The story of Camilla of Cornwall: from villain to duchess
The series The Crown increased the public's antipathy towards the second wife of Prince Charles.
When Carlos married Diana in 1981, about 750 million people watched the "wedding of the century" on TV: that of the heir to the throne of England and that of a young aristocrat of just 20 years of age, who had the consent of the Royal Household to be the future queen consort. The girl who had recently been living in an apartment with two friends, arrived in a glass carriage to the Cathedral of San Pablo, with a dress so voluminous that it barely fit in the vehicle and that despite the fortune it cost, it turned out to be a failure to wrinkle completely.
The wedding was far from being idyllic, as people saw it. The bride and groom had hardly spoken for several weeks, during which Diana was locked in Buckingham Palace learning the rules for behaving "properly" with a prince, dealing with her anxiety and eating disorders. And among those attending the ceremony was the person Carlos really wanted to marry for years: Camilla Parker Bowles.
Why didn't he marry her from the beginning and avoid Diana's suffering? Some may ask. Camilla did not meet what the Crown required to be the wife of the future king: she had been a bride first and later married Major Andrew Parker Bowles (from whom she took her surname) and the Queen, as head of the Church in the United Kingdom , he could not allow his son to marry a divorced woman (it was only in 1995). It was not the first time that Elizabeth II acted like this: she had already put her thumb down on the wedding of her own sister, Margarita, who had to part with the love of her life, the war hero Peter Townsend, for be married There are those who say that Margarita's later life, full of vices, excesses and frustration, was marked by that episode in her youth.
Diana was like a real flesh and blood Disney princess. She was 14 years younger than Camilla and the virginal appearance that the Crown demanded. An attribute that, of course, Carlos did not possess, who until that moment had followed the advice of his second uncle (and almost father by adoption) Lord Mountbatten: "Let him throw all the reeds into the air that he can before settling down." Many of those fireworks exploded over Camilla's bedroom, whom Carlos never stopped visiting from the moment he met her. In a famous interview Diana gave to the BBC in 1995, she noted: "There were three of us in my marriage and that's a crowd." She swallowed the anger Lady Di for many years: even days before getting married she discovered a fine bracelet that Carlos had sent to make Camilla, with the initials of both.
A love of half a century
Carlos and Camilla (whose real last names are Rosemary Shand) met at a polo match in 1970, when she was at an impasse in her relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles. "Did you know that my great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was a lover of her great-great-grandfather, King Edward VII?" She told the prince. And she conquered it. She was 23 and he was 22.
They began a low-key romance shortly after, until Carlos was sent on an eight-month trip to the Caribbean, as part of his career in the Navy, something that some experts on the British monarchy (of which there are several) say was planned by Mountbatten and the queen herself to separate them. Finally, although they never completely cut the bond, she returned to her ex, whom she married in 1973. They had 22 years of marriage and two children, Laura and Tom, the latter curiously godson of Prince Charles.
Although they maintained an open marriage, Andrew Parker Bowles decided to separate in 1995 after the prince's confession about his love affair with his wife. A year later, Carlos and Diana signed the divorce, paving the way for a new royal wedding.
After the death of Lady Di in 1997, when she tried to escape in a car from the paparazzi with her partner Dodi Al-Fayed (who also died in that accident in Paris), Carlos began to bring Camilla out of the shadows. Although her lover always knew that she did not have the star of Diana, who overshadowed both her husband and the queen herself in each public appearance of her, in 1999 she was shown for the first time in front of the cameras next to him. the prince. Unsurprisingly, they received a barrage of criticism.
In 2003 they moved together to Clarence House, a royal residence located on the street that connects Buckingham Palace with Trafalgar Square, where they have resided ever since. But in the wake of the royal family's attempts to get the world to accept Camilla, the popular Netflix series The Crown has reopened old wounds. And increased the public's antipathy towards the second wife of Carlos, who is held responsible for having destroyed the marriage of the deceased - and loved by all - Lady Di.
But we must also say this: although Carlos does not look well in The Crown, where he shows him as a frustrated, selfish and obsessed person by Camilla, the truth is that true love triumphed with his new marriage; Too bad it is despite Diana's followers. With the blessing of the queen, they were married in April 2005, although Isabel did not attend the wedding.
Accumulating noble titles
As Lady Di was when she was married to Carlos, legally Camilla is also a Princess of Wales. But on the day the betrothal was announced, Buckingham Palace anticipated that she would be titled Duchess of Cornwall as a way to respect the memory of the prince's first wife. She uses this title everywhere except in Scotland, where she introduces herself as Duchess of Rothesay. Since this country joined Great Britain in 1707, the title of Duke of Rothesay has been used by the heir to the throne of England.
Camilla also holds the title of Countess of Chester, the city where actor Daniel Craig (a real English 007 agent), former footballer Michael Owen and the mythical Lady Godiva, who had the same title as Carlos's wife in the famous story, was born. set at the beginning of the 11th century. But also, after the recent death of Felipe, husband of Elizabeth II, she added the Duchess of Edinburgh by right of marriage, as Carlos inherited the title of her father.
