Mrs. Parker Bowles was restive. By the spring of 2004, she had been divorced from Andrew for nine years, and the sainted sylph Diana had been dead and buried for six. Camilla and Charles were now ensconced much of the time at Clarence House, where Camilla had her own suite of rooms. Charles had renovated the nineteenth-century John Nash–designed jewel with punctilious historic perfection.
When the Prince traveled, Camilla made festive escapes from royal dullness to Ray Mill House, her rambling Wiltshire bolt-hole less than half an hour from Highgrove. She had refused to give it up, for here at least she could loll around, eat peas straight from the garden, enjoy a cigarette without furtively smoking up the chimney as she did when Charles was around, and have raucous dinners in the kitchen with her now-adult kids.
Life had greatly improved since the wilderness years, but she also felt marooned. Despite all the finagling and finessing of Mark Bolland, who had now been gone for over a year, all the patient maneuvering into royal acceptance that seemed to be gathering steam after the death of the Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee, all her sweet-talking of a succession of private secretaries to the Queen and the Prince of Wales, all the careful overtures to the still guarded Prince William and an outright sullen Prince Harry, there was always some fresh debacle not of her making that drove her underground again.
Being the unofficial consort of the Prince of Wales was a heavy lift. Upbeat encouragement had always been her mistress role. In the thirty-three years they had known each other, she had never said a public word about their relationship. She acknowledged the nuances of royal etiquette even after so long together as a couple—she always referred to her paramour as “the Prince,” not “Charles” when they hosted dinners at Highgrove and “Sir” when she addressed him in public. She was the horse whisperer of his emotional needs, and knew how to dispense tough love with charm. A son of one of the Queen’s friends told me, “Camilla stops the pompous thing with Charles. She won’t let him get away with telling his man to get his gin and tonic. She says, ‘Oh don’t be so ridiculous. Let me pour the gin and tonic.’ ”
If Camilla had a family motto, it would be “Thou Shalt Not Whine.” That was not always easy when it came to supporting her royal partner. One of her challenges was to sustain Charles through his Diana PTSD. “I remember in the early days of working for Charles, we would have these three-way dinners with Camilla,” Mark Bolland told me in 2005 when I spoke to him for The Diana Chronicles:
Charles would go on and on about Diana and how she spun the press. I would say, “We have to move on, sir,” and he said, “To understand me, Mark, you have to hear this.” And Camilla would say to me afterwards, “He needs to do this, Mark.”
On occasion, Bolland had tried to suggest some gracious way for the Prince to acknowledge Diana’s legacy, but Charles always punted him to Camilla. “I’m not the block here,” she said. “Forget about trying to make him do it. He still has too much pain and anger. It’s too great.”
Over time, Charles’s self-pitying paranoia about never being appreciated enough was a serious bore to all. He moaned endlessly about being undervalued by his mother, the nation, and the press. He complained his life was unbearable when his office was the wrong temperature. In 2004, he reportedly said, “Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales.” It was not endearing coming from a multi-millionaire monarch-in-waiting with a brace of stately homes on tap. The aftermath of Labour Party spin doctor Peter Mandelson’s visit to Highgrove in 1997, when he told Charles that British ministers sometimes found him “rather glum and dispirited,” was pure panic. The Prince was so unused to hearing the truth that he asked Camilla afterward in a tortured tone, “Is that true? Is that true?” Camilla crisply replied, “I don’t think any of us can cope with you asking that question over and over again for the next month.”
The Prince was not wrong that his many accomplishments were rarely acknowledged. Despite the excruciating public spectacle certain parts of his life had become, he had succeeded in transforming the nine hundred acres surrounding Highgrove into an early model of sustainable farming, ignoring those who ridiculed him as an heirhead who wasted his time talking to plants. Decades before organic was cool, he had the vision to convert Home Farm completely to that eco-philosophy. The use of pesticides was banned, and visitors were greeted with the words: “Warning: You are now entering a GMO-free zone.” A source of princely pride was the preservation of the gene pool of rare breeds, such as Tamworth pigs and Irish Moiled cattle. And he was entrepreneurial with his farming innovations. In 1990, the Highgrove House estate began producing a surprisingly successful line of organic products, which the Prince called Duchy Originals. (At his seventieth birthday party in 2018, the Queen toasted her son for being “in every respect a duchy original.”) Since 2009, thanks to a licensing and distribution agreement with the grocery chain Waitrose, which came to the rescue after the 2008 economic crisis, Duchy Originals (now rebranded as Waitrose Duchy Organic) has raised over £30 million for the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund. In his own idiosyncratic way, Charles proved to have a flair for sustainable business.
The Prince made other efforts to combine enterprise with his environmental passions. In the late eighties, he donated Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorset to build the experimental village Poundbury. The plan reflected his retro-architectural vision of what British rural life should be—low-rise streetscapes built to human scale in an integrated community of shops, businesses, and residences, a third of them affordable housing. Yawns ensued, and ridicule abounded of Poundbury as a feudal Disneyland, a “Toy Town,” and a “retro-kitsch fantasia.” But over the years, it blossomed into a buoyant three-thousand-strong community. In 2005, the Prince gave a tour to 60 Minutes, pointing out the convenience store and noting that he is “very proud of it [as] everybody said [it] wouldn’t work,” and the pub, which “again, nobody wanted to touch.” In his usual doleful vein, he added, “I only hope that, when I’m dead and gone, [the British people] might appreciate it a little bit more.” In 2012, Poundbury touted its first full-scale anaerobic digester, which turns food waste and maize from surrounding farms into local, renewable, sustainable energy. It generated about as much excited press coverage as one might expect.
Charles was correct in feeling that the prescience of his much-mocked “hobby horses” was validated again and again. After all, he was only twenty-one when he made his first landmark speech at the “Countryside in 1970” conference about the “horrifying effects of pollution in all its cancerous forms.”
In 2018, when he was served an iced coffee at an Athens café during a visit to Greece, he made headlines for declining a plastic straw while pointing out that plastic is bad for the environment. Reporters made no mention of the fact that Charles had first spoken out about the threat of plastic to the environment way back in 1970 and was largely ignored.
Charles was bold on other topics. In 1993, eight years before 9/11, he gave an impassioned address to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies about the need for a greater understanding of Islam by the West, expressing outrage about the decimation of the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. Reading the speeches today, one can tell that they are clearly mostly his own work, full of characteristic Eeyore asides and self-deprecating statements. It’s hard to imagine either of his sons embracing such a miscellany of offbeat causes.
Nowhere did Charles feel less appreciated than in the work of his charities for youth advancement. The Prince’s Trust developed significant heft over time. Perhaps because Charles himself felt so aimless in his post-naval years, he made the trust’s philanthropic focus kids whom everyone else had written off: the homeless and those with arrest records or drug habits, or who lived on the dole and never saw themselves leaving it. At the time the charity was launched, there was little interest in seventeen-year-olds who failed at school. Charles felt a genuine affinity for them and wanted to help.
The actor Idris Elba, who grew up on a council estate in Hackney, has thanked the trust for giving him the audition—and £1,500—he needed to launch his career. In a recent tally, the Prince’s Trust has helped more than eighty-six thousand young people start a small business.
Why wasn’t Charles more celebrated for his strenuous progressivism, and for his demonstrably humane labors? Ironically, he cared about many of the things the liberal bible The Guardian espoused, and to which the Murdoch press was instinctively hostile. But as the heir to the throne, he was hardly going to become a poster boy for liberal causes, especially given his cranky dislike of anything that smacked of lefty cultural dogma. As Prime Minister Tony Blair put it: “He was a curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour; at another, definitely not), and of the princely and the insecure.”
His lack of appropriate royal caution was sometimes admirable, and principled. While Blair was trying to court improved relations with China, Charles pointedly hosted an evening reception at St. James’s Palace for the Dalai Lama, in order to express his keen support of Tibet. He harbored deep reservations about the war in Iraq and its effect on Anglo-Islamic relations, but, in that instance, his opposition was probably based on the wrong reasoning: his cozy, fundraising relationships with the Gulf kingdoms.
What caused him the greatest despair was the never-ending industry of Diana books, documentaries, and tabloid takeouts that kept his negative image alive. It was understandably frustrating, but he also invited avoidable ridicule. Consumed by what he thought were the burdens of his office, he was frequently clueless about how distorted his worldview was. After a visit to India in October 2003, he offered as an inspiring example of livability “the shanty town slum in Bombay” where a population of close to a million lived with only one fetid bathroom for every fifteen hundred residents on teeming acreage half the size of the Highgrove estate. His hopelessly retro style of delivery made it an insurmountable challenge to connect with modern audiences. As Ken Wharfe told me in 2006:
The trouble with Prince Charles is he’s not like the rest of us, is he? The other day he was on the news in a suit, cloth cap, and polished green Wellies on the Duchy of Cornwall estate talking about the marvels of organic farming. He said in that voice [of his], “What drives me mad of course is the way supermarkets today dispatch carrots. When I was a child I remember wibbly-wobbly carrots.”
A window into his loopy perspective was revealed in an unfair dismissal tribunal involving Elaine Day, a former personal assistant at Clarence House. In March 2002, she happened to see what Charles wrote about her in one of his intemperate annotations of an office memo. “What is wrong with people nowadays?” Charles scrawled in the margins about Day. (She’d had the temerity to suggest that assistants should have the opportunity to train for senior roles in the household.) The memo continued:
Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred education system which tells people they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability. It is a result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history.
Given that the author of this statement holds the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy, Field Marshal in the British Army, and Marshal of the Royal Air Force without ever having served a day in combat and felt qualified to opine on architectural design and the intellectual product of every ministry in Whitehall without even an undergraduate degree from the Royal Institute of British Architects or an apprenticeship in the civil service, it’s not surprising his comments were poorly received by the British media. The memo concluded: “What on earth am I to say to Elaine? She is so PC it frightens me rigid.” Day lost her case, but inevitably won the PR war.
For a future king who was supposed to be neutral on matters of public policy, Charles generated unnecessary grief for himself when he used his bully pulpit to sabotage reputations. In 1984, while at a gala marking the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he called architectural plans for an extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” The design by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek was in all fairness deemed authentically hideous by many less willing to be candid than Charles. Patrick Jenkin, then Tory secretary of state for the environment, who was present while Charles delivered these notorious remarks, muttered that Charles’s speech “saved [him] from making a difficult decision.” The “carbuncle” design was rejected, and forever seen as the index of how ruthless the Prince could be when his sensibilities were offended.
Desperate for influence, stature, and attention as he waited (and waited) for his mother to move on, Charles poured forth a blizzard of opinionated suggestions and complaints to Tony Blair and his ministers. The Guardian got hold of a juicy batch from 2004 and 2005 with a Freedom of Information suit. Charles’s letters became known as the “black spider” memos because of the Prince’s sprawling comments, handwritten in black fountain pen. Topics ranged from his dislike of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the “degree to which our lives are becoming ruled by a truly absurd degree of politically correct interference,” to governmental neglect of rural England and the lack of resources for the armed forces in Iraq—particularly the “poor performance” of the Lynx helicopter.
Blair and his ministers received letter bombs pushing for a cull of Britain’s badgers and a protest about the illegal fishing of the Patagonian toothfish. In one letter of April 2002, which his advisers apparently begged him not to send (and would surely have got him “canceled” today), he associated himself with the views of a Cumbrian farmer who asserted, “If we, as a group, were black or gay, we would not be victimised or picked on.”
Just as often, though, the tone was more that of an inflamed curmudgeon who fires off “strongly worded” remonstrations from his armchair in the shires to the Telegraph letters page. In February 2005, when raising concerns about the future of hospital sites in a note to John Reid, MP, secretary of state for health, the Prince had at least enough self-awareness to acknowledge that he was at “the risk of being a complete bore.”
What is interesting and paradoxical about Charles is that there were also times when he was more in touch with subterranean British feeling than either the media or politicians, times when he was not wrong in essence, even if irritating—and profoundly fogeyish—in expression. Many of his blasts to politicians picked up accurately on the growing resentment felt in rural regions toward urban multiculturalism and Whitehall condescension, a widening divide that contributed to the Brexit vote in 2016.
The Blair government’s pledge to ban foxhunting in England and Wales was one of the most inflammatory of such issues. It came to epitomize to country dwellers the liberal elite’s insular misunderstanding of rural values. Charles strenuously lobbied Blair to drop what he considered an assault on tradition, explaining that hunting is “environmentally friendly” and “relies entirely on man’s ancient and, indeed, romantic relationship with dogs and horses.” Hunting was not, he endeavored to explain, what so many townies imagined: an activity dominated by toffs who rejoiced in tearing a terrified animal limb from limb (although there were, to be sure, plenty of them enamored with the chase). Hunt supporters insisted that the sport forged bonds between the village community, the landowner, and the farmer. Men and women saddled up in the same spot for generations amongst their neighbors, who all saw the culling of foxes as an environmental necessity. I glimpsed this myself when the Daily Mail sent me to Gloucestershire in 1983 to write a slasher piece about snobs on horseback. I didn’t find any. “Mostly the people hunting were relaxed, courteous country people, not all aristos by any means,” I wrote, surveying the motley turn-out of farmers, publicans, local doctors, and country squires.
The men were gallant, raising their hats at the slightest provocation, the women dignified and strong. Their hunting-speak wafted back to me as they paused to pat their steeds. “I’ve just come back from the Quorn. Frightful country.” “So difficult. It was nose to brush all the way.”
This pro-hunting view, of course, was entirely at odds with the urban sensibilities of the reformers, making the foxhunting ban the most elemental sort of culture war.
For Blair, the hunting topic was too radioactive with the Labour Party’s class warfare and animal rights activism to drop the ban. He had thrown it as a bone to appease his troublesome left wing and, as the controversy raged on, he came to have more important decisions to defend, such as the Iraq War. For some reason, many pro-hunting campaigners blamed the ban on Cherie Blair, who had always been identifiably more left of center than her husband. In September 2004, several hundred pro-hunt campaigners blocked the roads against guests trying to get to her fiftieth birthday party at Chequers, one of them wearing nothing but a Tony Blair mask and a strategically placed placard. “To be honest, I was never that interested in the hunting ban despite what they all thought,” she told me in 2020. “I’m perfectly happy if they kill a whole herd of foxes if you ask me. I don’t even like animals.”
In his memoir, Blair revealed that the Hunting Act that finally passed in 2004 was “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret” and confessed he was “ignorant about the sport” when he made the “rash undertaking” to agree to a ban. Blair claims he became more desperate to avoid a ban as he learned more about the sport. “Prince Charles truly knew the farming community and felt we didn’t understand it, in which there was an element of truth,” he wrote.
Ironically, it was this issue—a subject on which Charles and Camilla (and the entire Royal Family, including William and Harry, who hunted with the Beaufort) were at one in their private opposition—that was the cause of a rare blow-up between the otherwise harmonious couple.
Camilla was passionate about joining her father (who had been joint master of the Southdown foxhounds), her sister, and their friends at the Countryside Alliance’s Liberty and Livelihood March through central London in September 2002. Charles told her it was out of the question because it would be “seen as a direct and unacceptable attack on Tony Blair’s government.” Camilla strongly resisted. “He has had to put his foot down,” a friend told The Times.
She finally gave in, but defiantly put a pro–Countryside Alliance sticker on her car. Her resentment only increased when the march turned out to be an epic expression of rural rage with four hundred thousand people busing in from the shires to protest the ban, something she would dearly loved to have been a part of. It was the Dance of the Decades all over again, in gumboots.
The ambivalence of Camilla’s position was becoming untenable to her. For a while, she had thought that there was an upside to not being Charles’s wife. She had always hated flying, speaking in public, dressing up, and getting press attention. She had never had a calendar filled with things she didn’t want to do, which essentially defines the royal way of life.
Camilla was naturally good at the things she was required to be good at—the small talk, the charming of dignitaries and donors, the understanding of the royal milieu and its modes—but she had started to resent the curtailment of freedoms without the dignity of being Charles’s official consort. For a woman used to running her own domestic show for decades while her military husband served overseas or in London, she found it disheartening, I am told, to be a permanent guest in Charles’s multiple grand houses with lugubrious eavesdropping servants always loitering around.
There wasn’t even the fun of being a chatelaine who could decorate the way she wanted, as Charles and Michael Fawcett were the fastidious taste barons who supervised every aesthetic detail. She found Highgrove irritatingly perfect. “It’s too small and too Charles,” she told her friends. “I can’t touch a thing.” When interior designer Dudley Poplak, who decorated Kensington Palace and Highgrove for Charles and Diana in airy color schemes, strolled round Highgrove after their separation, he noted how Charles’s taste had returned to his childhood. “You can see this is an old man’s room now,” he said, surveying the new dark red window hangings and tapestry-covered sofa. “The Prince is withdrawing into the womb. It’s just like one of those rooms at Sandringham.” Two of his other homes, Birkhall and Castle of Mey, still felt like shrines to the Queen Mother. Camilla especially hated the heavy, moth-eaten tartan curtains at Birkhall that Charles refused to change because they were his grandmother’s favorite.
The Prince’s routine was relentless. He never ate lunch, and breakfasted on the same bird seed and peeled fruit every morning. Punctuality had never been Camilla’s strong suit, but Charles expected her to be ready for engagements at his own regimented pace. When she asked where they were going, he would snap, “Haven’t you read the brief?” (After she joined the Firm, the military tempo and flying, often in helicopters, which she hated, were not an option she could refuse.)
Anecdotes about how she was faring leaked to the press, and she began to feel she couldn’t trust people. She resented policemen and security personnel who were not her chosen friends, gossiping about her unkempt appearance out of the public eye. “Camilla is nervy and lacks stamina; she has never worked in her life and is terrified of being on public display,” Mark Bolland wrote in The Times in April 2005.
One of her friends at that time told me that she had even started to feel some empathy with Diana’s manifold discontents.
When the Queen sent Sir Michael Peat over to clean up the chaos of Charles’s household in 2002, his brief from the top, despite the good omens of acceptance at the jubilee, was to push back on Camilla’s ascendance. “His instructions were to sever Charles’s relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles because it was a mess and was detracting from his work,” the well-wired Penny Junor reports.
This is certainly how the people in St James’s Palace who worked with Peat during those first months viewed the situation….For a man who would one day lead the Church of England, this was an awkward situation at best. She had to go.
As reported by The Independent, Peat prevented Camilla from going with Prince Charles on an official trip to India and scaled back her public appearances with him. He kept her out of Charles’s crucial diary meetings. A piece in Hello! magazine claimed that Camilla and her family had started to refer to Peat as “The Enemy”—the term that Diana used about the Prince’s previous private secretary. In May 2004, Clarence House had to deny reports that Camilla was “being frozen out of royal life by unnamed courtiers.” The intervention came after reports that “only if Camilla were sidelined could the Prince of Wales regain popularity after the Paul Burrell affair and implausible claims that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered.”
Peat, however, was nothing if not pragmatic. After observing the strength of Charles and Camilla’s relationship, he realized that trying to obstruct it was a futile exercise. He began to advocate the reverse to the Palace and his boss: Charles should marry her and be done with it. A “trusted royal courtier,” who sounds very much like Peat, would tell The Times only nine months later:
The Prince will become the Supreme Governor of the Established Church and Defender of the Faith when he becomes King. We would want to avoid the succession being overshadowed by any controversy over whether the new King should marry his long-time love.
Peat was backed up in his marriage zeal by Charles’s new communications secretary, Paddy Harverson, who was also put in charge of representing the young princes. Harverson was an inspired choice for the role, the definition of a breath of fresh air—six foot five, confident, modern, easygoing, but a robust defender of a client in trouble. He put the days of faxed press releases to rest by launching a Clarence House Twitter account, holding press briefings, and going on television as the charming, ask-me-anything spokesman for all things the old-guard Buckingham Palace team had never deemed proper to do. He defined the communications role simply as promote and protect.
Harverson had a strong press background as a former Financial Times journalist, and three years’ experience as communications director at Manchester United Football Club. Peat asked him to meet for a vacancy that had come up at Clarence House. There was a view that more employees were needed from the private sector. Harverson thought the job was an unlikely fit, but he liked Peat (who ingratiatingly described himself as a football fan). As he thought about the challenge of becoming the image maker of Prince Charles and the boys, he realized that his work at Manchester United was a useful qualification. The Palace, much like England’s premier football club, was a global institution at the heart of English life with young celebrity players: Prince William, twenty-one, finishing university, and Prince Harry, nineteen, who had just left Eton. The protections provided by the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice were soon to fall away. He was keen to show the boys they had someone on their side.
Catching sight of William at a Westminster Abbey service marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, Sir Roy Strong noted in his diary that “Prince William could become the new David Beckham, a real pin-up, fresh and sweet-natured and shy.” No one would be better at representing the new David Beckham than Harverson, who had represented the real one. He quickly passed the Camilla test over tea. “I thought she was fantastic,” he said. Unfrightened by all the stuffiness and drama of the past, he saw that her dynamic with Charles could be an asset to how the media portrayed the Prince: “It was most noticeable on overseas tours, he looked lonely. Yet you would see them privately and they were fantastic together—funny—and she was so good for him, you could tell.”
With Peat urging Charles to make Camilla official, the Prince, in his usual tormented fashion, dithered about what it would do to his popularity. In May 2004, the liberated Mark Bolland gave a mischievous interview to The Times in which he said that Charles had missed the boat to marry Camilla: “I think there was a window within the year or so after the Queen Mother died…when all the indications of opinion were in the right place. I don’t think it is like that now. He is more cloaked in controversy.” He said that Charles, despite his longing to be with Camilla, had long been wary about being pushed into marriage:
Every now and then newspapers would run a poll about whether they should get married and a couple of editors said we should start a campaign….He would always say, “Just please do everything you can to stop them doing that. I don’t want to be pushed into a corner. I will know if the time is right.”
The gossip columns started to imply that Charles’s interest in Camilla was waning. There were lots of winking references to the oft-quoted Jimmy Goldsmith aphorism that “when you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy.”
Happily for Camilla, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and royal sycophant George Carey weighed in a month later with a more soothing newsbreak. “He is the heir to the throne and he loves her,” Carey told The Times.
The natural thing is that they should get married….The Christian faith is all about forgiveness. We all make mistakes. Failure is part of the human condition and there is no doubt that there has been a strong loving relationship, probably since they were very young, that has endured over the years.
Other clerics started to join a chorus of approval. Behind the scenes, Michael Peat was in overdrive, squaring the finer points of church and constitution.
Ultimately, it was not august canonical opinions, but an infuriating social incident in November 2004 that pushed Charles across the matrimonial finish line. The twenty-nine-year-old son of one of Charles’s closest friends, a Norfolk landowner and horse breeder named Hugh van Cutsem, and his socially ambitious Dutch wife, Emilie, was getting married to the Duke of Westminster’s daughter at Chester Cathedral. Edward van Cutsem, the groom, had been a page boy at Charles and Diana’s wedding. He was the Prince of Wales’s godson, and it was all set to be the society wedding of the year. A guest list of 650 included the Queen and Prince Philip, Charles and Camilla, and William and Harry. The two princes were close friends with all the van Cutsem boys and would be serving as ushers.
Charles and Camilla were apprised of the seating plans the weekend before the wedding. The arrangements revealed Mrs. Parker Bowles to be relegated to the social margins of the event.
She had been expecting to sit directly behind Charles, who, protocol demanded, would join the Queen and Prince Philip at the front, but no, that “Dutch cow” (as Camilla reportedly called Emilie van Cutsem) had stuck Camilla on the other side of the cathedral with the bride’s friends at the back and told her that she could not enter or leave by the main door.
“The trouble is Charles wasn’t really focusing on all the details of the wedding,” a courtier told a reporter at the Daily Mail. “I think it was William who alerted him to what was going on. And it sent Camilla over the edge. The Prince has been muttering that this would never have happened if Michael [Fawcett] was still here.”
What made the snub especially explosive was that there was already bad blood between Camilla and the van Cutsems. Camilla was outraged when they informed Charles that they believed her son, Tom, a known drug user, was a bad influence over William and Harry. The van Cutsems believed that Bolland was retaliating by spinning against their own sons and brought lawyers into the row until an uneasy truce was declared. (Not enough of a truce, however, to restore Hugh to the guest list of the Prince’s shooting parties or either of the van Cutsems to be a recipient of the annual Clarence House Christmas card.)
Claiming a strict allegiance to royal protocol, Emilie van Cutsem resisted Charles’s demands to upgrade Camilla’s seat in the cathedral at their son’s wedding. Hugh was a stuffed shirt whom Princess Diana always considered “heavy furniture” when she drew him as a dinner partner. Dislike of Emilie, the haughty daughter of an Amsterdam banker, was one of the few judgments that Camilla and Diana shared. A point in her disfavor was that she was one of six female confidantes to whom Charles gave a special brooch when he married Diana, suggesting a closeness neither wife nor mistress liked.
Camilla refused to be understanding this time. She would not be humiliated in front of all of Charles’s snotty circle and, more important, the Royal Family. The Prince had to choose between attending the wedding without her or snubbing his closest friends and his godson. Basta! It was Camilla’s line in the sand.
Fortunately, there is always an exit if you are the Prince of Wales.
On the day of the wedding, duty suddenly called. He found himself obliged to visit the barracks at Warminster in Wiltshire to meet with the families of soldiers from the Black Watch serving in Iraq. Three members of the regiment had been killed in a suicide attack near Fallujah.
Meanwhile, Camilla was “otherwise engaged.” The absence of the groom’s royal godfather at the wedding was a devastating social setback for Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, but one that they had to bear with a stiff upper rictus. Game, set, and match to Mrs. Parker Bowles. The Prince of Wales had made an unprecedented show of support for the woman he loved.
That was satisfying, but not sufficient for Camilla. At this point, she felt there would always be some reason why the moment wasn’t right to make her partnership with the Prince of Wales official. Her feelings were supported by the mildest of men with the strongest of principles: her father, Major Shand. Now aged eighty-seven, he had become increasingly concerned that his beloved daughter was being put in a shoddy position. “Although he loved the Prince dearly, he thought him weak, and was worried about how vulnerable he had made Camilla by allowing her to live in limbo,” royal biographer Penny Junor says. The Major decided to make a rare intervention. “He took the Prince aside and said, ‘I want to meet my maker knowing my daughter’s all right.’ ” He was speaking for the entire extended family. Charles, who had a deep respect and affection for the old war hero, felt chastened enough to pay attention. The humiliation of the van Cutsem affair could not be repeated. “It’s nonsense, it’s insulting,” Charles acknowledged. “And I’m not going to put Camilla through it anymore.” What would happen, for instance, if William married first? Mrs. Parker Bowles banished again to the back of the church?
Charles proposed to Camilla at last over New Year’s at Birkhall on bended knee. They had each spent Christmas with their families and Charles had briefed his mother, his sons, and the rest of his family at Sandringham on what he planned to do. A Populus poll in 2004 had shown more members of the British public supported the notion of a Charles-Camilla marriage than opposed it, and even more said they didn’t care (which was more helpful to Charles than it might seem, for it disarmed those who would raise fears of popular opposition to his remarrying). The Queen, softened up by the prelate and public approval, the constitutional politicking of Sir Michael Peat, and her freedom from the Queen Mother’s objections, agreed that cleaning up the Camilla business—“regulariz[ing]” her role, in royal parlance—was the only course that now made sense for the working efficiency of the Firm. “It’s been very messy, hasn’t it?” one of the Queen’s oldest friends said to Gyles Brandreth. “The Queen likes things to be tidy and, despite what’s been said, she isn’t in the least bit vindictive. Since Camilla isn’t going to go away, she may as well be welcomed. That seems to be the view.” The Duke of Edinburgh, apparently, was of the opinion that if “they’re going to do it, they might as well get on with it.” William and Harry would never fully embrace Camilla or understand her appeal, but as everyone else understood, she was “non-negotiable” in their father’s life. If their relations were strained, they were, by this time, cordial.
The Queen signed off on Charles choosing Camilla’s engagement ring from one of the Queen Mother’s collection. It was an art deco heirloom featuring a five-karat emerald-cut diamond in the center, with three diamond baguettes on each side, more valuable than the engagement ring given to Diana. Camilla always loved heritage bling, and Charles loved giving it to her. Shortly before the marital separation in 1992, Diana was particularly aggrieved when she found that an expensive diamond necklace had been marked by Charles to give to Camilla for Christmas while she had been allocated a collection of paste. “I don’t want his bloody fake jewels!” she cried in front of Highgrove staff. “I thought cheating husbands took great care to keep their wives sweet with the real things, saving the tawdry stuff for their tarts!” His grandmother would have turned in her grave at Windsor Castle if she had known who was destined to wear her emerald-cut diamond bequest.
For Camilla, the ring on her finger was the ring of fire through which she had passed over thirty tumultuous years. She was inextricably bound to Charles like a Russian vine, entwined in love, protection, and the rough passages of the past. Why had she stuck it out? Some of her friends believe that by temperament and love of independence, she would have preferred the Alice Keppel role, but only in the discreet era that Alice Keppel lived. Mrs. Keppel never had to endure trashings by the British tabloids, the humiliation of the Camillagate tapes, the demonization after the death of the Princess of Wales, and the financial insecurity of divorce. Nor was there the remotest chance that Mrs. Keppel could end up as Queen. Camilla had been patient but never passive in her slow advance. She was about to become the second most important woman in England after the Queen. The “Dutch cow” would have to curtsey to her now!
There were more wins. She was able to ensure the Prince established a “substantial” trust fund for her children and that Charles prevailed against legal advice by waiving a prenuptial agreement, even though he felt he had been “taken to the cleaners” last time around. Given how he never stopped resenting the £17 million settlement he was obliged to pay Diana, the absence of a prenup in the Prince’s second marriage was an especially impressive score for Camilla. She had seen enough of royal parsimony to ensure she protected her future.
They chose Valentine’s Day 2005 as the date to release the engagement news and Camilla’s new title of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall bestowed by the Queen. Clarence House announced that when the Prince succeeded the throne, it was “intended” (a well-chosen weasel word) that his wife would be known by the galleon-like title of Princess Consort. The Queen gave her royal consent to the union after consulting Prime Minister Tony Blair. He expressed his approval and delight with a message of congratulations from the whole cabinet. Clarence House settled down to planning a wedding as different as possible from the unhappy associations of the first celebrated Wales union at St. Paul’s Cathedral. A civil ceremony at Windsor Castle on Friday, April 8, 2005, avoided religious controversy. A service of prayer and dedication led by the Archbishop of Canterbury at St. George’s Chapel brought ecclesiastical stature. The couple decided to eschew engagement pictures and the hazard of a prenuptial interview, with its horrible hark back to “whatever ‘in love’ means” when Charles was told he and Diana looked “very much in love.” There would be no glamorous honeymoon on the royal yacht (it was gone anyway). Instead, the newly married couple chose a few quiet days tramping around in the biting cold at Birkhall. It would all be very low-key, very elegant, very age appropriate.
Except it wasn’t. How could it be when the royal groom was the male version of Calamity Jane? First, in perhaps what American shrinks would see as a gesture of acting out that revealed the true turmoil of his feelings, there was a tabloid furor in January 2005 over leaked pictures of Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform from General Rommel’s Second World War Afrika Korps at a costume party. An incensed Charles, who was a nervous wreck before the “Big Announcement,” demanded Harry make proper apologies to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Prince Charles also blasted William, who’d reportedly dressed in a skin-tight black leotard with leopard-skin paws and a tail, for allowing his younger brother to make such a witless choice. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee launched an inquiry into the standards and responsibilities of Clarence House advisers. The always tone-deaf Duchess of York extended the headlines a further cycle by publicly offering Harry her full support.
Next, royal reporter Robert Jobson of the Evening Standard caught wind of the wedding scoop and bounced Clarence House into announcing the plans early, on February 10. At first, it seemed all right. Charles and Camilla were due that evening to go to a charity function at Windsor Castle that offered a friendly flashbulb moment outside. Camilla looked radiant in her pink Jean Muir dress. She showed off her ring and told the press she was “just coming down to earth!” The Queen illuminated the Round Tower of the castle as a festive gesture.
The problem: The usually punctilious team led by Michael Peat had made an unfortunate mistake.
The small print in the Marriage Act 1994 allowed marriages to be solemnized in certain “approved premises.” That said, if Windsor Castle was given a license to host the civil marriage of Charles and Camilla, it also meant that any old yobbo could apply to marry at the Queen’s home as well. The venue for Charles and Camilla to exchange vows had to be switched from the castle to the Guildhall. The Queen, as supreme governor of the Church of England, felt that her position did not permit her to attend a civil marriage ceremony, particularly one involving the heir to the throne. Nor was she given to showing up at High Street registry offices, inching past the Windsor branch of McDonald’s en route. She would now attend only the blessing in St. George’s Chapel. The question of the legality of the civil ceremony immediately cropped up. Sir Michael Peat had to ask the help of Tony Blair, who deployed the Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer. The latter put the matter sagely to rest by saying that the Human Rights Act 1998 (the one that Charles had sounded off against in the “black spider” memo) trumped, in effect, the Marriage Act, and affirmed that the marriage was lawful.
All of this offered an irresistible cock-up narrative for the press. The red tops, as British tabloids are sometimes known due to their red mastheads, were already in an angry mood that the Evening Standard had scooped them all with the engagement news. The headlines were brutal. “A Bloody Farce!” “Queen Snubs Charles’s Wedding!” “Humiliated!” “The Town Hall Bride!” “Wedding Fiasco Deepens Hostility to Charles!”
In March 2005, Charles took the boys skiing over Easter break at the Swiss resort at Klosters. Reluctantly, he agreed to a press opportunity in the snow that would give William and Harry a chance to express their enthusiasm for the wedding. The boys behaved with media-savvy geniality. Charles asked his sons, “Do I put my arms round you? What do we do?” William suavely said, “Keep smiling.” Asked if he looked forward to being a witness, the Beckham pin-up gamely answered, “As long as I don’t lose the rings—that’s the one responsibility!”
Charles, however, was furious when the BBC’s veteran royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell shouted what would seem to be a benignly predictable question about how the Prince was “feeling” with eight days to go before his wedding. “Felt” is always an unwise word to use around a senior member of the Royal Family, as it opens up questions of emotion they have been trained not to discuss. Forgetting the hot mic, Charles voiced his true opinion of Witchell to the world. “Bloody people,” he muttered under his breath. “I can’t bear that man. He’s so awful. He really is.” The sentiment surprised everyone since the inconsequential Witchell’s only claim to fame until that moment was sitting on a lesbian demonstrator during a protest invasion of the BBC’s Six O’Clock News studio in 1988. It took several days of negative Charles commentary—that he was “bad-tempered,” “petulant,” etc.—for that gaffe to go away.
At the end of March, the Bishop of Salisbury, who chaired the Church of England’s liturgical committee, got in on the act. He was on the high church Anglo-Catholic wing of the communion, and seemed to speak for those not happy with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s willingness to sanction the remarriage of the future supreme governor and defender of the faith. In a statement, the dyspeptic, ecclesiastical showboat insisted that Charles and Camilla should apologize to Camilla’s ex-husband for their part in breaking up the marriage before they were allowed to receive a church blessing. Clarence House didn’t even dignify this suggestion with a comment, though it afforded much mirth to those who knew the colorful sexual history of the supposedly wronged Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles.
Charles was distraught at how the wedding was being received. He made frantic phone calls to his friends. Some of them thought he and Camilla should have just gone off to Scotland like Princess Anne when she married her solid second husband, Commander Timothy Laurence, a former equerry of the Queen, at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral. Nicholas Soames, one of Charles’s closest friends, disagreed. “It might have been all right for Princess Anne…to do it in a businesslike way and then go back for a cheese sandwich at Gatcombe or whatever they did, but Camilla is a different gel,” he told The Spectator. “She wanted her friends there, for heaven’s sake.” Charles blamed Peat for the protocol debacles, and Peat in turn blamed his deputy, Kevin Knott, for bollixing up the venue. The twenty-year Palace veteran Knott obligingly resigned. The Queen, always such a stickler for detail herself, was exasperated at yet more indignities blowing up around Charles. Even Camilla wondered aloud to her staff, “Will the nastiness ever end?”
The life of Mrs. Parker Bowles was already beginning to change. She now had an armed protection officer at her side and could never again nip out to a store without one. Being “royal” in comportment would always be an effort for Camilla. A friend remembers seeing her with Charles in Qatar when they were all staying at the Four Seasons. “One time, I was getting into the elevator and Camilla got in wearing only a bathrobe, and I said ‘You are a brave woman’—imagine if people had taken a picture of her!” One characteristic she shared with the royals is that she never allowed her stress to show. At a memorial service for Princess Alexandra of Kent’s husband, Sir Angus Ogilvy, she was seated with the royal party. Gyles Brandreth noted that she looked “really good”:
She has lost weight and gained confidence. Her smile is sustained and unforced. Her only sign of insecurity is her habit of holding on to her hat. Given the years she has had to spend hovering in the shadows, she is entering into the limelight with considerable assurance.
While Charles went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Sri Lanka, where he visited tsunami victims, Camilla spent her time with her sister in fittings for her two wedding outfits—one for the Guildhall and one for the blessing—at the studio of the designer duo Antonia Robinson and Anna Valentine. She visited the hairdresser, though there was no threat of her changing her style, and practiced yoga to reduce angst. Charles’s tour of Australia was rewarded with a poll saying 59 percent of Aussies thought he should stand aside and give the throne to William.
Six days before the wedding, the pope died. And not just any pope. John Paul II, who would be canonized in 2014, was the most consequential pontiff of the modern era. He helped end communist rule in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe. His funeral convened the single most august gathering of heads of state outside the United Nations. Millions of mourners gathered in Rome. Dr. Rowan Williams was the first serving Archbishop of Canterbury to attend the funeral of a pope since the Church of England split with Rome in 1534. Seventy presidents and prime ministers, four kings, five queens, and more than fourteen leaders of other religions were on the guest list.
The Queen insisted that Charles represent her on the appointed funeral day, which happened to be the date on which he was supposed to be getting married. “Can anything else possibly go wrong?” whooped the Daily Mail, in response to this cosmic eruption into the lives of Charles and Camilla.
The wedding was postponed for twenty-four hours. Religious and political propriety demanded it. On top of the herculean task and expense of reworking every single detail of the arrangements, the televised blessing was now scheduled to clash with the Grand National steeplechase, considered the “crown jewels” of the BBC’s sports coverage. The solution was to move the start of the race from 3:40 p.m. to 4:10 p.m., allowing viewers to see both.
The otherwise stalwart Camilla went into meltdown. It must have felt as if Diana and the Queen Mother had joined forces from beyond the grave to rain down thunderbolts on her special day. She developed a chronic case of sinusitis and spent the week at Ray Mill with a group of girlfriends ministering to her shredded nerves. Her old friend Lucia Santa Cruz, who had first introduced her to Charles, arrived from Chile and brought Camilla homemade chicken soup. “She was really ill, stressed,” Lucia said, and terrified she wouldn’t make it. On the day of the wedding, Penny Junor reports, it took four people to coax Camilla out of bed at Clarence House: “She literally couldn’t get out of bed.” Camilla’s dresser, Jacqui Meakin, was there along with Camilla’s sister, Annabel, and daughter, Laura, and a housemaid. Finally, it was Annabel who settled the matter: “Okay, that’s all right. I’m going to do it for you. I’m going to get into your clothes.” Only then did Camilla get out of bed. Competition was always the best way to galvanize the woman who would, soon, never again be Mrs. Parker Bowles.
Once Camilla’s game face was on, she had never looked better. Radiating hesitant joy, she stepped into the Queen’s Rolls-Royce Phantom VI to join Charles for the journey to the Guildhall. It was a killing comparison to know that the world was thinking about that other bride, the enchanting twenty-year-old “lamb to the slaughter,” who had gone before up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in a riot of princess-doll taffeta, followed by that crumply, over-the-top train. But Camilla had her own muted dazzle that day. Aged fifty-seven, unvarnished, unblushing, un-svelte, she was someone that Diana had never been: the woman whom the Prince of Wales had wanted all along.
The fashion press agreed that Robinson Valentine pulled off a double win with its outfits: a delicate cream chiffon dress under an oyster silk basket-weave coat paired with a wide-brimmed, white-feathered Philip Treacy hat for the civil ceremony; a porcelain-blue chiffon dress and matching coat, embroidered with five varieties of gold thread that glowed in the light of St. George’s Chapel for the blessing. Hat maestro Treacy excelled himself a second time with a headdress of gold-leafed feathers, reminiscent of waving cornfields at harvest and a chic rural accent for a bride who loved the country.
The crowds lining Windsor’s narrow, winding streets were respectable enough—20,000 to Diana’s 600,000 in 1981—and at least they weren’t hostile. Twenty-eight guests, including Princess Anne, Prince William, and Prince Harry witnessed Charles and his new Duchess’s vows in the modest Ascot Room of the Guildhall with its single brass chandelier and fresh flowers picked from the garden at Highgrove and Ray Mill. Charles looked immaculate in a morning suit and dove-gray waistcoat. Bride and groom exchanged wedding rings made of special Welsh gold. When a cut of it was requested from the family’s remaining reserve from the Clogau mine, the Queen remarked, “There is very little of it left—there won’t be enough for a third wedding.” Her gift to Charles was a broodmare for which she would pay the expenses.
At St. George’s Chapel, eight hundred guests waited eagerly for the newlyweds to arrive. Energy was high, bordering on euphoria. This was the Camilla-Charles home team, the myriad friends and supporters who had provided safe houses to tryst in. They had listened patiently to Charles’s moans, kept Camilla’s secrets, defended them in the press, and acted as advocates with the Queen. It was Party in the Pews, without Ozzy Osbourne, featuring old favorites such as the Duchess of Devonshire, country stalwarts the Palmer-Tomkinsons, the former king and queen of Greece, Nicholas Soames, Stephen Fry, and a brace of old flames, such as Lady Amanda Ellingworth, and the Duke of Wellington’s daughter, Lady Jane Wellesley. Andrew Parker Bowles appeared mysteriously gratified. “He was behaving like the mother of the bride,” one of the congregation told me. Two guests whose absence raised eyebrows were Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem. Still in mourning for the pope, it was said.
Fresh off a plane from Rome himself, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, officiated the blessing. Masterfully, he led the couple in a prayer considered to be the strongest act of penitence in the Church of England. It was written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, to King Henry VIII, who had plenty to be sorry about himself:
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,
which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed,
by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,
provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these misdoings.
Asked if they would support the Prince in his marriage vows and his loyalty for the rest of his life, the congregation bellowed in unison, “WE WILL!”
The Queen sat through all this with her customary wedding face (to wit, no expression at all), but one of the guests told me there was a marked difference in her demeanor at the after-party, where she exuded genuine affection for both Camilla and her son. Were the long years of exclusion an expression of form rather than feeling? The Prince’s supportive and uncomplicated second wife has qualities the Queen always admires—constancy, discretion, stoicism under fire. Nothing kept Her Majesty from her first love, however. When Charles and Camilla emerged to cheers into the sunshine outside the chapel, the Queen disappeared into a side room to watch the Grand National. She emerged into the buzzing reception taking place in the State Apartments at Windsor Castle to make an unusually inspired toast that led the headlines the next day:
I have two important announcements to make. I know you will want to know who was the winner of the Grand National. It was Hedgehunter. [Deadpan pause.] 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.
Then she disappeared into the side room again to watch a replay of the race.
Camilla and Charles worked the room with an air of bewildered jubilation. Paddy Harverson remembers it as one of the most joyful weddings he has ever attended, releasing years of pent-up tension within the Royal Family and their entire circle of mutual friends. Stephen Fry remembers:
There was a moment when there was a mass of people and I was talking to David Frost and I turned round and, suddenly, there was the Queen next to me. And she said, “Is nobody going to get me any cake?” And I thought, “Wow.” There we were at Windsor Castle, and there indeed the cake had been. People were handing it out, and lots of people were eating it, and she wasn’t. I said, “You stay, ma’am. I’ll go and get you some.” So I barged through feeling like I was the most important messenger in a Shakespeare play, you know, saying, “Out of the way, the Queen demands some cake!”
As Her Majesty and Prince Philip headed for the exit, they passed Michael Fawcett. The Queen turned to Philip and said loudly, “Oh look, there’s Fawcett. He’s got so fat.” Coming shortly after the exquisite charm of her toast to Charles and Camilla, it was a moment when the tartness of the offstage Queen revealed itself.
William and Harry rushed outside to hang “Just Married” signs onto the back of their father’s Bentley before the bride and groom left for Birkhall. “It was transparent that William was happy for them,” a photographer who was up close told Penny Junor, “and Harry, but more so William. You could see that what mattered to him was the happiness of his father and how good Camilla was for him.”
What Diana’s younger son was thinking only he can tell us, and doubtless will.