It had originally been Charles’s wish to marry in the regal surroundings of the castle, with a dedication ceremony to follow in St. George’s Chapel, amid the hushed reverence of carved oak, heraldic flags, and carved stone sepulchres holding the remains of his crowned ancestors. This proved problematic; if the royals were to marry in the chapel, an obscure English law would take effect, allowing commoners to marry there as well. So the proceedings were moved to Guildhall. It was a more appropriate choice. At Guildhall, the atmosphere is one of overstuffed formality and faded glory, in keeping with the falling fortunes of the royal family. On the inside, it is all burnished oak, stiff-backed chairs, and framed portraits of old royals, but on the outside, it has fallen to municipal neglect.
To one side of the entrance, a notice board sports regulations governing trash collection and ads for upcoming music recitals. The covered entrance is supported by Tuscan columns, now blackened with motor soot from the stream of cars crawling along the busy high street. Guildhall is surrounded on all sides by a clashing riot of Chinese, Thai, and fast-food restaurants, offering the hordes food on the cheap—and a possible source of caterers for the Queen, who agreed to foot the bill for the wedding reception. Most arresting of all is the fact that the Guildhall entrance is flanked by steps leading down to Windsor’s busiest public conveniences. Some feared that the “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” rooms, with their astringent scent of the pissoir, would provide a pungent counterpoint to the happy couple (or at least, as happy as Charles ever gets) when they emerged, married, on April 8.
Despite this wishful thinking, it is altogether unlikely. The constitutional precedent for abdication is Edward VIII, whose wish to marry the divorcée Wallis Simpson left both Parliament and the country divided. Today, Charles’s wish to marry the divorced Mrs. Bowles has the enthusiastic support of the Blair government, which hopes to benefit from a feel-good wedding bounce at the outset of its campaign for a May 5 general election. Charles also has the grudging support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was willing to bless, if not consecrate, the union. As far as the British public is concerned, the general mood of who-cares-let-them-get-on-with-it was summed up in the Daily Star headline: “Boring Old Git Gets to Wed.”
But the wedding has troubling implications for the fifteen Commonwealth countries that retain the British monarch as head of state, no less than for Britain itself. The bells of St. George’s ringing in the royal couple may well be sounding the death knell for the monarchy in its present form. It is not only in Britain that the announcement of the royal marriage has led to a decline in support for Charles as king—and, by extension, for Camilla as queen. “The Commonwealth will not tolerate Camilla in any shape or form,” said one royal courtier, “especially Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.”
Anticipating this, Charles announced that Camilla would not be styled as queen when he ascends to the throne, but instead would become something called “Princess Consort,” a neologism contrived for the occasion with no precedent in 1,000 years of the unbroken line of succession, and no standing in law. Neither would she assume the title of Princess of Wales—a title that has apparently been retired, like a hockey jersey, with the death of Diana, the secular saint of broken hearts and light eaters. Instead, Camilla will be known as the Duchess of Cornwall, a title unfortunately similar to the market brand of Duchy Originals, the product line of high-class biscuits, sausages, and ciders spun from Charles’s organic Highgrove estate.
Both of Camilla’s titles are mere invention born of wishful thinking on Charles’s part, as the Queen recognized—being far wiser in constitutional matters—when she approved the hrh designation for Camilla, a distinction reserved for family members in immediate proximity to the throne. (The Queen similarly stripped the hrh from Diana once her divorce removed the throne from her grasp.)
If Elizabeth believed that Camilla would never be queen, the hrh would not have been bestowed. The simple fact is that there is neither precedent nor protocol in British legal tradition for the wife of a king to be anything other than queen, no matter what fiction Charles tells to his marigolds. There is no provision in Britain, as there is elsewhere in Europe, for morganatic marriages, meaning those between a high-born royal and a lesser-born commoner, whereby the children assume none of the royal perquisites or privileges. (During the 1936 abdication crisis, Edward viii had proposed a morganatic marriage as a compromise position allowing him to marry Wallis Simpson. This was rejected by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin as unacceptable to either Britain or its dominions. He was left with no option but to abdicate—a path Charles has shown no interest in taking.)
In Britain, the husband of a queen does not automatically become king for the simple reason that he would then outrank his wife—hence, Prince Philip is the Duke of Edinburgh, a title that does not even outrank his two eldest sons. But in Britain the wife of a king always, without exception, becomes his queen. Charles can call Camilla the Duchy Original Princess Pie if he wants to, but there is no escaping the conclusion that with their marriage, Camilla is destined to become queen of the United Kingdom and, by extension, Queen Camilla of Canada.
Comments