Before she married, the Daily Mail liked to refer to the current Princess of Wales as “Waity Katie”; William’s proposal was, it was thought, rather a long time in coming. But these things are relative, of course. In 2005, when Prince Charles announced his second engagement, he’d known Camilla Parker Bowles for more than 32 years, during which time she had played several different roles in his life: girlfriend, friend and adviser, mistress (she enlisted for the latter job twice). Thirty-two years! Imagine it. Multiply this figure by four, and you’re only just over – by 16 years, to be exact – the age of the crown Camilla will wear at the Coronation at Westminster Abbey on 6 May (Mary of Teck, the wife of George V, bought the coronet in question at the jeweller Garrard & Co in 1911).
But time, in this case, equates to words: hundreds of thousands of them. When the 26-year-old Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, people knew next to nothing about her; even had the public been less respectful then, and less religious, there was never any danger the holy solemnity of the occasion would be sullied with thoughts of her earthly existence, let alone with gossip and scandal. In the case of 75-year-old Camilla, however, the opposite is true. As she lifts the gold sceptre, will we picture her looking fraught in the car park at Sainsbury’s? As she is anointed with sacred oil, will we recall that bit in Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers where the author describes how she once French-kissed Charles in full sight of her husband, Andrew, at a polo ball? Even the glorious sound of Handel’s anthem, Zadok the Priest, may not stop us from wondering what kind of queen it is who chooses to have lunch (as she did last year) in the company of Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan.
On the last point, incidentally, the answer may be: a very canny one. “What Harry said in his book [Spare] about the campaign to rehabiliate Camilla rings true. She was helped in that endeavour by Mark Bolland [Charles’s former deputy private secretary], whom some in the palace suspected of promoting her and Charles at the expense of other royals,” says Catherine Mayer, the author of Charles: The Heart of a King. Camilla knew she had to get the media onside if she was to be accepted, and she continues to use it now (think of her recent veiled comments about the censoring of Roald Dahl).
But equally, the answer may be: a very silly one. When Charles and Camilla made Tobyn Andreae, the deputy editor of the Daily Mail, their new communications secretary last July, there were raised eyebrows, and not only because Prince Harry is involved in legal action against the paper. The fact that Camilla is on kissing terms with Lord Rothermere, the Mail’s owner, is no guarantee such an appointment won’t one day bite her on the bum – and even if it doesn’t, the optics are, to put it mildly, on the strange side. “But then, her politics are all over the place,” adds Mayer. It is rather odd to be involved, on the one hand, with semi-edgy feminism of The WOW Foundation, and on the other, to have Petronella Wyatt, the former Spectator journalist who famously had an affair with Boris Johnson, going out to bat for you.
Oddness, though, is one of the hallmarks of the Camilla story. Royal writers like Gyles Brandreth and Penny Junor like to tell us in their brisk, nose-tapping way that the new queen is wonderfully normal; even those, like Mayer, who believe she is more complex and ambitious than people imagine, insist she’s easy in her own skin, and that it’s this – her warmth, her sociability – that Charles has always loved.
But normal means different things to different people. Camilla’s family history is full of men with nicknames like Rolie and Mad Harry (also, with Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII). She went, not to university, but to a Swiss finishing school called Mon Fertile. She has never worked, unless you count five seconds among the swatches in Colefax & Fowler. She existed, as a twenty-something, in a world in which – according to Brandreth – her greatest assets were her abilities as a horsewoman (she liked to hunt, which apparently equates to being keen on sex, too), the size of her breasts (“All our generation are breast men,” as her childhood friend, Broderick Munro-Wilson, put it), and her absolute refusal to make a fuss about silly emotional things like, say, the fact that the man you’re in love with, Andrew Parker Bowles, is having a fling with Princess Anne.
Ah, yes. Andrew Parker Bowles: a soldier and, by all accounts, a cad. Believe it or not, he is the principal reason – the others being her non-aristo status, her “past” (a euphemism for ex-boyfriends), and HRH’s dithering – why she didn’t marry Charles first time round. She was obsessed with APB in the particular (“masochistic”, according to Brandreth) way that some women are with the kind of men who use milk bottles as a code to signal to their brother-in-law they’ve brought a female back to their London pad for the night (he was married to Camilla by this point, according to Junor). Incidentally, the Queen Mother and Princess Anne both came to the Parker Bowles wedding (more oddness).
It’s easy to see why Charles turned to her when things with Diana went bad. Camilla subsumed the role once played in his life by the Queen Mother (“the buttery scone to his mother’s steamed broccoli”, according to Brown). But what was in the affair for her? (Both of them believed, for obvious reasons, that it could only ever be an affair – but then Diana died, and the landscape changed.) None of my sources, whether on the telephone or in the pages of a book, could answer this. Perhaps she got stuck: maybe, after the vilification that followed revelations of her affair with Charles, marriage seemed a way of making the pain and sacrifice worthwhile. Perhaps she just liked being adored, for there’s no doubting that the King adores her. Or perhaps, as Harry insists, she just fancied the whole deal.
Could this be so? It’s hard to believe (though easier to believe than some things I’ve read in the last week). Accounts of Camilla’s immense laziness are exaggerated, but she doesn’t share the King’s constitution. If he can keep going all day, she needs to “disappear for a sit down” at some point. “She does have to do some crashingly dull stuff,” says Mayer, who has been on royal tours. Somehow, though, she has made it work: “She’s been powerful for a long time. There was this determination to create a space for herself.” She has a world outside the realm of the court, in the form of Ray Mill House in Wiltshire, where she lived before she married. (They’re nothing if not profligate, house-wise, the royals.)
By all accounts, it’s there to which she retreats – as she did after the Queen’s funeral – for time alone; where she cooks her own supper, and eats it on a tray. What does it mean in 2023 to be a good queen? Who knows, though the polls suggest the public increasingly believes she will be one. But whatever it is, maybe it depends on sometimes being courtier-free: Mrs Windsor in stockinged feet with a reheated shepherd’s pie, a glass of red wine, and the Archers (or Taylor Swift) on the radio.
