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After years of being depicted as the most hated woman in Britain, Camilla, the second wife of King Charles, was crowned queen on Saturday, capping a remarkable turnaround in public acceptance few would have thought possible.
When Charles’ divorced first wife, the popular, glamorous Princess Diana, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, Camilla bore the brunt of media hostility. Some declared the couple could never wed.
But marry they did eight years later, and since then she has come to be recognized, albeit still grudgingly by some, as a key member of the royal family, as someone on whom the new king heavily relies, and as the nation’s Queen Camilla.
“She is his sort of soul mate,” said Robert Hardman, a long-time royal correspondent and author of ‘Queen of our Times’, pointing out she had been married to Charles longer than Diana.
“They’re a team. And you’ve got to be a team.”
Born Camilla Shand in 1947 into an affluent family – her father was an army major and wine merchant who married an aristocrat – she moved in social circles that brought her into contact with Charles, who she met on a windswept polo field in the early 1970s.
The pair dated for a time and Charles had contemplated marriage, but felt too young to take such a major step.
As he dedicated himself to his naval career, Camilla went on to marry a cavalry officer, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles. The couple had two children, Tom and Laura. They divorced in 1995.
Charles himself married 20-year-old Diana in a wedding in 1981 that enchanted not just Britain but the world.
