HOW CAMILLA WON US OVER
10 years on from her marriage, her acceptance says so much about the way the nation’s changed
TEN YEARS ago, a divorcée of 57 and a prince of the realm just one year younger were married at Windsor Guildhall and stepped out into history. It was the first time a member of the Royal Family, let alone the heir to the throne, had had a civil wedding. The Lord Chancellor had to make a statement in Parliament to confirm that this union was legal.
As for the bride’s divorced status, it was only 70 years since another heir to the throne, the bridegroom’s great-uncle Edward, was stepping out with another divorcée, Wallis Simpson.
This was so scandalous that the Press had been persuaded to keep the lid on the affair — although every newspaper editor knew all about it — until the Bishop of Bradford referred to the Prince’s ‘ need for grace’ in a sermon, and the dam of discretion broke.
Edward’s refusal to give up his mistress plunged the country into the 1936 Abdication Crisis, and cost him the Crown.
Times have changed, and Prince Charles was luckier. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself blessed his union with Camilla, despite objections from some clerics to the future head of the Church of England having a civil marriage only.
But the Prince suffered the mild humiliation of having to marry like any old commoner, with a registrar and in a public building (nearby Windsor Castle not being registered for marriages). Guests arrived in a minibus, another faintly ludicrous commonplace.
And there still was, at that time, a palpable remainder of public ill-feeling towards Camilla Parker Bowles, since both Princess Diana and Charles himself had said in unprecedented television interviews that the affair began during their doomed marriage. Many wives remembered with fellow-feeling Diana’s vulnerable glance from under the fringe in her TV interview with Martin Bashir and that soft line: ‘There were three of us in this marriage and it was a bit crowded.’
Over the years since Princess Diana’s death in 1997, I often heard women, far from the tolerant metropolitan world, saying flatly: ‘We will never accept Camilla. Never.’ Some may still feel that way, although fewer of us do with every passing year.
A YouGov poll this week showed that nearly half of the British public thinks Camilia should become Queen when Charles succeeds to the throne, compared to just seven per cent a decade ago.
Yet even when the staid middleaged couple left the Guildhall to return to Windsor Castle, there were smiles and some applause from onlookers; and when the BBC broadcast the blessing from St George’s Chapel in the castle, there was a curious, almost magical moment.
The bride’s long pale blue and gold coat rose and rippled a little as she walked, and the light caught the spray of golden feathers in her hair. A moment of theatre.
Later, a battle-scarred Palace aide of the Prince’s household said to me thoughtfully: ‘Yes, it was that camera-shot which made me think: “It’s going to be all right.”’
For there is an infectious happiness about weddings, and a mid-life one has a particular poignancy: people no longer fresh and hopeful gamely having another try.
Later, the Queen said that her son was ‘home and dry with the woman he loves’ and that she was proud of him. There was a sense of a gearchange, a consensus that, actually, this was fine.
It has to be said that Charles and Camilla had not behaved perfectly, or faithfully, or always wisely; the Prince made an unfortunate choice when he failed to marry her as his first love, and then took on poor Diana, only four weeks after her 20th birthday, not knowing how to make her happy.
But Diana’s death in that car crash in Paris after the divorce was not his fault; and they had two fine sons who were at this new wedding, smiling, and well, life goes on.
Indeed, I believe that the whole saga of Charles and Camilla is a good example of the way that, as years pass, public opinion softens, old feuds and scandals fade away, and we rub along together in a flawed world.
The shock of Diana’s death was fading and, looking back, most — if not all — onlookers probably accepted that the Prince’s first marriage was always doomed.
The age difference was only 12 years, but he was already middleaged in his interests and sense of duty. For her part, Diana, the emotionally insecure daughter of a broken home, struggled with the relentless attention of her global fame and the weird imprisoning life of a royal, and made some poor decisions of her own.
Her death laid all the family low, and during the eight years since the Pont de l’Alma crash, it was clear that the Prince of Wales had suffered, worked grimly on with his charities, and held on to his mistress (his first love) as if to a lifeline.
Even the hugely embarrassing hacking of their amorous phone conversation (the ‘Camillagate’ tape in which he confided intimate thoughts to her) was somehow touching. Before the raunchy moments, it consisted of her asking about his latest speech like any supportive girlfriend would.
Camilla had, of course, been quietly divorced well before Diana’s death.
For a good few years of this odd limbo, Camilla was with the Prince but kept from public view, not seen at official events. This made Charles, not to put too fine a point on it, visibly glum.
I met him a couple of times; I sat next to him during a long dinner at St James’s Palace once, when Camilla was no doubt upstairs eating alone with a tray. And for all his gentle courtesy and proud talk of his sons, he was quite obviously not a relaxed or happy man.
When she began to emerge, in a PR process carefully planned by his aides and recently analysed on the BBC’s Reinventing The Royals programme, he started looking better: relaxed, confident, making
jokes. Indeed, the tone of the BBC series seemed to imply that it was somehow sneaky of his aides to ‘spin-doctor’ Camilla into favour.
But why not? Royalty is a public role, a decorative business as well as a constitutional one. Nobody wants their event blighted by a gloomy divorcé weighted with shame for their ‘secret’ love.
So the wedding went ahead, and now, ten years on, we can reflect on how, why and indeed ‘if’ the British people have really taken to the woman who became Duchess of Cornwall on that day. On the whole, I think we have. It helps that her looks, though she scrubs up well for formal occasions, are not spectacular but ruggedly handsome; outdoorsy. Her hearty, ‘ county’ style fits better with the Royal Family we know than Diana’s fragile orphan glamour ever did.
She clearly makes Charles happy, but her taste for a cigarette, a ginand-tonic and (so we hear) a messy country kitchen is a counterweight to his angsty image.
Her informal interview on his 65th birthday on their tour of India had her cheerfully referring to him like any typical wife as ‘ hopeless’, ‘annoying’ and ‘exhausting’. But she has, importantly, had the sense to keep her mouth shut about her own feelings during those long years of demonisation.
She has a cheerful ability to create a rapport with people when they are out in public, and a fruity sense of humour, chortling about someone having the title of ‘wig mistress’ when visiting a theatre on the American tour.
HER backing of the campaign against female genital mutilation and her presidency of the Women Of The World festival are useful and appropriate, but it is vital to keep her in the position most useful to her husband. That of being supportive, well in the background, not starrily outshining the heir to the throne or undermining his confidence, as Diana often did whether she meant to or not.
As to the question of whether she should be titled ‘Queen’ when Charles becomes King, Camilla herself has apparently said she would be fine as ‘Princess Consort’. And aged 68 and a grandmother, what woman would really want any more prominence and public duty than she already has?
But the idea of her in a tiara, sitting next to Charles at the State Opening of Parliament seems to fit. And, inevitably, the word ‘Queen’ will no longer have its particular magic when we lose the present monarch.
The other interesting thing about contemplating this new Camilla — half- shrugging and half-affectionate — is how well it chimes with the way Britain has changed since Charles and Diana’s divorce 20 years ago, and in the ten years since his remarriage.
The year 2000 may only have been a date on the calendar, but it certainly created a bracing sense of history’s advance. It meant that we moved out of the century that had witnessed the abdication, two World Wars and the Cold War, Fifties’ prim austerity and Sixties’ flowery exuberance.
It was also the century of industrial strikes, punk, Thatcherite change, manufacturing decline, poll-tax riots and ever more TV channels feeding the world’s entertainment and manners into our mainstream.
With the 21st century came new crises: wars and terrorism, fundamentalist Islamism and an urban multiculturalism which both invigorated and fretted old Britain. established political certainties about Left and Right wavered and broke with centre-left Blairism and then the Coalition in 2010.
Alongside all this, perhaps as part of the search for old- fashioned certainties of a harmless and uniting kind, came a definite resurgence of affection for the monarchy.
The Golden Jubilee in 2002 was an unexpected success, coming soon after the death of the Queen Mother and the remarkable queues seeking to file past her coffin.
I’ll never forget the amazed reporter asking a dreadlocked Rasta youth ‘Why are you here?’ and his reply: ‘Cos she would be glad to see I.’
The Diamond Jubilee, ten years later, coincided happily with Britain’s triumphant Olympics.
Both those royal events had a breezy, populist atmosphere: the former had ticketed parties in the Palace gardens, and rock star Brian May twanging God Save The Queen on the roof; while in 2012 Take That’s Gary Barlow masterminded a concert on the Mall with projections cheekily turning the Palace into a row of terrace houses during Madness’s Our House.
even the Archbishop of Canterbury sang along to both Delilah and Crocodile Rock on the stands by the Victoria memorial (I saw him!).
It was all daft, and cheerful and acknowledged that the age of awed deference to establishment and Royalty had given way to something matier, more informal, less nervously respectful but also happier.
For example, watch Charles joshing with his young Prince’s Trust entrepreneurs — never attempting any Tony-Blairish glottal-stops or politicians’ down-with-da-kidz attitude — and their affection is visible. He may be a royal toff with a plum in his mouth, but he’s their royal toff. A mascot. Constitutional monarchs can do worse than become friendly mascots.
Social attitudes to family in g eneral have changed and softened, too. Again, I offer respect to those people whose values haven’t altered that much, but the fact is that we have seen the arrival of civil partnerships for homosexual men and women, and many of us have witnessed the happiness and security they bring.
Then, later — under a Conservative government! — these partnerships won the name of marriage.
This still appals many, but also badges us as defiantly tolerant in a world of unspeakable bigotry and cruelties towards gay people, with them tormented, jailed, burned or hanged in countries across the Middle east and Africa.
That British tolerance, too, is part of the change of mood from which this royal couple have benefited. Condemning people out of hand has gone out of fashion. Of course, political correctness can be a pompous, restrictive curse when it is carried to silly extremes, but at its best it is merely good manners.
And the same applies when we look at those who have made a few mistakes in life, regretted them and tried to cobble together something a bit better and soldier on.
See? Charles and Camilla, in their way, are pretty good mascots.