Camila’s popularity has “soared”, according to a poll published by the Daily Mail, after the publication a week ago of a statement from Elizabeth II expressing her desire that the wife of her son Carlos be known as queen consort when he agrees. to the throne The difference between those who have a positive or negative opinion of her has risen 16 points. Although, yes, an overwhelming majority would have preferred the late Diana as monarch.
The announcement was published at ten o’clock at night on Saturday the 5th, on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the death of George VI and the transfer of power to his daughter. The queen, alone in Sandringham Manor, signed it “Your Handmaid, Elizabeth R.” The message was full of optimism that the future will bring “similar opportunities” to have the “extraordinary social, technological and cultural progress that has benefited us all” in the seven decades of his reign.
But it was the fifth of the six paragraphs that grabbed the attention. After expressing “eternal gratitude” to her subjects for “the loyalty and affection that you continue to show me”, the queen asked them to equally support Carlos and Camila, and that, when he is king, “she be treated as queen consort”. On Monday she returned to Windsor. On Tuesday, Camila resumed her activities, visiting an elementary school near her home.
From time immemorial the wives of English or Scottish kings have been queens. But the civil marriage between Carlos and Camila, in 2005, was so unpopular that she was not given the title of Princess of Wales, which corresponded to her by custom, and it was also promised that she would never be queen. There is nothing in the constitutional norms that grants a singular role to the queens or the prince consorts.
York Minster Archdeacon George Austin went further on the couple’s titles. “He made solemn vows on her marriage before God and in the Church, and it seems – if the rumors about Camila are true – that he broke them almost immediately. She has broken her trust and vows her to God on one thing. How can Charles go to Westminster Abbey and deliver the coronation promise? » he said.
Camila and Diana meet in an equestrian competition in Ludlow, a year before the latter’s wedding with Prince Charles. /
What rumors about Camila would the venerable Austin be referring to when he spoke of that “immediate” breach of the marriage promise that put in doubt the legitimacy of the future king? Hadn’t it already been published that the prince and his mistress slept together the very eve of his wedding to Diana? That Camila told the duchess, Catherine, that “Carlos killed Diana and I’m next!” it is more recent.
In the fact-fiction saga of a monarchy aging due to the longevity of the nonagenarian queen and the long wait for her son, Sally Bedell Smith, biographer of the Prince of Wales, noted how often her interlocutors referred to a man bathed in opulence as ‘Poor Charles’ (poor Carlos). Camila played the role of the baddest woman in the world in the media soap opera.
libertine ancestors
Born on July 17, 1947 in London into a wealthy family by her maternal grandmother, who married the builder of the posh Belgravia neighborhood, Camilla Rosemary Shand Cubitt received an upbringing similar to Diana’s. Both were poor students and ended their training learning a bit of French and ‘domestic arts’ in a Swiss school.
The big difference between the two, separated by 14 years, was Camila’s passion for horses. She met her husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles, on the circuit of mounted fox hunts and the game of polo. He descended from a dynasty of Catholic military and courtiers. He was a close friend of Princess Anne, Carlos’s sister, before his marriage to Camila.
The saga gets complicated from there. Her parents urged Parker-Bowles to marry her daughter after such a long affair, and he, with a recognized reputation as a womanizer, agreed, not without having some doubts. She, direct and humorous in dealing with men, too; she had struck up a relationship with Carlos when her officer’s boyfriend had to attend to her duties in the military.
The Prince of Wales and his current wife are visiting Egypt in 2021.
The prince embarks as part of his military service and returns to land lost. The family demands that he marry. He dedicates himself “to fox hunting and with a shotgun, to polo and to fornication,” according to a secretary. Poor Carlos has to marry now and also with a virgin. Diana dreams of princes. Her parents had divorced with public brutality. She was 20 years old when she walked down the aisle crying inside, because she had discovered that Carlos wanted another woman.
Camila’s background perhaps dampened the value of marital fidelity. Her maternal great-grandmother, Alice, was an official mistress of Edward VII. Her husband, George Keppel, accepted his wife’s relationship with others in exchange for reciprocity, as Parker-Bowles would later do. Her paternal grandfather had four wives and many more mistresses. The court rejected Camila as a possible wife of Carlos, because she is a woman “with history.”
old crown
They wanted a virgin. And the Prince of Wales found her. He didn’t love him, but she was a girl he could love. The stubborn infidel, Parker-Bowles, raised in Catholic boarding schools, had favored the necessary context for Carlos and Camila to resume their intimate relationship. When Diana publicly denounces him, Camila is ‘the rottweiler’. She was the only smoker and, as such, the clear favorite to be the bad guy in the movie.
She quit smoking, has smoothed out her wrinkles, and people like her because she’s not presumptuous. Read novels. She sponsors causes that move her, like osteoporosis, or domestic violence. She is a good professional in the incessant schedule of events and rituals. Her rank in her succession has favored her integration into a disciplined family, although divided into factions by access to privileges or the management of her image in the press.
Poor Carlos, who sponsors a foundation with great success in helping young people who need financing for some initiative, is about to reign after promoting organic agriculture or a radical change in architecture. He has written countless recommendations to the ministers of successive governments and established rocky relationships with tycoons to raise charitable funds.
In Highgrove, in the south-west of England, he created a farm where he has experimented with farming and gardening. Camila has her private house fifteen minutes from the prince’s mansion, and she spends time there with her grandchildren, cultivating her garden or her friends. In shared trips or events they give the impression of being happy together. It is finally something similar to the harmony that the prince postulates for the construction of cities or the relationship with nature.
Is it harmony or mirage? Days after the announcement, the court is concerned that Carlos has tested positive for Covid and visited his mother in Windsor on Tuesday. The media publish premature information, fed by some press department, about the distribution of palaces, castles and mansions among the family, after the death of the queen. Carlos and Camila will move to Buckingham Palace, residence and office.
The “visionary” king is 74 years old. He will be the oldest crowned king in the history of the United Kingdom. He has neither the youth nor the veil of mystery that ancient treatise writers considered essential for kings, and that his mother had. We know everything about him. And the most remarkable thing is that he conspired with Camila behind the back of a vulnerable 20-year-old girl, and together they provoked such discredit to the presumed exemplary nature of the monarchy.