The story of Queen Consort Camilla: From scandal and abuse — to respect and relevance

Last week, a King lost his cool when a tray of pens teetered on the edge of a table.

A Queen Consort, meanwhile, wore a smile in the streets of Britain even though unbeknownst to the mourners in her midst she was reportedly nursing a broken toe.

Several days after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Daily Telegraph reported that Camilla, Queen Consort of the United Kingdom and wife of the newly reigning King Charles III, suffered the injury before Elizabeth’s death on Sept. 8. A spokesperson for the King told the media it doesn’t comment on medical matters.

But whether or not the 75-year-old’s toe is actually broken, news that it might be still inspired a reaction from the U.K.’s royalty-friendly press and public that is reminiscent of an old-school NHL coach lauding his star forward for playing through pain during the Stanley Cup Finals. From the Daily Mail Online this week: “Camilla puts her best foot forward as she battles through events remembering the Queen with a broken toe.” Attagirl!

Formerly a liability to her husband’s image, it appears Camilla is an asset to it in this era: one that is fiercely hostile to entitlement and obsessed with so-called relatability.

At least the King seems to think so. “In all this,” Charles told a packed room at a historic meeting of the Accession Council last week, “I am profoundly encouraged by the constant support of my beloved wife.”

In these past days, that support has included standing next to her husband to greet hordes of British mourners (their kids and dogs in tow) with smiles and handshakes (and pats); it has included sitting in the gilded chair adjacent to his at Westminster Hall; it has included playing the part of unflappable foil to a frazzled king as he struggled to sign a book at a castle in Northern Ireland with an apparently malfunctioning pen.

“You can see her supporting Charles through this entire time,” Patricia Treble, who has been writing about the royals and the Crown for two decades, said of the Queen Consort. “She knows exactly what her role is. Support the monarch. They are grieving publicly. You can see the strain on their faces.”

It is a strain Queen Camilla appears to have made her peace with a long time ago.

“I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love,” she told Charles during a phone call surreptitiously recorded in 1989 and leaked to the press a few years later. Both were married to other people at the time — he to Princess Diana and she to British army officer Andrew Parker Bowles.

Both of them fixtures in elite British society, Charles and Camilla first hit it off at a polo match in 1970. They soon began dating but when Charles departed for the navy two years later, Camilla moved on with Parker Bowles, whom she married in 1973. Eight years later, a 32-year-old Charles married 20-year-old Diana Spencer. In hindsight, that marriage appears to have been doomed from the beginning. At the onset of their engagement, when a television reporter asked the couple if they were in love, Diana responded “of course,” to which Charles infamously added, “Whatever ‘in love’ means.” Presumably, today, he knows the answer.

Amid the perils of leaking pens, publicly grieving for days on end, and anti-monarchist protest both on- and offline, Camilla was and remains a quiet constant at her husband’s side. If the late Queen’s self-sworn destiny was to serve her people, Camilla’s, it seems, is to stand by her man. (It’s a destiny she comes by naturally: the Queen Consort’s great-grandmother was, remarkably, the favourite mistress of Charles’ great-great grandfather, Edward VII.)

The question plaguing those determined to safeguard the royal family’s reputation is will the rest of us — the English public and beyond — stand by Queen Camilla?

“One of the challenges the Crown faces is that Queen Elizabeth II was the most popular member of the royal family and public attitudes towards Charles III are more complicated,” says Carolyn Harris, a historian and royal commentator based in Toronto. Because the King is grieving the death of his mother, said Harris, “right now there is a wave of sympathy and admiration. But there is going to be scrutiny going forward.”

And yet, a great irony of the present moment is that the scrutiny may have little or nothing to do with Camilla, a rare public figure whose reputation has utterly transformed with time. In February, Elizabeth announced that it was her “sincere wish” that, upon her death, Camilla be known officially as Queen Consort — a declaration that would have been unimaginable in the 1990s.

Though the Queen’s death has provoked an endless stream of snarky memes and social-media commentary referring to Camilla as a “side chick,” this light ribbing pales in comparison to the abuse she endured at the hands of the ’90s tabloid press and a public that appeared at times to resent her not only for interfering in the marriage of Charles and Diana, but for committing the unforgivable sin of not being pretty enough.

“Her offense, perhaps, was to overthrow the sexist magazine nostrums of what a mistress ought to look like,” journalist Tina Brown writes in her 2022 book “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil.”

In the 1990s, writes Brown, “The tabloids expended an endless volley of creative insults in her direction: old boiler, old trout, old bag, prune, hatchet face, horseface, fat, gaunt, weather-beaten, witch, vampire, frump (as memorably itemized by Allison Pearson in the New Yorker in 1997). The best she could achieve was to have an entrée named after her at Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar in St. James’s: Smoked Haddock Parker Bowles.”

And yet despite Camilla’s previous public flogging as the “Other Woman,” the “Rottweiler,” and a villain indirectly blamed for Diana’s death, she is arguably among the least controversial, headline-worthy figures at the centre of royal life today.

The irony again is that this is no surprise. Amid a pending Prince Harry memoir, bombshell racism allegations delivered by Harry and Meghan via Oprah sit-down, an overdue reckoning about the British Empire’s brutal colonial mission, and the allegedly predatory train wreck that is Prince Andrew, somehow a happily married 75-year-old woman doesn’t quite cut it as salacious.

Of course, it helps that times and attitudes have evolved. Even if the forthcoming season of Netflix’s megahit “The Crown” paints ’90s Camilla in a harsh light when it airs later this year, viewers will assess the tabloid culture depicted therein with a modern eye.

“There’s now more critical scrutiny of the 1990s and how women were portrayed in the press,” says Harris. “That kind of tabloid journalism accepted at the time is now being viewed in poor taste as sexist.”

It helps too that Camilla is and has always been tight-lipped about the scandal that dominated the ’90s and the pain it caused her.

In other ways though, she is warm, open, and oddly: relevant.

The Queen Consort’s interests, besides horses and gardening, include playing Wordle every day with her granddaughter and advocating for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. In 2017, she partnered with a beauty retailer to distribute toiletry kits full of soaps and hairbrushes throughout rape-crisis clinics in London so that victims of sexual violence would have essential hygiene products to use in the shower after being subjected to the often-dehumanizing process of a forensic rape kit.

“Like anyone who marries into the royal family, once they are more confident in their abilities to be a working royal, they will often take on causes that many don’t think of when they think of royals,” says Treble. For Camilla, those causes include osteoporosis, the disease that took her mother’s life.

The Queen Consort grew up on a large country estate in East Sussex in a loving, affectionate family — likely a far cry from her spouse’s childhood.

“Camilla has had a lot of success with royal walkabouts that involve connecting with local businesses and farmers,” says Carolyn Harris.

“For people who know her, they like her,” says Treble. “She has her own country home. This is where she can relax with her family. She’s got grown kids from her first marriage. She knows the importance of being grounded. She’s got a great sense of humour.”

Indeed, when journalists from British Vogue arrived at Camilla’s London home earlier this year to take her picture, she met them with an apology: “Sorry you’ve got to photograph an old bat this morning.”

Even those of us who dislike the royal family might quietly delight in the fact that a woman once smeared by a sexist society as dowdy, damaged goods is now called Queen.

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