IT WAS never going to be a simple matter. Although those who love Charles or Camilla rejoiced at the news that this middle-aged couple were at last to be married, the celebration of their wedding was always going to be fraught. Not for them the decent obscurity of a second union: the simple nuptials with close friends dancing attendance, a champagne-laced speech or two, followed by a quiet honeymoon and new normality.
So far from being an ordinary wedding this is the marriage of the heir to the throne, and it is, therefore, an event of real constitutional significance. Given the particular circumstances of the relationship between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles, the prospect of their legal union was bound to cause debate and even dissent. No one though could have foreseen that this would inspire quite so much frenzy and, very often, malevolence as well.
In the process, what should have remained private and personal has become entangled with what properly belongs to the public domain. As a result confusion rules to the benefit of no-one — least of all the heir to the throne and the woman who tomorrow becomes his wife. As Alan Bennett wrote in The Madness of King George: “To be Prince of Wales is not a position. It’s a predicament.” I have no doubt that, battered though unbowed by the prurience and disdain which both of them have had to endure, he would certainly regard Bennett’s observation as the understatement of the month. She, I am sure, would find very much stronger language.
So to begin at the beginning: this is a love match that crackled into life more than three decades ago. The Prince fell for Camilla Shand soon after he graduated from Cambridge University. He was 23 years old; she was a year his senior. Their go-between was his beloved “honorary grandfather”, Lord Mountbatten, who — for better and occasionally for worse — exercised a greater influence on him than anyone else, encouraging him, inter alia, to “sow his wild oats” and providing him the privacy of his Hampshire estate to that end.
Caricatured in those days by the tabloid media as an “action man” and “playboy” — the most eligible bachelor on earth — the Prince was in fact driven by an overwhelming sense of royal duty by which his sensitive and introverted personality was kept in check and on course. Intensely serious about his role, he later told me that in those days he could not imagine that any woman that he might love would either return those feelings or be willing to endure the vicissitudes of royal life. Yet, to his delight and astonishment, he discovered that Camilla not only reciprocated his passion but — no less importantly — met his need for a friend and companion as well. Liberated from media speculation, their relationship blossomed.
Then, in January 1973, with their romance still in its infancy, the young naval officer set sail in HMS Minerva for the Caribbean, an obligation from which he could not possibly escape but which would keep them apart for eight months. He was both too young and too uncertain even to raise the prospect of marriage; nor did he seek reassurance from her that their feeling for each other would survive the parting. Five months later, he learnt that Camilla was going to marry a young army officer, Andrew Parker Bowles, who had been her suitor before she met the Prince. Writing wistfully in his naval diary of the “blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship” which had lasted a mere six months, he noted: “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”
As it happened, his feelings for Camilla were not ruptured by the marriage but flourished, albeit in a different context. As friends of the Royal Family, both Camilla and Andrew were frequent visitors at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, where her absence of guile, her warmth, and her commonsense, endeared her to the Queen and Prince Philip as well as to their son. In Charles’s words, Camilla gradually became his “touchstone” and “sounding board”, someone whom he could trust and with whom he could speak his heart. That they still loved one another was hardly in doubt. So much so that whatever the precise nature of their relationship, some of his friends assumed that they were indulging a clandestine affair and warned him against scandal.
Approaching his thirties, the heir to the throne came under growing pressure to find himself a suitable wife. It was not a casual undertaking. “Love is basically a very strong friendship . . . and I think you are very lucky when you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense . . .” he once noted with tortured naivety. “To me marriage, which may be for 50 years, seems to be one of the biggest and most responsible steps to be taken in one ’s life.” In 1981, the Prince married Lady Diana Spencer.
It proved to be a public humiliation and a private tragedy. Only the stupid or malevolent could dare to delve into the complex of reasons which led to the collapse of their marriage and emerge with a clear judgment about whom or what was to blame. Suffice it to say here that: first, despite repeated assertions to the contrary, there is no shred of evidence to suggest that the Prince failed to honour his marriage vows until after five troubled years (during which he had virtually no contact with Camilla), the relationship had “irretrievably broken down, both of us having tried”; secondly, that merely because the Princess claimed that there were always “three of us” in the marriage does not make her assertion true; and, thirdly, that the Prince had the courage to admit the truth about his adultery, knowing that he was likely to pay a price, but knowing equally that he would be unable to live with a lie.
As any of those who know him well will confirm, so far from being indifferent, he profoundly regretted the collapse of his marriage. It has caused him enduring distress, and he still blames himself — to an inordinate degree — for failing fully to appreciate either the depth of the Princess’s misery or the fragility of her mental state. In any event, his critics have had their pound of flesh and more for the shortcomings that they remorselessly discerned. It was bad enough after their divorce and even worse after the Princess’s dreadful death for which the morbidly obsessed still seem to hold him directly or indirectly responsible.
It is impossible to think of any public figure of our age who has had to endure quite so much sustained calumny simply for failing to fulfil his allotted part in someone else’s fairy tale. The casual and sustained cruelty routinely inflicted on him by ignorant gossip writers and malign commentators, recycling each other’s rubbish, would surely have broken a weaker man. If at times he has retreated into himself, turning away from the world in the search for inner peace, is this so very surprising? Is it conclusive evidence of an enfeebled self-pity that occasionally — and usually in private — he rails against this injustice against which he had no means of redress? Not surprising to me at least that he finally lost his cool in public on the ski-slopes at Klosters.
Camilla Parker Bowles has also been persecuted to a degree that most of her tormentors would have found unendurable were they to find themselves on the receiving end. But she is an unusually resourceful woman with enviable reserves of dignity and resilience. Her unstinting support of the Prince has not only helped him to survive his private purgatory but to restore his faith in himself. Through her, he has rediscovered that life on this Earth offers hope as well as despair, happiness as well as sorrow, and even, occasionally, contentment as well as frustration.
It is a cliché, almost embarrassing to repeat, but those of us who have had a chance to glimpse them together in private see at once that they are truly “made for each other”, that they are indeed “soulmates”, and that theirs is a deep love that, after years of torment, can at last be celebrated. They so clearly delight in each other’s company, utterly at ease and brimming with affection. Nor is there any sense of competition between them, no upstaging, no putting down, nor any sign of irritation at the foibles and mannerisms that middle-aged couples invariably acquire.
