huge comfort in that, especially when there are so few people a man born to be king can trust or relax with. The private dynamics of their relationship were suddenly visible in the raw, turbulent days following the Queen’s death last September. When an exhausted and on-edge King lost it with a leaky fountain pen (“I can’t bear this bloody thing... why they do this every stinking time?”), his wife remained sanguine by his side, silently soaking up her spouse’s hissy fit and murmuring a few reassuring words before calmly sitting down with the offending implement to write her own signature.
“She was the horse whisperer of his emotional needs and knew how to dispense tough love with charm,” Tina Brown observes in her book The Palace Papers. Exactly as Charles’s beloved grandmother had once bolstered the confidence of the stammering George VI. A gregarious, sparkly person, the late Queen Mother was her grandson’s favourite, bestowing on him all the praise and attention an emotionally remote and constitutionally preoccupied mother never did. Observant courtiers say they see Camilla playing that same role for Charles; brilliantly jollying along a man who has always had a tendency to self-pity.
“She’s able to say no to him and laugh at things that he finds upsetting and make them seem less awful,” says a childhood friend. “Camilla was always brave, funny, very stable and down to earth.”
At Clarence House, when Charles is casting around for a servant to get him a drink, Camilla will say, “Don’t be so ridiculous. I’ll pour the gin and tonic.” That’s one of the gifts she gives him, adds the friend, “she pricks pomposity”.
It’s not calf love, it’s hooks into the heart. It’s like a rope attached from him to her
During the Accession period after the Queen’s death, it was hardly mentioned that Camilla had broken a toe. It must have been so painful for her, travelling to all four corners of the kingdom and standing, for hour after hour, meeting dignitaries. Only once did she falter, tripping over in the aisle of Llandaff Cathedral before swiftly righting herself with a rueful smile. I watched as she warily descended the cathedral’s vertiginous steps – her husband was up ahead, protocol forbidding him (or anyone else, it seemed) to lend her a helping hand. It was a rare moment when Camilla looked vulnerable and anxious, and I thought, who on earth would want to take on all that rigmarole at her age (she celebrates her 76th birthday in July)?
“She doesn’t want it for herself; she’s doing it for Charles,” says a female friend. “She’d be perfectly happy at Ray Mill [the family home she has retained in Wiltshire], seeing her children and grandchildren [three of the boys, Gus, Louis and Freddy, will be their Granny’s pages of honour during the Coronation] and pottering about in the garden with the dogs, Beth and Bluebell, her adored rescue Jack Russells.”
Instead, the pressure is on as never before. Camilla has lost weight in the past year, dropping a dress size or two on what I assume must be a Coronation Diet. Never a fashion plate, she is clearly conscious that the eyes of the world will be upon her and she must look as good as she possibly can. “Truth is, Camilla couldn’t care less if she’s called Queen or Queen Consort or anything else. It’s the King who minds,” adds the friend. After all those brutal, ignominious years when Charles felt helpless that he couldn’t protect her, he protects her now, and fiercely.
Camilla’s son, the food writer Tom Parker Bowles, recently took the extraordinary step of rebutting Prince Harry’s snide claim that his stepmother had orchestrated “a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the crown”. There was no “endgame”, Tom insisted, his mother “married Charles for love”.
Although Tina Brown calls her a canny “poker player” who was “patient but never passive in her slow advance”, Camilla does seem to lack the attention-seeking gene. She operates on the Tammy Wynette principle: stand by your man. Unlike Diana, she is relieved to let her husband have the limelight. As one old chum points out, “If she’d been socially ambitious, she’d have dumped Andrew (Parker Bowles) and married Charles the first time round.”
As a monarchist who harboured pretty standard doubts about this pair of star-crossed divorcees (if our dear late Queen had concerns, then I had concerns), I must admit I have been won over by their incredibly supportive partnership and the beneficial – I was about to write medicinal – effect that Camilla has on Charles. No longer the anguished Eeyore of yore, the King looks happy. It really suits him.
Camilla couldn’t care less if she’s called Queen. It’s the King who minds
Earlier this week, the Royal couple travelled to Liverpool to unveil the stage for the Eurovision Song Contest. It was not Charles’s natural milieu – he’s more of an Albinoni than an Abba man – and there was a glitch when he was invited to press a large pink button, With forefinger hovering, he somehow managed to totally miss said large button, causing much mirth on Twitter. If the King had been on his own, he’d have been miserable, a fuddy-duddy launching into one of those tedious arias of fretting and self-recrimination that Camilla can’t abide. With his “darling wife” by his side, however, the balls-up became a joke, an occasion for a shared, conspiratorial smile; something they could both giggle over in the car on the way home.
“He was the loneliest man in the world, and she made him not lonely,” I was told. Yes. But happily ever after would come at a high price.
The course of true love never did run smooth, as Shakespeare famously wrote. Charles and Camilla were to stress-test that proverb to its limit. The then Prince of Wales married the wrong woman. Not the first human to make that mistake, and certainly not the last, but for the heir to the throne the error was to have devastating consequences which live on to this day in the vengeful alienation of his younger son who threatens to be a glowering bad fairy at his father’s Coronation.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see what madness it was to expect the 32-year-old Charles to pick a bride from a rapidly diminishing pool of Protestant virgins. But that was still the archaic, dynastic requirement in 1981. The prince’s wariness about what was, in effect, an arranged marriage came across in an awkward engagement interview in which a prettily blushing Lady Diana Spencer (only 19, a baby!) said she had no hesitation accepting his proposal (“Of course! It’s what I want”). Her fiancé prevaricated with the infamous, “Whatever love is”. Watching the interview again, you notice the prince saying he had, not long ago, acquired Highgrove to “be nearer the Duchy of Cornwall”. More likely, he’d acquired it to be nearer Bolehyde Manor, home to one Camilla Parker Bowles with whom he had been having a passionate affair for three years.
Charles and Camilla first met in 1971, introduced by a mutual friend. Unfortunately, there seems to be no truth in the legend that Camilla opened with the daring quip, “My great-grandmother and your great-grandfather were lovers. So, how about it?”
But the attraction, at least on the part of His Royal Highness, was instant. A gauche and insecure 22-year-old whose idea of foreplay was doing Goons impersonations, Charles was not a natural suitor. Camilla, then 23, was 16 months the Prince’s senior and far more experienced with the opposite sex. (She was besotted at the time with the louche, irresistible Cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles, who rode several fillies at a time; a habit which, to his wife’s dismay, he continued after their marriage.)
Charles liked the fact that Camilla’s smile reached her blue eyes (it still does), that she was sexy, a good sport and forthright – a quality not found in abundance around the then Prince of Wales. They met a few times before the prince, then serving in the Royal Navy, had to leave for duty in the Caribbean. “The last time I shall see her for eight months,” the smitten fellow wrote sadly to his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten.
There is no record of Charles’s reaction when he learnt that Camilla had become engaged to Parker Bowles while he was away. If she was not his first love, she was his first true love – and perhaps his last.
The two kept in touch, moving in the same aristocratic circles (the Prince is godfather to Camilla’s son) and, in 1978, their romantic relationship was rekindled. The editor Emma Soames recalls a party from that period when she was standing directly behind Camilla when Charles came into the room and “got my eyebrows singed” by the blazing look he gave her. “It suddenly hit me, my God, he’s in love with her!”
Charles was both under the spell of Camilla – “my touchstone” and “sounding board” – and under huge pressure from his parents and the media to find a wife. He could, of course, like Edward VIII have given it all up “for the woman I love”. According to how charitably inclined you are, he either did his duty or took the path of least resistance. Certainly, the prince entered into the marriage with Diana with high hopes and a desire to make things work. The affair with Camilla was over.
Just how catastrophic a mismatch the Waleses had made was clear from their honeymoon on the Royal Yacht Britannia. Charles read the nourishing spiritual works of Laurens van der Post while his bride bopped on deck to George Michael. The country had fallen in love with its dazzling new princess, but the prince had to deal with a profoundly unhappy, volatile young woman in the throes of bulimia. Diana was so possessive she cut her husband off from his old friends, allegedly even making him give away his dog. The Prince of Wales was depressed, wretched and trapped.
Recollections may vary, in the late Queen’s immortal phrase, as to when Charles and Camilla started seeing each other again. After the five-year marriage had “irretrievably broken down,” Charles told his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. Reliable sources say it was definitely after the birth of Prince Harry in 1984, by which time Diana had started affairs of her own.
The public felt cheated on. Millions of us thought we had been watching a fairytale romance; instead, it turned out to be a British remake of Dangerous Liaisons with Mrs Parker Bowles in the Glenn Close role of conniving predator and Diana as the Michelle Pfeiffer milk-white innocent.
That caricature was as crude as it was unfair, but it didn’t stop vitriol and contempt raining down on Camilla’s head. She went straight from anonymity to being one of the most hated women in Britain without ever being known for herself. The abuse was so surreally vicious and misogynistic (Charles, who bore half the blame, escaped the brunt of it) that it’s hard to revisit it now that we do know her. Suffice to say, one tabloid thought it was amusing to run a picture of Mrs Parker Bowles next to a horse and asked, “Which one would you rather go to bed with?”
He was the loneliest man in the world, and she made him not lonely
Throughout this ordeal, the woman “whose first instinct is always to laugh” somehow retained her sense of humour. Patti Palmer Tomkinson, a confidante of Prince Charles, once told me that Camilla would joke to friends about the awful, unflattering photos of her in the papers, “Thirteen double chins as usual!” But she begged them to keep details of the worst abuse from the Prince of Wales. “Please don’t let him know, he’ll be so upset and worried.”
We can all probably recall the battles and pyrrhic victories in the War of the Waleses. The tit-for-tat books, the leaked recordings of private phone conversations – Squidgygate and Tampongate. How sordid and sad it all seems now with the life of the princess cut so tragically short and the prince left with two motherless boys, and his guilt.
Charles and Camilla finally married in April 2005, 34 years after their first meeting. Our dear King can be a bit of a ditherer and is not always emotionally robust, and yet, despite strenuous efforts to persuade him to renounce his lover for the sake of the monarchy, and warnings from the then Archbishop of Canterbury that their marriage would “cause a crisis for the Church”, the union went ahead.
“There’s no such thing as getting it right in my position,” he told a friend. “If I left her, they’d say it was cruel, and they’d be right.” Camilla gave Charles the strength he sometimes lacked; their love was non-negotiable.
Our beloved late Queen finally gave the newlyweds her blessing in a unique speech on what was also Grand National day. Smiling, Her Majesty said she was delighted to be welcoming her son and his bride to “the winners’ enclosure. They have overcome Becher’s Brook and The Chair 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.”
Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Of course, the tabloids ransacked the transcript of that sleepy, late-night phone call between them for smut. But when I went back and read it again yesterday, it was remarkable how revealing the conversation between the two soulmates was, perfectly capturing Charles’s propensity for comic gloom and Camilla’s ability to cheer and console him:
Charles: Your great achievement is to love me.
Camilla: Oh, darling, easier than falling off a chair.
Charles: You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.
Camilla: Oh, darling, don’t be so silly. I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love. It’s the strength of love.
The prince was rebuked for the arrogance of saying, “Your great achievement is to love me.” What he meant, quite clearly, I think, is, “My God, darling, I don’t know how you’ve stuck with me and put up with the abuse and ghastliness all these years. You’re amazing.”
Plus, Camilla then offered to read one of his speeches on the environment. Is there no end to the woman’s self-sacrifice?
Can we now please put all the recriminations and bitterness behind us and relish the joy of seeing a King and Queen at the Coronation who adore and support each other in everything they do? It’s time. It really is. They were only human.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
Charles and Camilla: what a love story.