When you think of the great power couples of the world, names of Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Bill and Melinda Gates spring to mind. Hardly Prince Charles and Camilla. And when you think of great romantic couplings, Romeo and Juliet, or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton spring to mind. Hardly Charles and Camilla.
What about Charles and Diana — the dashing prince and his beautiful bride in a fairy-tale wedding, with toy-like red-jacketed soldiers in their big, black bearskin hats and the settings of Westminster Abbey and waves with the rest of United Kingdom’s Royal Family from the balcony of Buckingham Palace to adoring crowds assembled on the other side of the gates below? Yes. Charles and Camilla? Not so.
But quietly, without a puff of pomp or a coif of circumstance, Charles and Camilla celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary together on Thursday. That it was low key should not be a surprise to anyone.
Everything about this marriage has been, well, low key. It was, after all, a decade ago that the royal groom and his bride-to-be skulked off to a very modest registry office in Windsor and signed their ‘I do’s on the bottom line of a marriage certificate.
The event was controlled, press limited and the images released would send the right message that this was going to be a very private and personal marriage between the heir to the British throne and his consort — a woman who would and could never be, in the words that rang from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey again on Diana’s funeral day, “the queen of people’s hearts”.
There has always been a love-hate relationship between the British public and Camilla — they loved to hate her. She, the seemingly cold and unemotional woman for whom Charles pined — and turned to — during his marriage to Diana.
And there has always been a strained relationship between Charles and his subjects and their government. This is now a 66-year-old man who has been born for one thing and one job — yet his time has yet to come.
The current holder of the corner office in Buckingham Palace, Balmoral or Windsor, has made it clear she is in the job for life and has no intent on passing over the reigns just yet.
Charles has made no secret of his views on modern architecture, preservation of the countryside, the dangers of genetically modified crops or climate change. And he is not just content to talk to his plants about those dangers either, actively writing to ministers in Her Majesty’s Government to assert influence over political decisions.
Unwritten constitutional tenet
As long as he has been with Camilla, Charles and his legal representatives have resisted attempts by UK press organisations to have the content of those letters revealed.
The principle at stake is the prince’s privacy vis-a-vis the unwritten constitutional tenet that the hereditary Head of State shall not interfere in the affairs of the elected government. It is a principle that is fundamental in all of the nations of the Commonwealth that acknowledge the British monarch or its representative as the titular head of state. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but there is no sunset clause in this principle: Royals must butt out of matters of politics and policy.
These affairs of state are hardly the stuff of pillow talk between Charles and his consort after 10 years of marriage. More likely, the imminent arrival of a new grandchild is the stuff of such whispered conversations. The Windsor’s family business has an heir and now there is a spare on the way!
Funny, it is hard to imagine Granny Cammy breaking out the needles and yarn, pearling two and dropping one stitch at a time to knit a little pair of booty socks for the new baby. She comes across as being too stiff, too stiff upper lip, too upper to show any public emotion.
Who can forget Diana, crying before the cameras, complaining of the third person in the marriage to Charles, while he was sending love notes to “Squidgy”.
Let’s be honest here. Who has ever referred to a lover as “Squidgy”? Do it and you’re as likely to get an elbow in the ribs or some other highly sensitive anatomical entity — if you’re lucky.
Yes, Charles and Camilla may be publicly married for 10 years now. That is the public side with the paperwork done. On the private side, the two have been BFFs since the 1970s when the then Camilla Shand showed him a royal good time before he went off to the navy.
Yes, there was that matter of the marriage to Diana, the divorce, her dalliances with Dodi Al Fayed, the crash and the funeral. Diana will always be the queen of people’s hearts. Camilla has always been the queen of Charles’ heart.
