Camilla Steps Up Amid Health Crises
LONDON — While illness has sidelined two of Britain’s most visible royal figures, Catherine, Princess of Wales, and King Charles III, Queen Camilla has stepped into the vacuum.
Recently, she traveled to the Isle of Man to deliver a speech on Charles’s behalf and met with public officials and community groups. She then flew to Northern Ireland, where she visited a bakery and butcher shop, attended a literary event and accepted salutes at a military parade.
Camilla, 76, smiled for the photographers, joking that a camera-friendly toddler who upstaged her visit to the butcher shop was a “natural.” She betrayed neither the strain of taking care of a cancer-stricken husband, nor that a day later Catherine would announce that she, too, had been diagnosed with cancer.
It is the kind of twist of fate that royal watchers savor: Camilla, whose very existence once seemed to threaten the stability of the royal family, has emerged as a stabilizing force. At times, it has felt as though she was carrying the entire House of Windsor on her shoulders.
“This is a vulnerable time for the royal family, where their human frailties are fully on display,” said Arianne J. Chernock, an associate professor of history at Boston University in Massachusetts and an expert on the modern British monarchy. “Camilla’s own background and training can help her in these circumstances.”
With her husband canceling public engagements while he undergoes treatment, and with Catherine out for the foreseeable future for chemotherapy, Camilla has taken on high-profile duties. Her trip to Northern Ireland, scheduled before the king became ill, thrust her onto diplomatically delicate terrain, given the territory’s legacy of sectarian violence and its politically fragile government. By all accounts, she performed well.
With her brisk, no-nonsense style, she has reassured people that the king is doing well and has tried to project an air of normalcy. During her visit to the Isle of Man, when a mother held up her baby, Louis, Camilla replied that she had a grandson Louis, who she said was “quite a handful.” It was a leavening contrast to Catherine, who spoke in her video announcement about the anguish of telling Louis and her other two children that she was sick.
For Camilla, this is yet another twist in her complex relationship with the public — one that has settled into, if not affection, then acceptance. To royal historians, last year’s coronation was the capstone of years of image rehabilitation by Charles and Camilla, who became romantically involved when she was known as Camilla Parker-Bowles. She had received much of the blame for the failure of his marriage to Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in 1997. London’s tabloids vilified Camilla.
But in the years since Charles and Camilla were married in 2005, they have worked to rebuild their images. Camilla became an active, dutiful participant in royal life. Nothing did more to cement her status than when Queen Elizabeth II, shortly before her death, laid out a road map for Camilla to become queen consort, putting to rest years of uncertainty and speculation over her status.
“Not that Elizabeth could foresee the series of challenges that the royal family has encountered this past year,” Professor Chernock said, “but Elizabeth recognized that the monarchy is never just about the monarch, it’s about the family on the throne.”
“Now is Camilla’s moment,” she added.
Becoming a family’s stabilizing force, in a royal twist of fate.