At last, Britain’s Prince Charles will marry the woman he always loved, Camilla Parker Bowles. The announcement Thursday that they will make it official in a civil ceremony on April 8 at Windsor Castle is a decisive step in a long-running affair and international soap opera.
In many ways, theirs has been a thoroughly modern affair, laced with longing and infidelity, complicated by stepkids and shadowed by incomprehensible tragedy.
The other woman gets the other man.
This marriage, though, comes with the advantages and the burdens of royalty in a love affair played out over the decades. They met at a polo match. They married others even as they carried the torch for one another. And their ancestors were royal lovers, Camilla’s great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, carried on an affair with King Edward VII. Back then, scandals were kept within the royal precincts.
“My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress, so how about it?” Camilla reputedly told Charles, in a now oft-repeated quote.
The love match of Charles and Camilla had to overcome a slight hurdle, though.
Her name was Diana.
Charles was supposed to be living out the public’s fairy tale after his internationally televised royal wedding to Princess Di, who became a symbol of grace and beauty and one of the most coveted women on the planet. With Charles and Diana, true love was elsewhere. The British–and the rest of the world–lapped it all up, every heartstopping, heartbreaking detail of sex, lies and tapes, of love lost among the feuding royals. Their scandalized marriage ended in divorce.
Diana’s 1997 death in a Paris car crash stunned the British, for a time transforming her into national martyr while her ex-husband was reduced to something of a national cad. The man who gave up Diana and then marched behind her flag-draped casket.
But as he grew older, Charles repaired his public image and slowly but surely Camilla gained some public acceptance. In the end, it’s Charles who gets it all, a sign of how much has changed among the royals and the British.
In 1936, King Edward VIII, Charles’ great uncle, gave up the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. Even though details of that affair were kept from the British public, the country’s government judged that the commoners would not stand for such a royal marriage. No such fate awaits Charles. When he becomes king his wife, Camilla, will be known as HRH Princess Consort.
After years of waiting and wanting, a king in waiting will take a second wife.
