‘The Duchess’: How Camilla saved the crown
For such a long time now, 30 years, it’s been hard not to take sides on Camilla Shand Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall and wife of Prince Charles, who will one day be his queen regardless of whether she’s actually called that.
Now comes royal biographer Penny Junor with her latest book, an admiring reassessment of the woman once known as the most hated in the United Kingdom, in The Duchess: Camilla Parker Bowles and the Love Affair That Rocked the Crown (Harper, 320 pp., ★★★☆).
Junor lays her cards out in her introduction: “In my view, when history comes to judge her, Camilla will not be seen as the woman who nearly brought down the House of Windsor. I think she will be recognized as the woman who shored it up.”
If you’re already an admirer of Camilla, you will find much to validate your views in this book. If you still carry a torch for Princess Diana, probably not. Nevertheless, you should get to know Camilla be- yond her “Rottweiler” rep, as Diana used to call her: Camilla is here to stay.
Now 70, the mother of two children from her first marriage and giddy granny to five grandkids, HRH Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is the same woman she was when she and Charles were first introduced nearly 50 years ago: down-to-earth and unpretentious, lusty and funny and kind, with good people skills and a calm and steadying hand who supports Charles unconditionally.
Junor believes Camilla has made a melancholy man blissfully happy, has helped make his duty-bound and frenetic life more bearable, and as such has won over key, and formerly hostile, members of the royal family, including Charles’ mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and his sons, Princes William and Harry.
“She has given Charles belief in himself that he’s never had before, and that has made him much more likable and therefore much more popular. And popularity is vital in a modern-day monarch,” Junor writes. “He’s no longer angst-ridden and tortured; he’s relaxed, he’s humorous, he’s teasing and he looks happy. ... The public wants to engage with him again. And she has made that happen.”
In other words, Junor argues, she saved him, thus saving the next British monarch, the British monarchy and the Windsor dynasty itself. Britons who back a constitutional monarchy (which is to say, a strong majority) owe Camilla a big thanks, Junor argues, and eventually they could acknowledge it by curtsying to Queen Camilla. We shall see.
It used to be there were only two sides when it came to Camilla: You could be a fierce loyalist to Charles’ first wife and mother of his sons, the late lamented Diana. She had long and loudly blamed Camilla for the breakup of her marriage, the much-anticipated union that had turned out to be not the fairy tale most people (Diana especially) expected.
Or you could reserve your sympathy for hapless Charles, 69: He gave up the woman he loved — Camilla — to do his duty and marry a virgin who could bear his dynastic heirs, only to find himself tied to a teenager he barely knew whose crippling emotional problems he could neither cope with nor allay.
“The Prince is incredibly happy and contented and amused since Camilla came back into his life,” Junor quotes a friend of his saying. “And I think she’s very happy. They seem to be very keen on each other, they love each other, they’ve come to a contented happiness in their late 60s. Why not?”