Shut the hell up about Camilla!

There has been much talk and writty about the recent announcement that Prince Charles, heir to the throne of England, will marry his longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles in April. Invariably the tone taken is one of ridicule, that a man in his late fifties should be in love with a woman his own age, who’s neither thin nor beautiful. These same people see nothing unusual in Donald Trump’s series of marriages to women a third his age, with cadaverous bodies and grotesquely inflated plastic breasts, and no discernable sign of intelligence. Such attitudes are demeaning to women and men alike: that women are only good for decoration, and useless when they’re no longer decorative; and that men aren’t capable of the kind of deep, lasting love that encompasses companionship as well as sex.

No doubt some of this spleen comes from the fact that Camilla was a factor in the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Princess Diana. Well, I don’t dispute that – but there are two sides to every story. Diana had a better PR machine, and the fact that she was beautiful and beloved by the people didn’t hurt either. The fact is there was fault on both sides. By all accounts he embarked upon that marriage intending to make it work, to give up Camilla and cleave only unto his wife. However, Charles and Diana were both badly screwed-up people, and unfortunately their separate screwed-up-nesses made them tragically incompatible. Diana needed constant attention and adoration (the kind she got from her subjects), and Charles just wasn’t raised to give that (and indeed it’s not usually included in the grooming of a future king).

Well then (you might well arsk) why didn’t he just marry Camilla in the first place? The answer to that is found in the monarchic machinery that surrounded Charles’ upbringing. It was the 1970s when the two of them fell in love – a wild and crazy time. Camilla was a lively, independent young woman who’d been out on her own for awhile. There was no way she could pass muster as the certified virgin that the Prince of Wales’ bride was required to be. This misogynist requirement was even then as anachronistic as the monarchy itself, and in that sense all of a piece with it. However, nobody believed in it more strongly than the Queen herself, and where her son and successor was concerned, her word was law. He was used to putting aside his own wishes for the good of England, and it just wasn’t in him to rebel while in his mid-twenties. So he went into the service, and Camilla married Andrew Parker Bowles, and that was the end of that.

Except that it wasn’t. The two of them really were right for each other. They stayed friends for years, through her marriage and the raising of her children, then through his marriage to Diana. Only after Charles and Diana had failed each other utterly, and he was trapped in a miserable marriage, did he turn to his old love with no attempt to fight the feelings that had always been there. Camilla is the woman for him. Their love has endured through hardship and tragedy, bad publicity and public denunciation. It’s stood the test of time, and plenty of other tests as well. Theirs is a genuine love story, right up there with that of Charles’ great-uncle Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Charles and Camilla are going to get their happy ending, and they deserve it, and I for one could not be happier for them.