Is Palace website hinting Camilla WILL be Queen?
First she counselled Kate. Now she’s soothing Meghan’s pre-wedding jitters. And, say our top royal writers, it won’t do Charles’s campaign to make her Queen any harm!
THERE was speculation last night that the Duchess of Cornwall could become Queen when Prince Charles is King, despite years of denials by royal aides.
It came after Clarence House deleted all references to Camilla being named the ‘Princess Consort’ to the future King Charles from his official website.
The Prince of Wales’s office has taken down a statement, made before the couple married in 2005, saying it was ‘intended The Duchess will be known as HRH The
Princess Consort when the Prince of Wales accedes to the throne’.
It has also been removed from her biography on the website and the Buckingham Palace website.
Clarence House said the statement was removed from the Frequently Asked Questions section of the prince’s website because the public was no longer interested in the issue. A spokesman added: ‘This is one question Clarence House has not been asked for some time, which is why it no longer features.’
But Joe Little, of Majesty Magazine, said it was a ‘very interesting development’, adding: ‘I’d be amazed if he didn’t want her to be Queen. I very much hope she will be Queen Camilla.’ Asked by a US journalist in 2012 if she could be Queen, Charles said: ‘We’ll see. That could be.’
OBSERVING the supreme confidence of Meghan Markle on stage with Harry, William and Kate the other day, it is all the more surprising to consider that she has been seeking advice from the Duchess of Cornwall. But it has been revealed that Camilla has been helping to calm the American actress’s understandable pre-wedding nerves.
Many will be astonished at this given the hostility Camilla faced in the early postDiana years, some of which still lingers.
In fact, the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles seems to have become the Oracle at the heart of the Royal Family. What is emerging is a tale of two divorcees, both of whom are making a surprising impact on royal life.
At Camilla’s invitation, Meghan lunched with her at Clarence House. The Duchess extended the same invitation to Kate Middleton before her 2011 wedding to Prince William.
And, of course, in those far off days when the 19- year- old Lady Diana Spencer seemed set for the happy-ever-after marriage she craved, there was Camilla’s memorable letter lying on the bride-to-be’s bed, inviting her to lunch.
The letter was on Diana’s bed when she arrived at Clarence House the night before the announcement of her engagement to Prince Charles in February 1981.
It was an apparently friendly note and was signed ‘lots of love, Camilla’. Diana had got to know the mother of two a little in the months she had been courted by the prince. She and Charles had on at least two occasions spent the weekend at Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowles’s Wiltshire country house.
When the two women did meet for lunch, the unworldly teenager didn’t even suspect that Mrs Parker Bowles, then 33, may have had an ulterior motive in asking if she planned to hunt when she moved into Highgrove.
Diana replied that she didn’t, and it was only much later that she realised the look on Camilla’s face that greeted her reply was one of relief — for Camilla and Charles both rode with the local Beaufort Hunt. THE recollection confirmed her suspicion that she and the older woman were rivals. It was a feeling that haunted her until her dying day.
The worldly Camilla had merely been a royal mistress back then, of course, ostensibly offering a mature woman’s advice about Prince Charles to the naïve and inexperienced newcomer. These days she is an old hand in royal matters, too.
But why would Meghan, herself a woman of experience, turn to Camilla for advice? One reason is a sense of isolation she has been experiencing behind the walls of Kensington Palace.
They would have had much to talk about anyway as both are divorcees and, like Camilla, Meghan is most probably going to be transformed from a commoner into a royal duchess.
She jumped at Camilla’s invitation because, since meeting Harry almost two years ago, she has come to admire the way the Duchess of Cornwall has worked hard using her chatty personality to overcome public prejudice. Most of all, we understand, Meghan, 36, has been in need of guidance about how informal she can be on public engagements with Harry, and what life will really be like as a working member of the Royal Family.
Right now she is mostly immersed in all the detailed planning of her wedding day, one that will be watched all over the world.
But behind the bold exterior on display at the inaugural meeting of the Royal Foundation Forum in Central London last week — and the wedding excitement — she is finding the adjustment from television actress to princess-in-waiting a tougher role than she might have envisaged.
Living with Harry in Kensington Palace means that the days when she could saunter casually, and incognito, to shop in the nearby High Street, are gone.
When she leaves Nottingham Cottage, their bijou royal residence, it is usually in a car with blacked-out windows and with armed police bodyguards. She and Harry sometimes go together to a gym in Chelsea. But for a woman used to total freedom, whose TV stardom was never so great that she was bothered by fans, these restrictions on her life are unfamiliar.
One thing we learn she does miss terribly is writing her regular blog about her life, and especially the feedback it generated. She had 1.9 million followers on Instagram, another 350,000 on Twitter and some 800,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook.
‘Meghan’s finding getting used to the new life a little tough,’ says a close figure. ‘She’s always been a free spirit and when she felt strongly about something, or just playful, she could tweet it or use her blog (The Tig). But that’s gone now. Harry told her what it would be like. Even so, it’s all happened so suddenly.’
So one can understand how grateful she was to receive the Duchess of Cornwall’s invitation to talk it all through over lunch.
Camilla, after all, had to face her own brand of solitude because of her relationship with Prince Charles, especially after Diana’s death, when there was considerable public anger at the way Diana had been treated. No one knows better than Camilla how important it is to strike the right balance with the public. The animosity she faced began to fade only after she married the Prince of Wales in 2005.
And how it has faded! Her decision to fly with Charles all the way to Australia for the opening of next month’s Commonwealth Games, but not to stay on with him for a brief, four- day tour, reveals her emerging as a woman of vaulting self-confidence.
Her own second marriage — to Charles — was a civil ceremony, followed by a blessing in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. Meghan, whose first marriage to film producer Trevor Engelson was on a Jamaican beach, is being allowed to marry Harry in the chapel. MUCH has been written about Meghan’s boldness in public, with some courtiers considering she has been too touchy-feely too soon. Indeed Meghan stole headlines on International Women’s Day by grandly hugging a schoolgirl on a visit to Birmingham. But at 36 — Diana’s age when she died in 1997 — it is probably too late to expect her to change.
For Camilla, 70, the opportunity to dispense her worldly wisdom and experience to the royal newcomer must have been highly satisfying. When she had lunch with Kate, a Queen-in-waiting, she eschewed the privacy of Clarence House and instead
chose a highly visible table in a Knightsbridge restaurant.
She is known to have enjoyed the considerable cachet attached to the fact that her advice was apparently being sought by the popular Kate. Ditto the emergence of her intimate tete-a-tete with Meghan.
But forging a close alliance with Ms Markle would give Camilla something more, a role that has never quite materialised with Kate — that of being an involved royal grandmother, something she has never really been to George and Charlotte.
Since their very first steps, the two toddlers have spent endless hours with Kate’s mother Carole Middleton, cavorting on beaches and being carried on her shoulders.
Meanwhile, with Meghan approaching her 37th birthday in August and Harry 34 a month later, they are expected to start a family without delay.
Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland, 61, a yoga instructor who lives in Los Angeles, is unlikely to be very involved in her grandchildren’s early years unless she moves to London.
For Camilla, who has five grandchildren by son Tom and daughter Laura, here at last would be a chance for her to be fully involved in the moulding of the next, infant generation of royals. And with Harry’s mother dead, ‘Camilla is likely to be the only grandmother in town,’ says one of the Prince’s circle. SUCH a role for her would delight Prince Charles. He has always had an easier relationship with Harry than with William. And he has never been as involved with George and Charlotte as much as he wished — a particular disappointment as George is, after all, a future king like himself to whom he hopes to be able to offer guidance.
At the same time, Charles has always accepted and understood why Kate quite naturally has turned to her mother in family matters involving the children, and spent so many weekends at their home in Bucklebury rather than Highgrove.
And Camilla’s grandmotherly role would help consolidate Charles’s undiminished wish to see her crowned Queen at his coronation, a move that he would never make without the approval of both his sons. How close to this ultimate goal he has brought the former Mrs Parker Bowles.
And yes, how ironic that the woman once viewed as a pariah has managed to turn herself into the Royal Family’s most central figure after the Queen, a trusted and vital linchpin between the young and the old.
For Meghan, her new role as Harry’s wife carries even bigger responsibility than she knew. With the retirement of Prince Philip, now 96, Prince Charles’s idea for a ‘magnificent seven’ of senior family figures to be the stars in the royal show was reduced to six.
With Meghan’s arrival, the magnificent seven will ride again — the Queen, Charles and Camilla, William and Kate, and now Harry and Meghan.
For the moment, she is taking root in London with hardly any of the usual family and friends support that any bride-tobe leans on.
Long-term friends are mainly in Los Angeles and Toronto, her father remains in Mexico, and little has changed in her difficult relationship with her half-brother and sister in America.
So all the usual excitement of shopping for her trousseau with her mother, or a sister, is absent.
If this were not difficult enough, she has not only the wedding itself to worry about, but what, in reality, lies beyond it. Enter Camilla, a woman worldly enough to be able to fill some of the gaps in Meghan’s life.
It offers her a new role in the Royal Family, one that she could scarcely have dreamed would ever be granted to her. ‘No one except Prince Charles has ever
needed her in the Royal Family before,’ says one of her friends.
‘They’ve just accepted her. Now, at last, she feels wanted. It makes her very happy.’ As for Meghan, she is a quick learner and she too knows she is needed — by Harry.
Her challenge now is to find a way to present a face to the world which is true to her own free-spiritedness, but respectful of the inevitable strictures and demands that are asked of a royal wife.