Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (32 page)

The second strategic strand proved more controversial within the palace system. Other members of the Windsor family suspected Bolland leaked negative stories about them in order to make Charles look better by comparison. It’s an allegation Bolland appeared to accept in a 2005 interview. “It was all about Camilla,” he told Sholto Byrnes of the
Independent
. “All about the refusal of the Queen and Buckingham Palace to take the relationship seriously and assist the prince in reaching a conclusion. That underpinned everything.”

“It seems extraordinary for royal servants to be briefing against other members of the reigning family,” Byrnes writes. “‘The team that was there probably cared too much and got too emotional about it at times,’ concedes Bolland. ‘We got in a sort of Prince of Wales bunker within the House of Windsor. But to an extent that reflected him.’”
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Charles and Camilla plighted their troth on April 9, 2005, a day later than originally planned. The death of Pope John Paul II on April 2 necessitated the short-notice change when the Prince agreed to stand in for the Queen at the funeral in Rome. Segments of the media reported this as a sign from above that the union was jinxed.

Though technically Princess of Wales since the marriage, Camilla has abjured the title and its unhappy resonances. Nevertheless, divorce rumors have circulated pretty much from the first day of the royal honeymoon at Birkhall, given credence by publications that, unlike America’s supermarket tabloids, consider themselves journals of record and by journalists with histories of procuring real royal scoops. Diana was so fond of the
Daily Mail
’s Richard Kay that she gave him substantial insights into her life; her trust was repaid after her death, when Kay declined to write a tell-all biography. “I was very close to her and I felt that one of the reasons I never wrote a book was that she’d got a raw deal. Mostly by people who worked for her or were her friends. And they all rushed to get their memoirs out as quickly as possible and I always felt my great difficulty would be not what to put into a book but what to leave out,” he says.
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In 2010, five years into the Prince’s second marriage, Kay and his colleague Geoffrey Levy published a long piece entitled “Why Charles and Camilla Are Now Leading Such Separate Lives.”

Their article described “a very strange marriage” made under duress, in anticipation of the Prince’s accession. In this version of events, not to marry Camilla represented a greater barrier to Charles’s eventual kingship than marrying her, but neither partner wanted to do it. Some accounts suggest a different reality. The night the engagement was announced Camilla was “excited like a young girl,” says Robin Boles, the Chief Executive of In Kind Direct, one of the Prince’s organizations, which redistributes surplus goods from companies to charities.
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Kay and Levy wrote that Charles and Camilla’s staff routinely clashed. The couple’s habits clashed too, the Prince’s “obsessional neatness” offended by the Duchess’s “renowned domestic untidiness.” An “aged dowager who has known Camilla all her life” provided a pithy commentary: “When a woman’s been a man’s mistress for 30 years and then marries him, the relationship is bound to change. They still love each other, I have no doubt of that, but life as a married couple is difficult for two such independent spirits, who have always enjoyed the physical aspects of life. There’s a certain electricity about sex between lovers which is bound to dissipate after several years of marriage.”

A “seasoned royal aide” gave another possible reason for the supposed chill in the heir: “Camilla absolutely adores having her grandchildren around her and is always talking about them, but Charles simply cannot stand the noise and mess that small children make.” As a result, the authors explained, the Prince preferred splendid isolation in his own houses, while the Duchess entertained her grandchildren at Ray Mill, her bolt-hole in Wiltshire since she divorced Andrew Parker Bowles in 1995. Adding to the disaffection, the Duchess apparently resented her royal duties. “For now,” the article concluded, “theirs is not a marriage in actual ‘difficulties,’ because it is an arrangement that both appear to be content with. And yet—who would ever have imagined that the older woman for whom a crown prince dumped a young and beautiful wife now chooses to spend so much time away from him in a world of her own?”
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The authors were wise to hedge. By April 2014, with the couple nine years married and the Prince’s delight in his own grandson palpable, Kay and Levy wrote a second long article on the state of the relationship. “From ‘That Wicked Woman’ to Her Majesty’s Secret Weapon” described Camilla’s “remorseless” and “inexorable royal progress,” adding that she seemed “to have settled comfortably into the royal role that arrived late in life.” There is a negative: Camilla’s ascendancy in the Queen’s affections has alienated Charles’s young brothers and their wives. “Edward is furious that Sophie now has to curtsey to Camilla.… Through all this, the former
maîtresse en titre
glides effortlessly beside the Prince of Wales, soothing his brow one moment, cajoling him the next. If she is eventually crowned Queen Camilla, will it be his triumph, or hers?”
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“The thrust of the [first] piece, that their relationship works when they are not on top of each other, still holds true,” e-mails Kay. “Camilla does prefer being at Ray Mill with her grandchildren around her while the Prince likes the familiarity of Highgrove, where he prefers to work without being disturbed by noisy step-grandchildren.… On their relationship, if anything it seems now that they somehow strengthened the union between them.”
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This is the Rashomon effect in action. From some angles, the time Camilla and Charles spend apart is easily interpreted as a symptom of dysfunction. From others, it’s a sign of stability, in the relationship and the psyches of both parties to it. The Prince will never be carefree but he has figured out the ingredients he needs to maintain an even keel: Camilla, his family, his gardens, his faith, his sanctuaries, and—possibly even above all—his work. When I asked him the standard feature writer’s question, “what gives you joy?” he embarked on a long answer about being able to put back together again and heal things that have otherwise been abandoned or allowed to become derelict or destroyed. His aide Kristina Kyriacou, with evident amusement, prompted him: “your grandson, Sir.” He laughed and happily proffered a more traditional—and entirely heartfelt—answer: “Having a wonderful wife. And of course now a grandson.”
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“All his friends have been on our knees saying, ‘Won’t you just slow down?’” says Emma Thompson. “I now think it would be very bad for him. I think he’d unravel in some way.”
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Camilla, too, needs the space to pursue her own interests. “She’s got much more of a world of her own than people suspect,” says Lucia Santa Cruz. “She’s very happy on her own. She’s an amazing reader; she’s very well read. Every time I discover a new author and I say ‘have you read?’ she’s read them all. Very difficult to give her a book. She loves what she calls pottering in the garden so she’s very happy on her own and that means she’s got a lot of internal life. Which I think also is her protection. She could flit off and be on her own, by herself and happy. She loves being in her house on her own.”
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Together, the Prince and Camilla belie the reports of friction. They share secret jokes and mirror each other’s body language (though Camilla has yet to adopt the Windsor habit of holding her hands behind her back). “She’s terrific, so down-to-earth, so good for him,” says Patrick Holden.
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Ben Elliot reckons this cuts both ways: the Prince is good for his aunt. “He really loves her. They’re so affectionate to each other. Some couples when they’ve been together that long…” Elliot trails off, then continues. “He’s so sweet to her.”
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There are long-standing niggles. Camilla likes plain food, grilled fish, steamed vegetables. Charles has a taste for suet puddings and game. There are potentially more explosive issues. Camilla doesn’t entirely buy into the princely philosophy and sometimes challenges his views, but if other people disagree with him, that’s another matter. “She is entirely loyal to his likes and dislikes,” says Lucia Santa Cruz. “We argue about organics, the solution to world problems, the extent of ecology versus the needs of huge populations and she will always say ‘but he is right about this.’”
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A Clarence House insider credits Camilla with giving the Prince his most secure line yet to Planet Earth: “She’s a caring and considerate mother and she’s never lost sight of the importance of family, the importance of having them close and keeping them around. That keeps her grounded and that gives her a practicality that perhaps she might otherwise forget. It gives her an anchor. I’m always surprised at how savvy she is.… It’s clear she’s not in a bubble.”

The couple has developed an effective working partnership too, often appearing as a double act. She has acquired the usual range of respectable royal involvements, as patron or president, from animal charities, garden trusts, veterans’ associations, and the Royal Voluntary Service to Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre, hospices and hospitals, opera societies and orchestras. Some patronages, such as the Charleston Trust, are “arty, literary, she loves that; Ditchling museum, again something very arty, it touches the rather bookish side of her nature,” says Amanda Macmanus, one of Camilla’s two part-time Assistant Private Secretaries and a woman who appears as jolly as the Duchess herself.
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Camilla’s good humor cloaks the resilience Santa Cruz describes that enabled her to withstand the backlash against her role in the breakup of the Prince’s first marriage. In 1995, at the height of the backlash, the then Mrs. Parker Bowles agreed to become the patron of the National Osteoporosis Society after watching her mother die from the condition that crumbles bones. “We watched in horror as she quite literally shrank before our eyes,” Camilla recalled later. “My mother’s GP was kind and sympathetic, but he was able to do little to alleviate the pain she was in.”
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The charity’s CEO took a gamble that at the time seemed risky: that Camilla’s association would bring the right kind of attention to the brand.

More recently the Duchess has also quietly developed a range of campaigning interests distinct from her husband’s and other members of the royal family, grappling with issues that in palace terms could seem edgy. She promotes credit unions—nonprofit financial cooperatives—seeking to draw attention to the problems of debt and rip-off loans that affect lower-income demographics most severely. She works with several organizations supporting victims of rape and sexual abuse. She has given her backing to a campaign against the practice of female genital mutilation.

From a privileged background, but an earthy one, tempered by the flames of contempt, the Duchess is no shrinking violet. At a reception, she spotted her friend, Australian novelist Kathy Lette, maneuvering through the crowd on crutches. “What did you do to yourself?” Camilla asked. “I fell off my toyboy,” Lette replied. Camilla roared.

Her behavior could rarely be described as queenly, yet as Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy hinted, the assumption in Clarence House as in Buckingham Palace and in wider royal circles is that Camilla will one day sit enthroned alongside her King not as “Princess Consort”—the designation mooted by aides during the early days of her rehabilitation—but Queen. Nobody doubts this is what Charles wants. “I think she’s very good for him,” says Robin Boles. “She should be Queen. There’s nothing in the law that stops her from being Queen. I’d put my money on it.”
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That isn’t quite as safe a bet as it looks. People who meet Camilla generally warm to her. She has authenticity, as Nicholas Soames explains with his characteristic exuberance. “There’s not one bit of side to the Duchess of Cornwall. She’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get. She’s what my father would have called ‘a bloody good egg.’ She’s terrific, she’s great, and people respond to that. What they most respond to is people being themselves. She’s just a really good girl, good-natured, she likes people. Exactly like the Prince’s grandmother was, who grew up in grand surroundings and was good with what the press, in their patronizing way, are pleased to call ‘ordinary people.’”
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The problem is that most of those “ordinary people” haven’t met Camilla, and many of them remember her predecessor. Opinion polls may be moving in favor of Charles. A May 2013 poll showed a narrow majority expects him to make a good king. There is diminishing support for the idea of the crown passing straight to William. But the same poll revealed Camilla as the only member of the royal family judged to have made a negative contribution to the monarchy; 46 percent of respondents argued that she should be relegated to consort status, with only 16 percent backing the idea of Queen Camilla.
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Another poll at the start of 2014 echoed these findings.

During the infamous Camillagate discussion, Charles told his then lover, “I’m so proud of you.” “Don’t be silly. I’ve never achieved anything,” Camilla demurred. He insisted, she protested. Then he uttered a line often construed as proof of his self-absorption: “Your greatest achievement is to love me.” “Oh darling,” she said, “easier than falling off a chair.” His next sentence gives an insight into their reality at the time: “You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.” “Oh darling,” she replied. “Don’t be so silly. I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love. It’s the strength of love.”

Loving Charles continues to be an achievement, a test of strength that she keeps winning. For the Prince her victories couldn’t be more important, and not only because he has known what love means for more than four decades. “He’s absolutely a whole other person now. He was desperately unhappy. He’s not any more,” says Emma Thompson.
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