Finally, it is here. King and Queen Charles and Camilla. What they always dreamed of. Yet things could have been so different.
As Prince Harry sat in the abbey – three rows back – what was going through his mind as he watched his mother’s nemesis, Camilla, being anointed as our next Queen?
Was he thinking the scene would make an excellent chapter opener for his next bombshell book? Perhaps.
In Spare, Harry painted Camilla as the wicked stepmother, a villain who, he claimed, leaked stories to the media.
He even said that he and William had urged their father not to marry her.
While he has seemed to backtrack on some of his claims, saying he has a “huge amount of compassion” for her and doesn’t see her as “an evil stepmother”, his revelations have caused irreparable damage to the family.
With a tight smile and barely singing God Save The King, Harry looked like he had got off at the wrong bus stop.
It is more than likely that, as Diana’s representative on Earth, the Duke of Sussex was wondering what his mother would have made of it all.
After all, if the fairytale marriage had enjoyed the happy ending meant for it, it would have been a glamorous 61-year-old Diana taking her vows by the side of his father, King Charles III.
The story of how Camilla became our Queen began in the room that had been Windsor Castle’s nursery, around 5pm on February 6, 1981 – when Charles sat Diana down and asked her to marry him.
Her response set in motion a chain of events that brought us to Camilla being crowned Queen.
In Diana’s own words, she laughed at the future King’s proposal. She said: “I remember thinking, ‘This is a joke’. And I said, ‘Yeah, okay’, and laughed.
“He was deadly serious. He said, ‘You do realise, one day you’ll be Queen?’ A voice said to me inside, ‘You won’t be Queen, but you’ll have a tough role’.”
If Diana felt that the role of Queen was not for her, she was not alone.
But the woman who vetted her suitability as Charles’ bride – Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles – would not have dreamed in a million years that one day it would be her walking down the aisle at Westminster Abbey to be crowned Queen.
She had accepted her forlorn role as the mistress. And Queen Elizabeth agreed. Even as her son’s marriage collapsed in acrimony, she never thought for a minute Camilla would one day be Queen – and told Diana so.
Diana was always wary of anyone with influence over her boys, so the idea that the Queen would accept Camilla as having any say in their future path was unthinkable.
Her premature death in 1997 merely set that antagonism in stone. The Queen and her aides wanted Camilla out of the picture, feeling that Charles’ loyalty to his lover was in danger of jeopardising the monarchy.
She was the Other Woman, excluded from formal invitations to any event hosted by Her Majesty.
Charles’ aides believed if Camilla was recognised by Diana’s sons, it would help her rehabilitation. So in June 1998, Camilla met William at St James’s Palace and they spoke privately for about half an hour. Her desire for a cigarette and stiff gin afterwards was helpfully leaked to the media.
He had every right to be furious at that first introduction, but he has realised she makes his father more relaxed, and less difficult to deal with.
William has accepted that you have to make compromises in life.
Yesterday’s ceremony showed that the divide between him and Harry could not be starker. While William pledged allegiance to his father with a kiss on the cheek, Harry was not invited to do the same. The brothers did not even acknowledge each other.
If Harry hadn’t cut himself adrift, he would not be the third-class royal he is now. That’s him done and dusted – this is the end of his long goodbye.
But it was a long road to acceptability for our new Queen. The public’s first introduction was when she and Charles were photographed leaving The Ritz hotel in January 1999. The death of the Queen Mother, who abhorred divorce, and the relaxing of the Church of England’s stance, ensured Camilla’s eventual acceptance into the royal circle.
With the Queen’s eventual blessing, the couple married in a civil ceremony at Windsor in April 2005.
Camilla was so nervous that it took four friends to coax her out of bed and help her into her Anna Valentine dress – rather belying Harry’s assertion that she schemed her path to the abbey with Machiavellian cunning.
Even then, there was no sign she would be Queen, the palace insisting she would become Princess Consort.
In fact, it was the Queen who was behind Camilla’s elevation, conferring upon her the titles of Privy Counsellor and Order of the Garter and requesting, shortly before she died, that she become Queen Consort.
Would Diana have approved? By now, it would be hoped that the princess would have found a partner and purpose that gave her new fulfilment.
Charles and Camilla should have been the rear view mirror of a life spent helping others. After all, the Parker Bowles family has remained civil, Andrew Parker Bowles being invited to the abbey by his ex-wife.
Diana would have watched her sons from a distance, probably on telly at a friend’s house – just like the former king, the Duke of Windsor.
But there would be no dusting off of her famous revenge dress. After all, she may have mused, Charles had long followed in her glow. For once King Charles III would be the star.
