How Camilla puts the smile on Charles’ face and the ‘snap in his celery’
Finally our future King looks ready and willing to step up. But will the woman who helped him embrace his destiny ever sit beside him as Queen?
SAY cheese!” cried the food sellers as the Prince of Wales stopped by a Thai food stall during last week’s tour of a market in the heart of Cambridge.And His Royal Highness duly obliged, bathing in the warmth of his subjects’ excitement as they snapped away on their camera phones.
In fact, he not only obliged, he positively beamed. It was a world away from the strained expression he wore so frequently in his earlier years, particularly during his first marriage, and there was no sign of the grief his displayed following the death of his father earlier this year.
Nor was there any indication of the apprehension he must feel when considering that his time to ascend the throne is inevitably drawing near.
Instead, the Prince was relaxed, charming and affable. And all agree there is one very simple reason why. It has been more than 16 years since Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, as she then was, and in that time Charles has blossomed, if such a thing can be said of a 73-year-old monarch-in-waiting.
Gone is the “emptiness” he said he felt when Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, gone is the tension of his tricky relationship with Diana, gone is the subterfuge that marked so many of his middle years.
For the fact is that whatever one thought of Diana, she and Charles were hideously badly mismatched. Both deeply insecure, with a desperate need for a partner to give them firm moral support, in fact they found in each other competition for the spotlight and a total lack of anything in common.
And as the bitterness between them grew, so did the desire that one should win… and be seen to win.
In Camilla, Charles has found not only his “non-negotiable” soulmate, but a partner who is happy to allow him to stand centre stage, while giving him all the love and security he needs.
With her earthy charm and warmth, Camilla manages to offer Charles a combination of motherliness and, not to put it too bluntly, raunch.
Theirs has always been an intensely physical relationship: the very first time they met, at a polo match in 1970, Camilla quipped: “My greatgrandmother was the mistress of your great-greatgrandfather – so how about it?” The great-grandmother in question was Alice Keppel, the great-great-grandfather was Edward VII.
And that connection has endured: just this week, on the plane back from their successful Middle Eastern tour, Camilla was heard to remark: “We’ve still got a snap in our celery.”
NO WONDER Prince Charles was sporting such a grin. Indeed, while Camilla might not have possessed Diana’s fashion model looks, she certainly possessed the sex appeal. It was said that when she showed up at parties, she would promptly have men all around her. It was, said a chum, a case of “je ne sais quoi”.
Of course, they should have got married all those years ago, which would have ensured a very different Royal Family today.
There would be no Prince Harry slagging off his family and giving tell-all interviews, following the example of his own parents, including Charles’s claims that his parents had not been close and loving, almost exactly what Harry has said about him. But
when Charles first fell for Camilla, marriage would have been impossible. For a start, it was known that Camilla had a “past” and that was simply unacceptable for a future queen.
Meanwhile Charles dithered, perhaps influenced by the truly dreadful advice of his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten: “I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for,” Dickie wrote to his young protégé.
“I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.”
We all know how that particular piece of hypocritical double standards worked out: goodbye Camilla, hello Diana, and welcome to the near collapse of the House of Windsor when the heir to the throne’s first marriage broke down. Of course, Camilla thought that she was in love with Andrew Parker Bowles and decided to marry him.
It was only as the years progressed that Charles and Camilla realised that, young as they were during their youthful romance (he was 22, she 24), they had each met The One.
And despite the difficult intervening years, despite the mistakes of their youth, they were given a second chance.
No one except the participants in the “there were three of us in the marriage, so it was a little crowded” will ever know the truth about the years Charles and Camilla were apart.
Diana’s camp maintain that they never were: that version of the story is that Charles cynically married Diana as some kind of brood mare, waited until the appearance of the heir and the spare and then scarpered back to the capacious bosom of Mrs P-B.
But if you look at pictures taken of Charles and Diana in the early years of the marriage, this appears unlikely: they looked pretty happy most of the time.
And members of Charles’s camp maintain the opposite: that he was totally loyal to Diana until the marriage broke down and that she cheated first. Last week there were
new claims that Charles only rekindled his youthful passion after discovering his wife was having a fling with one of her police bodyguards.
Either way, Charles and Camilla were reunited, a furious Diana ensured that the affair went public and Camilla, with no royal protection officers at the time, was so unpopular she was pelted with bread rolls in a supermarket by furious members of the public who believed she had destroyed a fairy tale.
FEELINGS ran so high that her first public appearances at Charles’s side had to be carefully stage managed. They did not appear in public together until two years after Diana’s death, when they attended a party at The Ritz in 1999.
Their marriage, six years later, was not without controversy: the Queen, ever mindful of potential damage to the monarchy, did not attend the ceremony, but she was at the reception, where she made a speech, welcoming them 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.”
When the Queen compares you to a horse, you know you’re doing all right.
Since then the effect Camilla has had on Charles is remarkable. The restlessness and angst that seem to have characterised him
for so many years, have gone. The chippy petulance sometimes on display at public appearances is nowhere to be seen. Back in the 90s, a member of the public who met Prince Charles shortly after his separation from his first wife tactlessly informed him that she’d met Princess Diana. “And you lived to tell the tale?” snapped Charles. These days he looks and sounds more resigned to his fate. He has clearly accepted that he is destined to be the longest-serving heir apparent in British history and possibly a short-lived monarch (one hopes not.) He seems genuinely to enjoy the affection of his future subjects. And it will be his subjects he needs to win over if he is to give the love of his life his heart’s desire… the title of Queen.
In a poll earlier this year, only 13 percent of Britons thought the Duchess of Cornwall should become Queen. Princess Consort was the preferred option.
Since then, Prince Philip has died, and our 95-yearold Queen has been on light duties on doctor’s orders. Suddenly, King Charles, or whatever regnal name he chooses, seems not nearly so far away. Whether the woman at this side will be known as Queen Camilla remains to be seen.
‘In Camilla, Charles has found his non-negotiable soulmate... but also his partner’