The society magazine Tatler described her as “the nation’s new grandmother” (a moniker once used for Queen Elizabeth) and noted increasing sympathy towards her among Zoomers. It cited a TikTok debate over whether the British tabloids would have shown more sympathy for Camilla if she had been as beautiful as Diana. Tatler summed up the Zoomer fascination: “Charles wants Camilla. He can’t have Camilla. It’s romantic.”
While many royals fumed over their portrayal in the Netflix series, The Crown, it has been a public relations boon for the queen, selling her forthright personality to an audience that never experienced the Diana phenomenon. It captures the way in which Camilla’s earthiness and sense of fun hooked the awkward young prince from the moment they were introduced by the Chilean ambassador’s daughter in 1970 and began an on-again, off-again relationship, in which Charles was the far more interested party.
Camilla and Diana pictured together in 1980.Credit: AP
Camilla Shand’s family had always interacted with royalty, so she wasn’t overawed by Charles. Her great-grandmother Alice Keppell had been a favourite mistress to King Edward VII, who, like Charles, waited decades for his mother, Queen Victoria, to vacate the throne.
Camilla and Charles dated for a while. Despite Prince Harry’s claims about her ambitions, royal watchers say the aristocratic Camilla grew up close enough to palace life to know that she didn’t want any part of it. Charles was a dalliance; Camilla was far more interested in the dashing Andrew Parker Bowles, a military lieutenant and fellow aristocrat who was famous for his philandering.
Some posit that she dated Charles to make Parker Bowles jealous. There’s an oft-repeated story about the time Camilla told a woman to stop sleeping with her boyfriend, Parker Bowles, and the woman replied, “You can have him back when I’m finished”. Still, she married the lieutenant after both families conspired to force his hand by announcing the engagement in the paper. The wedding was said to have left Princess Anne, who was also besotted with Parker Bowles, “in pieces”.
Most believe Charles, who was a highly eligible bachelor (during a swim in Perth’s Cottesloe Beach in 1979, an Australian model famously walked up and kissed him), kept seeing Camilla while Parker Bowles was making conquests of his own. They speculate that she encouraged his marriage to 20-year-old Diana, who was her opposite in almost every respect – shy, naive, virginal and vulnerable. (Diana had a difficult childhood, in which her father refused to allow her mother access to the children after their divorce. The children never heard their mother’s knocks on the door because the mansion was so big).
Unlike Camilla, Diana loved the idea of being a princess. She was perfect, but for one issue that everyone overlooked; they were wildly incompatible. During an engagement television interview, Charles was asked if he loved her. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” he replied.
Charles and Camilla resumed their affair while he was married to Diana. But Charles’ wife did not adopt the aristocratic tolerance of royal infidelity (unlike Parker Bowles, who saw it as a status symbol) or the aristocratic silence about it. She felt deeply betrayed and made it known. “There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana said in a television interview. The kingdom and the realms were firmly on her side. One cannot overstate just how much the world loved Diana.
The decades-long push to have his relationship with Camilla accepted after his divorce and Diana’s shocking, violent death involved not only resistance from his subjects, his parents, the Church of England and the press, but from their children. The grief-stricken William and Harry were not the only ones who struggled. “Laura [Parker Bowles] blamed Charles for the break-up of her parents’ marriage and feuded about it with Prince William,” Brown wrote.
Nevertheless, they persisted. They wore down or waited out the opposition (the death of a staunch opponent, the Queen Mother, helped). Finally, they married in 2005. It was nothing like the Prince of Wales’ first wedding. Camilla reportedly left the palace for the registry that day wearing mismatching shoes.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla stand in Buckingham Palace Gardens.Credit:
There is, of course, no such thing as a fairytale romance. The inability of Charles and Camilla to stay apart over five decades has involved selfish and sometimes cruel decisions, stress and turmoil for their families, and abject misery, at times, for themselves. But their relationship has survived every test, and appears to reflect what Tatler’s TikTok Zoomers would describe as #couplegoals. They are easy and happy in each other’s company, they share interests, and they support each other in what, despite the riches, must be a difficult job.
“I have followed the couple for more than a decade and the depth of affection and mutual respect and support is obvious,” says Rieden.
Camilla, at 77, has embarked on a reverse retirement; she has gone from being a finishing school graduate and country m’am who’s only ever held one, brief job as a secretary (from which she was reportedly fired for coming home late after a big night out) to being a busy working royal.
Her main job is, as Brown put it, to be the “horse whisperer” of Charles’ emotional needs. “Camilla stops the pompous thing with Charles,” she wrote. Rieden agrees. “I have been told by those close to the couple that the Queen is a calming influence on the King, who is a natural workaholic,” she says.
She may still be eclipsed in popularity by Prince Edward, Princess Anne and Zara Tindall (Anne’s daughter), but she has Britain’s respect, not just for the causes she champions, such as literacy and keeping women and children safe from violence, but also for her lack of pretension. There are glimpses of humour, too. As she trailed then US president Donald Trump out of a Clarence House photo-shoot in 2019, she sent the world’s media into meltdown with a quick wink at her security detail.
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It remains to be seen whether Australians will show much interest in Camilla, but she is winning over one key demographic – readers of the Australian Women’s Weekly. “Diana was and still is adored by AWW readers but I think there is a growing appreciation of Camilla,” says Rieden.
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