A floating blond-white square, sparkling eyes, a discreet but constant presence with Charles: since the death of Elizabeth II, the British have a new queen, Camilla – a queen consort, non-reigning. Friday, September 9, she crossed for the first time, alone alongside Charles III, the gates of Buckingham Palace. The next day, she witnessed her husband’s official proclamation as king, at St. James’s Palace. Monday, September 12, she will be received with him with great pomp at the Palace of Westminster, before joining the procession behind the queen’s coffin, in Edinburgh, Scotland. What a metamorphosis for this 75-year-old woman, considered thirty years ago as an outcast, a threat to the British monarchy!
Married for seventeen years to the Prince of Wales, Camilla Parker-Bowles was not assured of being given the title of queen consort when he became king until February, when Elizabeth II expressed her “sincere wish” so be it, “when the day comes”. Before accessing this belated recognition, Camilla was harassed for a long time by the tabloids, caricatured as a couple breaker, a treacherous mistress, criticized for her physical appearance or her style of dress, considered to be much less elegant than that of Diana. The long-term relationship of this independent woman with the heir to the British throne is nevertheless a great story of love and endurance.
Camilla was born on July 17, 1947 into a very wealthy environment, aristocratic by her mother (Rosalind, daughter of the third Baron Ashcombe), military by her father (Major Bruce Shand is a hero of the Second World War), but without royal connection. Education in private schools in London and Switzerland, language stay in Paris: at the age of 20, Camilla is a young blonde woman who is a little sassy, very popular in the receptions of “beginners”, reserved for young women to be married from high society. British.
The case of the bracelet
Charles’s biographers report that he first met Camilla in 1970, in Windsor, at a polo match, and immediately hit it off. The young woman, endowed with a solid sense of repartee, would point out to him point-blank that a century earlier her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been the mistress of his great-great-grandfather, Edward VII. Young people shave very different appearances: Charles is as cocky as Camilla is cheerful, he is just as uncertain that she is comfortable in her own skin. But they also have a lot in common: a love of dogs, horses, hunting parties and other outdoor activities. The physical complicity is also evident. Camilla had “an intensely maternal character, with enormous sex appeal”, says Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a friend of the Parker-Bowles family, quoted by Sally Bedell Smith, biographer of Prince Charles (Prince Charles. The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, Random House, 2017, untranslated).
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