To resolve Camilla’s status once and for all, Charles proposed marriage. ‘Charles went down on his knee,’ said Camilla, describing the scene at Birkhall. She was fifty-seven and he one year younger. Their first dalliance had begun thirty-three years earlier. Their second, in the late 1970s, satisfied a woman spurned by her husband. Their third affair, starting in the mid-1980s, was a union of two unhappy middle-aged souls seeking relief from broken marriages. Nearly twenty years later, their relationship had survived exceptional obstacles. ‘She suffers indignities and vilification,’ said her promoters, ‘because she loves Charles.’ Her reward for decades of frustration, Charles reasoned, would be a blissful traditional wedding.
To Charles’s fury, the Evening Standard ruined his careful preparations. On 11 February 2005, the Standard’s front page boasted an old-fashioned scoop. Robert Jobson, the paper’s royal correspondent, never revealed his source. Charles was indignant. Instead of announcing the forthcoming wedding, a personal triumph for the prince, with a dignified flourish, Clarence House was forced to rush out an untidy press release. The Standard’s editor was crossed off the royal invitation list.
In St James’s Palace, Michael Peat stood in front of oil portraits of Charles’s predecessors dressed in their military uniforms. ‘All the ducks are in a row,’ said the ruffled private secretary with a grimace. Over the previous three years, during conversations with journalists, he had cultivated the image of a self-confident Establishment fixer. Standing stiffly before those same people, he now explained the procedure that would enable the two divorcees, one of whom was the heir to the throne, to do as they wished. The marriage would be a civil ceremony at Windsor Castle, followed by the Archbishop of Canterbury blessing the newlyweds in the castle’s St George’s Chapel. Certain of his preparations, he then handed out a short statement by Charles: ‘Mrs Parker Bowles and I are absolutely delighted. It will be a very special day for us and our families.’ Their engagement was ‘welcomed’ by the queen. Peat returned to his office, anticipating a smooth climax on the wedding date of Friday, 8 April.
To his staff, he presented himself as the marriage-broker. Charles and Camilla, he told colleagues, had been content to ‘muddle along’. The prince was not ‘keen’, but, Peat puffed, ‘My job was to get them married.’ Many of his staff doubted that he wielded such decisive influence, but his self-importance reinforced the impression of a loyal courtier who had successfully masterminded a blend of the civil and church ceremonies to make the day palatable to Charles and his family.
Within days, Peat’s plans had unravelled. It seemed that every hour after the announcement some learned lawyer or religious scholar would bring up another insurmountable obstacle. The first was the Marriage Act of 1836, which specifically forbade the marriage of any member of the royal family in a civil ceremony in a register office. Two subsequent acts, in 1949 and 1953, upheld that law. The intention was indisputable. In a memorandum written in 1948, a Home Office lawyer recommended that the ban on civil marriages for royalty be kept in the 1949 Act. His recommendation was accepted. According to the 1949 law, Charles could be married only by Anglican clergy, and the advice the prince received when he divorced Diana confirmed that. The ceremony for members of the royal family had to take place in a church. Subsequently, the Anglican Church reaffirmed its ‘moral obligation’ to refuse to unite two divorcees.
Peat had not only ignored the three Marriage Acts, but also the law about weddings conducted in a register office. Civil marriages had to be held in public places, and Windsor Castle was the queen’s private home. If Charles requested a registrar to officiate in the castle, the queen would be obliged to allow access to the public, which was out of the question. Peat and Charles were comprehensively trounced. Peat blamed his deputy Kevin Knott, who resigned shortly afterwards. Charles Falconer, the lord chancellor, was also accused of providing inaccurate legal advice. Peat asked Downing Street for help.
Tony Blair was preparing for his third general election. Although the opinion polls were favourable, saving Peat was not a priority. However, he felt there was no alternative. To limit the royals’ embarrassment, and without sufficient time for new legislation, Falconer and Blair decided to overlook the statutes. Just as Henry VIII expected his lord chancellors to change the law or face execution, Falconer took it upon himself to declare that the three Marriage Acts could be ignored. The advice written in 1948, he professed, was ‘too cautious’, and the Act had anyway been overruled by Labour’s human rights legislation. The royals could after all be married in a register office. Charles was saved, but he failed to savour the irony: he had denounced that very human rights law as a ‘threat to sane, civilised and ordered existence’.
St James’s Palace’s mistakes were protected by a cover-up. Citing public interest, the government refused to release the ‘legal advice’ underlying Falconer’s decision to override the established law. The final hurdle was the venue. Since Windsor Castle could not be opened to the public, Peat was told that the ceremony should be held at the register office in Windsor Town.
Two weeks of turmoil had somewhat bruised Peat’s self-image, but another irruption was still to come. A YouGov opinion poll confirmed that Charles’s reputation had not recovered from the Burrell saga. The majority of Britons, 60 per cent to 21 per cent, reluctantly accepted that tradition would prevail when the queen died, but preferred William as king; and only 16 per cent welcomed Camilla as the next queen.
Within Clarence House, there were fears that the newly married couple would be booed on a cold morning outside the Windsor register office. Anticipating the public’s animosity, Peat had originally announced that after Charles’s accession Camilla would be named princess consort rather than queen, and until then she would be Duchess of Cornwall. His self-esteem was again dented when government lawyers quietly admitted that the marriage would not be morganatic (that is, a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which prevents a husband’s titles and privileges passing to the wife) – and that Camilla could and would become queen. ‘The shambles Peat has presided over,’ Mark Bolland wrote gleefully in the Sunday Times, ‘brought shame and ridicule’ on the couple. The final ignominy was the queen’s unexpected disclosure, while hosting a dinner for Charles and Camilla at Buckingham Palace, that she would not be present at the town hall ceremony.
Charles was inconsolable. In spite of having finally achieved his ambition, at every spare moment he would telephone friends and sympathetic officials to complain about his fate. He believed he was at the mercy of history, events, his family and his advisers. ‘He needed to get things off his chest,’ recalled one person on the list for regular tirades. ‘He needed to let off steam. He would go on forever, far into the night.’ To alleviate the tension, one confidante half-jokingly asked whether the queen might abdicate. ‘No,’ replied Charles, taking the question at face value. ‘Can you imagine her looking out of the window of Clarence House and waving to me as I paraded in a carriage down The Mall?’
He was also upset by the absence of any media excitement about his wedding. His feelings did not remain private for long. Asked by news photographers to pose for them while skiing in Klosters on the eve of his wedding, he complied, and behind a forced smile whispered to his sons, ‘Bloody people. I hate doing this.’ In the front row of journalists crouched Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s royal correspondent. The prince’s personal dislike of Witchell matched his anger with the corporation as a whole. ‘I can’t bear that man,’ he muttered, unaware that a live microphone was nearby. ‘He’s so awful, he really is. I hate these people.’ Reluctant to remove his sunglasses or to answer Witchell’s inoffensive questions, Charles asked William, ‘What do we do?’ ‘Keep smiling,’ replied his son, whose relationship with Kate Middleton had just been revealed. Charles did not apologise to the journalist.
The queen was anxious to avoid unnecessary controversy, so rejected her son’s proposal for a glittering dinner party for 650 guests at Windsor. She also vetoed the employment of Michael Fawcett to supervise a modest celebration at her home. Her frostiness towards Camilla continued even during the weeks leading up to the wedding: she excluded her future daughter-in-law from both royal ceremonies and official dinners.
To minimise public displeasure, palace briefings described Camilla as an ‘unwilling bride’ and ‘a bundle of nerves’ who would gladly remain in the shadows – silent and supportive – with no ambition to be queen. Since most Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand, disliked the prospect of Queen Camilla, an inaccurate impression was promoted. ‘When he becomes king,’ wrote Charles’s long-time supporter Jonathan Dimbleby in the Guardian, ‘she will not be queen. The essence of her role is not constitutional but personal.’
In the same vein, courtiers gave the impression that Charles had dithered about marriage until he was persuaded by the queen of the importance of averting a constitutional crisis if he were still unmarried at time of the succession. The protocol problems about seating Camilla on state occasions would have been even more embarrassing than they had been at the van Cutsem wedding. As supreme governor of the Church of England, Charles could not ‘live in sin’. One of those influencing him to overcome his reluctance, it was hinted, was his old friend Richard Chartres, the formidable Bishop of London.
The wave of disinformation about Camilla being a protesting bride was soon ridiculed. This was a woman, her critics riposted, who had always posed as reluctant. To get her way, she had feigned resistance to marrying Charles; then she had hesitated about accepting a royal title; and finally she was pretending to oppose being crowned queen. That was all nonsense. She relished the prospect of the title of princess consort. As Duchess of Cornwall, she would rank above Princess Anne and Sophie Wessex, both of whom would be expected to curtsey to her and to acknowledge that Camilla could choose who to speak to and expect no one to leave a room before her. To modify her expectations, a courtier let drop that the queen, referring to Camilla’s wedding ring, made from special Welsh gold, commented, ‘There is very little of it left – there won’t be enough for a third wedding.’
The guest list for the reception at Windsor included those loyal friends – the Palmer-Tomkinsons, the Marquess of Douro, the Earl and Countess of Halifax and the Duchess of Devonshire – who had allowed their homes to be used by the couple during their secret affair. Among those who declined the invitations were members of several European royal families, in retaliation for Charles’s past refusal of their own invitations. The excuse of one Swedish royal was a trip to Japan to open an Ikea store. Among the guests who eventually declined were the van Cutsems – Hugh van Cutsem wrote that they were committed to a prior engagement.
Mark Bolland was not invited. ‘Honesty about their relationship,’ he wrote just after the wedding, ‘did not come naturally, even with each other. It was forced upon them by Diana’s revelations.’ He continued, ‘While the royals pretend to work hard, they holiday for nearly half the year and only put in a three-day week. Camilla does not even pretend. With limited stamina, she has never worked and hates being on public display. Now Charles and Camilla must persuade the public that they can be satisfactory monarchs.’
There were invitations for the comedian Joan Rivers and for American financiers of Charles’s charities. But there were concerns about the American fundraising operation. For the first time questions arose about Robert Higdon’s expenses. The running costs of the foundation were 52 per cent of its income, rather than the customary 10 to 20 per cent. A scandal had also arisen at the New York Academy of Art, supported by a $100,000 grant from the foundation. The Academy was charging $1,000 a head for dinner in ‘Charles’s Room’, and one director was suspected of fraud. There was also unease about the American Young Presidents’ Organization, a group recruited by Higdon to pay a minimum £30,000 per person for a tour of Clarence House and Windsor Castle, ending with dinner with Charles.
The absence of popular excitement was capped by anti-climax. On 2 April, six days before the planned wedding date, Pope John Paul II died. Under pressure from the queen, and after the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to fly to Rome for the pope’s funeral, Charles agreed to postpone the ceremony for one day so that he could be in Rome as her representative.
The next morning, a small, enthusiastic crowd cheered modestly outside Windsor’s register office before the marriage, which was witnessed by Charles’s three siblings. He and his new bride returned with some tears of joy to the castle for the archbishop’s blessing in St George’s Chapel. Few monarchists were placated by Charles’s promise to ‘acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness’. The queen looked serious as the archbishop asked, ‘Do you, his relatives, his friends and supporters, will you support the prince in his marriage vows and his loyalty for the rest of his life?’
The guests roared, ‘We will!’
As the queen emerged into public view, she smiled then walked briskly to a side room invisible to the celebrities, writers, charity workers and Charles’s old girlfriends filing into the state apartments. She was, as planned, just in time to watch the Grand National with Andrew Parker Bowles and other racing enthusiasts and then enter the reception. Charles looked warily at Andrew Parker Bowles. There was a call for silence.
‘I have two important announcements to make,’ said the queen. ‘I know you will want to know who was the winner of the Grand National. It was Hedgehunter.’ After the laughter subsided, she continued, ‘Secondly, having cleared 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. They are now on the home straight; the happy couple are now in the winners’ enclosure.’
Amid the cheers of approval, few noticed that the queen did not mention Camilla by name; nor did she speak to her during the party. ‘I can’t believe it,’ the new bride repeated to her friends in the room. ‘I can’t believe it.’ The queen was also noticeably cool towards her son. She had given him a brood mare as a wedding present, and a promise to cover her and pay the expenses for the foal. Not interested in racing, Charles had not appreciated the gift. When the queen telephoned a few days later, he ordered his valet, ‘Tell her I’m busy having a dinner party.’
After her speech, the queen re-entered the side room to watch a replay of the big race. To her irritation, the event had not been recorded. ‘Someone forgot to push the right button, Ma’am,’ explained a nervous courtier.
The queen curtailed her stay and headed for the exit, passing Michael Fawcett on the way. ‘Oh look,’ she said loudly to Philip, ‘there’s Fawcett. He’s got so fat.’
Charles was waiting for her on the steps outside. ‘That went rather well,’ she said, according to a lip-reader hired by the Sun.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘We’re leaving now.’
‘Oh, I really want a picture of us all.’
The queen stood for just fifty-two seconds, then, without another word, walked away.
Back inside the castle, Charles turned to Billy Tallon, known as ‘Backstairs Billy’, the queen mother’s favourite steward. ‘If only Grandmama could have been here and seen this.’
‘If she’d been alive,’ Tallon replied, ‘you couldn’t have married.’