It has not been the princess of the people. But his has been, without a doubt, the fairy tale in which, in the end, love has triumphed. Camila, today Queen Consort of the United Kingdom, has gone in the last 30 years from being the witch of the story to the secret weapon of the Windsor house, one of its most tireless workers, and the anchor that has given stability, confidence and poise to the current monarch.
That her appointment as queen consort at the “sincere wish” of the late Elizabeth II generated little controversy in the same country that vilified and ridiculed her just three decades ago says a lot about how things have changed in the United Kingdom. The British tabloids, in addition, have a new “bad” with which to fill their pages, as Meghan Markle, Prince Henry’s wife, well knows.
Princess Diana, the first wife of the then Prince of Wales, called her “the Rottweiler.” Her own queen came to refer to her as “that wicked woman.” She was dubbed “the most hated woman in the UK” by tabloid press after the death of her glamorous Lady Di, ascended to heaven by a country that adored her. No one, in this country so given to gambling, would have gambled a penny that she would be queen today.
Camila, however, has not only managed to win the favor of the public, but has also managed to soften the image of the current monarch in the eyes of the British. As her biographer, journalist Angela Levin, explained in an interview with ‘Town & Country’, “before being able to be publicly with Camila, Carlos was an unhappy soul because he had no support.” The one who was accused of turning the monarchy upside down could finally become its savior.
Those who have treated her closely describe a woman with her feet on the ground, with a country soul, jovial, discreet and hard-working. The daughter of an army major turned wine merchant and an aristocratic mother, Camilla Shand spent her childhood in a magnificent country house in south-east England, doing what well-to-do girls of the British aristocracy then used to do: hunting and riding. horse.
Educated at the elite Queen’s Gate School in the London neighborhood of South Kensington, Camila was a self-confident teenager, not very studious but a great reader and “with a magnetism and a confidence that I envied more than anything. She was one of those people who knows what she wants and who knows that she will succeed in life », as described by a former classmate in the book ‘Charles and Camilla’, by Gyles Brandreth.
Without many career aspirations, Camila was sent to a Swiss boarding school specializing in etiquette and creating the perfect high-society housewife. But Camila, like any teenager, she liked to have fun. From one of her first jobs as a secretary she was fired for being late after a night of partying.
the origin of romance
Carlos and Camila met in 1971. She had had an on-and-off relationship with Andrew Parker-Bowles, an Army officer with a reputation for heartbreaking. In one of their breakups, in which Parker-Bowles tried to woo Anne, Charles’s sister, the Prince of Wales and Camilla struck up a friendship. Legend has it that, in that first meeting, Camila, spiteful and seductive, released him: «My great-grandmother was your great-grandfather’s lover. What do you say?”. True or not, the friendship quickly turned into romance.
In 1973, Carlos left with the Navy to continue his military training and the relationship cooled. That same year, Camila accepted Parker-Bowles’ marriage proposal, leaving the young prince in despair. “I guess this empty feeling will pass in time,” she then confessed to his great-uncle and mentor, Lord Mountbatten. It was not so.
Much has been written about why, if they were in love, they did not then take the step to get married. Some point out that Carlos did not want to get married until he was 30, and that she decided not to wait. Others, that different members of the royal family had their own candidates for Princess of Wales and that they maneuvered so that the story of Carlos and Camila did not go ahead.
But one reason overrides everything else: Camila had blue blood but she also had a “past.” I mean, she wasn’t a virgin. And in a society as hypocritical and rancid as the British aristocracy, sex before marriage was -for them- prohibited. The advice of Mountbatten, the same one who had set up a riding school in Hampshire for Carlos to take his friends, and who had encouraged him to “throw a can in the air” before settling down, was clear: “Look for a girl with a sweet character to put her on a pedestal and marry her,” according to biographer Sally Bedell Smith. That girl was Diana Spencer, and the marriage – it’s no secret – was a disaster.
Carlos and Camila had remained friends and, by the time of the wedding with Diana, the affair between the former lovers, say some of their biographers, had begun again. The now queen consort already had two children, Tom and Laura, and an unfaithful husband. On the same honeymoon, Diana found some photos of Camila in a book of her new husband and the two had a fight when she discovered that the two intertwined C’s of her husband’s twins stood for “Carlos and Camila”.
Tensions with Diana Spencer
Diana even confronted Camila at a birthday party in 1989. “I know what’s going on,” she told her. “Don’t treat me like an idiot.” But the marriage, the one in which Diana said in her famous interview with Andrew Morton that there had been three, broke up in 1992. Camila and Andrew divorced in 1995.
A year after the separation from Carlos, a bomb exploded in the British tabloid press. The transcript of an intimate telephone conversation between Carlos and Camila, in which the Prince of Wales confessed that he would like to live in his lover’s pants and reincarnate in her tampon, ended up, black on white, in the press from half the world
The conversation revealed much more, first of all the deep love they professed, and Camila’s constant support for a tremendously unhappy Carlos in his marriage. But almost the only thing that transpired then were the spicy details. Carlos was ridiculed and the press found what he was looking for: a villain to hate.
The ‘Camillagate’, as the press called those revelations, and the harassment to which she was subjected, was tremendous. “It’s hard. I was scrutinized for so long that, in the end, you have to find a way to live with it. Nobody likes to be looked at all the time and criticized… », she acknowledged in an interview with ‘Vogue’ magazine last July, on the occasion of her 75th birthday. “But I think I managed to get on top and get over it. You have to get on with your life.”
Diana’s tragic death in 1997 reactivated the media hunt against Camila. But her relationship with Carlos was stronger every day, and the prince managed to assert his will, before his family and before the British, to spend the rest of his days with what had been his true love. the. The couple’s appearances, shy at first, became more and more frequent. The queen and the rest of the family had accepted her. They got married in 2005.
“No one doubted that they loved each other,” says journalist Jonathan Dimbledy in his authorized biography of Carlos. “In Camila Parker-Bowles the prince found the warmth, understanding and stability that he had always wanted and that he had not been able to find in anyone else.”