Opinion: Camilla will thrive as Queen in ways that previous royal mistresses could only dream of

Eleanor Herman is the author of Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and Off With Her Head: 3,000 Years of Demonizing Women in Power.

On June 1, 1533, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s former mistress and second wife, was crowned Queen of England at Westminster Abbey.

On May 6, 2023, Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles III’s former mistress and second wife, will be crowned Queen of Great Britain at Westminster Abbey.

During the five centuries that separate the two women, several other European kings married their mistresses, with all of the marriages ending badly. (It seems Anne Boleyn set the tone.) While Camilla’s relationship with King Charles has certainly been controversial, there are many reasons to believe that her fate will be far happier than those of her predecessors.

For one thing, in centuries past, a monarch marrying the Other Woman instead of a virgin princess was thought to disgrace the entire nation and call down the wrath of God in the form of plague, war, drought or floods. So many of his subjects protested Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne that the king made it treasonable to write or act against the marriage and forced all adult males to swear to uphold it. Those who refused were executed.

Anne, who was pregnant at the wedding, produced not the longed-for male heir, but a mere girl. After two miscarriages, in 1536 she was tried on trumped-up charges of adultery with five men, including her brother, and lost her head on the chopping block. Most of her subjects were not sad to see the ambitious vixen go.

For another thing, no one has ever accused Camilla of ensnaring Charles through witchcraft or Charles of sliding into lunacy for marrying her. In 1568, Erik XIV of Sweden married his mistress Karin Mansdotter, the beautiful daughter of a jailer. Courtiers whispered that Queen Karin – by all accounts a sweet, simple soul – had used the dark arts to beguile the monarch, muttering incantations over a candle and feeding him love potions with eye of newt and toe of frog. Erik had given numerous alarming examples of mental instability over the years – including stabbing a courtier to death in a fit of rage – but his half-brother Johan saw the scandalous marriage as undeniable proof of the king’s insanity.

Johan locked Erik up, grabbed the crown for himself, and in 1577 had his brother’s jailer finish him off with poisoned pea soup. (A modern forensic analysis of Erik’s remains found them riddled with arsenic.) Compared with Anne Boleyn, Queen Karin got off lightly; she was exiled to an estate in the country where she lived out her days in relative comfort.

Nor is it likely that Charles and Camilla will meet an ignominious end because of outrage over their marriage. In 1578, the recently widowed Grand Duke Francesco of Tuscany wed his mistress of 12 years, Bianca Cappello. Recent research indicates that the grand duke’s brother, Cardinal Ferdinando, horrified that a trollop should be grand duchess, had the couple poisoned with arsenic by a doctor who was treating them for malaria. The new grand duke – none other than Cardinal Ferdinando himself – had Bianca’s body dumped at night in an unmarked grave and had her name effaced from every portrait and monument in Tuscany as if she had never existed.

More recently, another king and his mistress met a sticky end because of their marriage. In 1900, 24-year-old King Alexander I of Serbia wed his lover of several years, the nervous, dumpy, 33-year-old Draga Mashin, who had been his mother’s lady-in-waiting. The entire nation was horrified at Alexander’s choice of bride – a poor widow with a dubious moral background twice the age a royal bride should be. Upon hearing the news of Alexander’s marriage, his entire cabinet resigned, and the king’s mother protested so vehemently he booted her out of the country. The public blamed all of Alexander’s unpopular acts on his evil seductress wife, and rumour had it that the childless king would name Draga’s unlikeable brother his heir. In 1903, a band of revolutionaries broke in and tore the royal couple limb from limb, then held a mass celebrating their liberation from a tyrant and the vile tart he had made queen.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s loosened age-old sexual mores for many, but not for the wives of princes. While casting about for a bride, Charles was caught in the pincers of mildewed medieval royal traditions. In 1971, he fell deeply in love with Camilla Shand, but the Palace frowned on a potential marriage, as Charles’s wife was required to be a virgin, which Camilla was not. In 1973, when Charles was off sailing the seas with the Royal Navy, Camilla married her old flame Andrew Parker Bowles. According to author and royal commentator Caroline Graham, the prince, upon hearing the news, locked himself in his cabin for hours and emerged red-eyed.

Finding her marriage less than satisfactory, Camilla ended up back with Charles by the late 1970s. But in 1981, the prince stiffened his upper lip, dutifully if reluctantly married the suitable virgin proffered by the Palace, Lady Diana Spencer, and swore off Camilla. Yet after a few years of marital misery, he found himself in the arms of his true love yet again. When Princess Diana revealed Camilla as Charles’s lover in a 1992 book, Camilla became the most hated woman in Britain. The Parker Bowleses divorced in 1995; Charles and Diana a year later.

Free at last, Charles desperately wanted to marry Camilla, to have her by his side at all public events, which protocol forbade if she was only his girlfriend. Diana’s 1997 death and the global outpouring of grief and love for the princess – and fury at the woman who had caused Diana such pain – put his plans on hold. While Henry VIII had hired an executioner to deal with those who protested his marriage, Charles hired a PR firm, which slowly and successfully rehabilitated Camilla’s image with the British public. There remained, however, a massive impediment, one which had caused Charles’s great-uncle to relinquish the throne in exasperation.

In 1936, the newly minted King Edward VIII wanted to marry the American socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson. But no British monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England was supposed to wed a divorced person whose former spouse was still alive, and Wallis had two of them running around. Edward’s abdication to marry the woman he loved created a constitutional crisis that shook the British monarchy to the core. Snubbed by the royal family, the duke and duchess of Windsor, as they became, drifted aimlessly around the world for decades, staying for free at rich people’s homes and drinking far more than was good for them.

Perhaps noting the alarming similarities of Edward’s push to marry Wallis and Charles’s insistence on wedding Camilla, in 2002 the Church of England lifted the prohibition. When Charles and Camilla married in 2005 in a low-key wedding, Camilla, bowing to public opinion, did not take the title that was her due, Princess of Wales – which was irrevocably attached to the tragic, beloved Diana – but accepted the lesser title of Duchess of Cornwall. The Palace also announced that Camilla would not become queen when Charles took the throne but would be known as princess consort.

Camilla has become patron or president of 90 charities – including ones focused on osteoporosis, domestic-abuse survivors, homeless dogs and cats, and literacy – and has proven herself to be one of the hardest-working royals. Her good nature and knack for cheering the irascible Prince of Wales even won over the queen, who back in the 1990s had called her “that wicked woman.” Seven months before her death, Elizabeth II stated, “It is my sincere wish that, when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort as she continues her own loyal service.” Charles III’s April 4 coronation invitation ditched the clunky, diminishing “consort,” however. Queen Camilla it is.

We can assume that Britain’s new queen will continue to enjoy a far happier life than Anne Boleyn, Karin Mansdotter, Bianca Capello, Draga Mashin and Wallis Warfield Simpson. In today’s world, many (if not most) people have either divorced or had affairs or otherwise suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous romance, and royals are, after all, human, like us. Assuming that a wrathful God will not smite a nation with plague if the King marries his lover, most of us aren’t concerned if he lives happily with the woman he loves.

Diana’s story was a tragedy. A modern-day Iphigenia, she was the requisite virgin led to the altar to be sacrificed to royal protocol and married to a man who desperately loved another woman. But it was also a tragedy for Charles, who couldn’t marry the woman he loved and was forced to marry one he didn’t.

And so, despite the bad behaviour of decades past, when I see Charles and Camilla, two elderly people grinning like happy fools in each other’s company, enjoying the marriage they should have had 50 years ago, all I can say is, “Long live Queen Camilla.”