Then Prince Charles and wife Camilla leave the Service of Prayer and Dedication blessing their marriage at Windsor Castle on April 9, 2005, in Berkshire, England. Photo / Getty Images
Then Prince Charles and wife Camilla leave the Service of Prayer and Dedication blessing their marriage at Windsor Castle on April 9, 2005, in Berkshire, England. Photo / Getty Images
The King and Queen spent their 20th wedding anniversary in Italy, attending separate official duties.
Their relationship is characterised by deep friendship, shared humour and support for each other’s roles.
Queen Camilla’s influence has positively impacted the King and the monarchy, making him visibly happier.
After waking at Villa Wolkonsky, the British ambassador’s residence in Italy, they will have breakfast and then get into separate cars, with their separate staff, to be driven to work in Rome.
He will visit the Prime Minister of Italy and the senate, with a stop to hear the results of a report into his beloved clean energy. She will visit a school to hear children’s stories and pose for a photograph with a pizza. In the afternoon, they will reconvene at Parliament where she will listen to him give a speech and join forces for a glitzy state banquet of 150 people at which there will be toasts to the still-happy couple.
It does not promise to be the most intimate or romantic of days. But, as those close to them will attest, it is a neat snapshot of their married life. Some might venture that it is even the secret to their success.
“They’re very affectionate but not sentimental,” says a source who knows them both well.
“At the heart of their relationship, as well as love, is a deep and abiding friendship,” says a confidante. Photo / Getty Images
Another likens them to “Darby and Joan” – a couple of a certain age who enjoy the quiet harmony of growing older together – while pointing out their often very different interests and personalities.
“At the heart of their relationship, as well as love, is a deep and abiding friendship,” says a confidante. “They accept each other’s flaws, draw strength from one another in their public role and private lives, and underpinning it all is a shared sense of humour.”
They have separate passions when it comes to work but both enjoy gardening in their time off, food and reading (the Queen prefers a good novel while the King is drawn back to his paperwork). He likes a long speech, she tends towards a short one with a literary quote and a joke. They divide their time between London and Scotland but prefer to maintain separate residences in the countryside – Charles at Highgrove and Camilla at Ray Mill. Both enjoy the concept of simple living but embrace the benefits of palace life (“I don’t think that she cooks for him, I’ll be honest,” says her son Tom Parker Bowles. “They have a team of very good chefs”). The King prefers to linger on a walkabout, the Queen likes to work her way through as many people and dogs as possible: in Northern Ireland last month, she had shaken hands with half of Limavady before he was past his first smiling baby.
The King and Queen’s presence in Italy on the day of their 20th wedding anniversary is not so much the result of a romantic getaway, but a coincidence: the couple were aware that the day fell this month, but they raised no objections to fitting state duties in. When they fly home on Thursday, they will travel to Birkhall, their Scottish hideaway, for a short while for some R&R in private. No one – not their greatest friends, not their families, and certainly not themselves – could have imagined that they were destined for such a milestone when they first met in 1970. They were never destined to marry.
Camilla Shand married Andrew Parker Bowles, a British Army officer, in 1973. Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, and Camilla went on to become the third of the “three of us in this marriage”. Prince Charles’ determination to finally marry her in 2005, while he was still the Prince of Wales, elevated her to the title of the Duchess of Cornwall, although she had never used the Princess of Wales title so associated with Diana. She is now Queen Camilla – the Queen – in an extraordinary timeline of events that one observer calls, “unexpectedly, one of the most enduring love stories of our times”.
Even the concept of the wedding was fraught. Elizabeth II and Prince Philip declined to attend the official ceremony (the late Queen’s role as head of the Church of England making the issue of the bride and groom’s double divorces insurmountable), but they did offer their in-person support at the blessing. Guests lamented the rough road the couple had travelled and celebrated their compatibility.
“Charles and Camilla’s love for each other is based on absolute trust and deep friendship,” said biographer William Shawcross then. “They are tremendously fond of each other. They look out for each other,” said Lord Bragg. “Camilla provides that deep comfort every man needs,” said Nic Paravicini, Camilla’s former brother-in-law. “She is his rock: a kind, warm-hearted, feet-on-the-ground person.” Those same descriptions have endured for the past 20 years. Annabel Elliot, Camilla’s sister, recently called them “yin and yang”.
“She’s just good for him,” says one friend now, repeating the refrain of many. “She brightens his life, doesn’t she?
“They make each other laugh. And thank God for that – they’ve needed it recently.”
Then Prince Charles and his wife Camilla drink whisky from a Quaich given to them as a wedding gift at the 2005 Mey Games at Queens Park in Caithness, Scotland. Photo / Getty Images
Importantly, another points out, Camilla’s official entry to the royal family gave her a tangible role, which has only increased since becoming Queen Consort. In choosing some unglamorous causes to champion, she has ploughed a royal furrow of her own, including banging the drum for domestic abuse survivors around the world. With the King’s encouragement, she has grown in confidence when it comes to public speaking (not a natural urge, one source says).
“She has been an amazing advocate for change,” says SafeLives chief executive Ellen Miller, who notes that for all abusers who tell their victims that they don’t matter, “Her Majesty has made it absolutely clear that is not true”. Craig Jones, chief executive of the Royal Osteoporosis Society – one of Camilla’s first causes, and particularly close to her heart as a result of her mother suffering greatly from the condition – calls her their “biggest and most effective supporter in the world”.
Even Queen Camilla’s former detractors agree on three common points: she has chosen important causes, she has knuckled down to duty, and she makes the King very happy. “You can’t underestimate Her Majesty’s influence,” says an ally. She has changed the monarch and, therefore, in this reign, the monarchy.
The King is indisputably lighter; everything easier with a consort by his side.
Where once aides would have paled at a monarch looking mildly silly in a photograph, the Queen delights in dragging him to see a pie in the shape of his crowned head (at the Sandringham Flower Show in 2023), persuading him to put on the sunglasses given to him by Inuit women in the Canadian arctic (2017), and insisting he dish up biriyani into food packages himself in an Indian restaurant in London’s Carnaby St (in February). Last week, he played Twinkle Twinkle on a recorder carved out of a carrot – a performance that might have seemed unthinkable two decades ago.
They are quick to laugh and increasingly seem to relax at palace soirees with friends from the world of the arts and showbusiness. The relationship with the press is easier, carefully honed by a Queen comfortable enough in her own skin to offer reporters small talk and the odd wink across the divide. Last year she became the first queen to wear jeans in public.
Spending more time together
The King and Queen are one another’s sidekicks during diplomatic engagements, catching one another’s eye during overly long speeches. He usually manages to look away before her habit of getting the giggles infects him too. They are said to be spending more time in each other’s company than ever before, as their working schedule as King and Queen entails time together at Clarence House even if they go their separate ways for engagements. Their shared diary is signed off by both of them (though not always with the same answers), and they sometimes swap notes on their speeches.
The King has started joining his wife’s events when he can. Recently, he deliberately played the role of a supporting cast member rather than the star at a Clarence House reception for the Queen’s Reading Room, his wife’s literary charity. And while Camilla has usually been credited as being Charles’ steadying rock over the decades, their elevated public duties since the Coronation have given him the chance to repay the favour.
“He gives her reassurance and encouragement that she’s doing the job well,” says a palace source. “The performative elements of state duties are second instinct to him now, so he can help with any anxieties.
King Charles and Queen Camilla in Belfast during an official visit to Northern Ireland in March this year. Photo / Getty Images
In the corridors of the palaces, the King and Queen are called “the Boss” and “the Lady Boss”; the smarter staff have been known to seek her help in persuading him around to their, or her, way of thinking. All have been largely unsuccessful in getting him to slow down, even in the face of cancer. Those around him now have a “flicker of hope” that a recent scare, in which the King was hospitalised briefly with the side effects of his treatment, might act as a catalyst for the monarch to concede that “he is mortal” and rest. “There is a natural tendency for him to take on more and more and more,” says a palace source. “We haven’t given up the battle to gently apply the brakes.”
“It’s been a tough old year,” adds a friend. “They’ve needed each other.”
That year, as everyone now knows, has seen the King endure gruelling treatment, and the Queen rally to do what she has done best over the years: stiff upper lip, keep the show on the road. The past 20 years has seen the public come around, to some extent, to understand the benefits of their marriage.
A new poll by Ipsos for the Telegraph found 18% of people believe the relationship has benefited the monarchy (another 45% believe it has made no difference), up from just 5% in 1997. More than half now think she should have “Queen” in her title, either as Queen Consort or Queen Camilla. At the time of the 2005 wedding, the issue was thought to be so controversial that aides insisted she would be called “Princess Consort” instead.
For Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine and author of My Mother and I, Queen Camilla has “changed the monarchy because she has changed the King”.
“Because Camilla came from outside into the world she now inhabits, she can see faults in a system that is second nature to her husband,” she says.
“He is visibly happier, far more relaxed and even not adverse to being hugged by total strangers. For someone brought up to be King and to expect a certain standard of rigid behaviour, this is nothing short of a revolution.”
On Tuesday, on the eve of their anniversary, Charles and Camilla were arm-in-arm in Rome, helping one another steadily down the steps of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where they had laid a wreath. At the Colosseum, they could almost have been mistaken for a couple of retirees on holiday, happily pointing out part of the ancient monument and posing for photographs. As it was, they were surrounded by an entourage of dozens, security all around, hundreds of tourists straining their necks to see them, and a bank of press photographers.
It is a strange life, make no mistake. But it is one they prefer to live together.
