Queen Camilla’s Reaction to a Wedding Invitation Prompted King Charles to Propose: ‘Line in the Sand’
A wedding invitation pushed Queen Camilla “over the edge” and straight for the altar herself. Being humiliated in the early 2000s proved to be the now-76-year-old’s “line in the sand,” according to a royal author. Not long after King Charles III proposed marriage.
A 2004 society wedding seating chart had guest Queen Camilla ‘relegated to the social margins’
As the sovereign’s wife, Queen Camilla gets prime seating at dinners or public appearances. However, that wasn’t always the case. Before she and King Charles were married, Queen Camilla found herself “relegated to the social margins” of a society wedding.
Which, as author Tina Brown claimed in her 2022 book, The Palace Papers, didn’t go over well (via Express). Brown explained many royals had been invited to the November 2004 nuptials of Edward Van Cutsem and the Duke of Westminster’s daughter.
There was King Charles, the then-Prince of Wales and godfather to the groom. His sons Prince Harry and Prince William. Notably, so were Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. However, the seating arrangements led to an “infuriating social incident” for Queen Camilla.
“Charles and Camilla were apprised of the seating plans the weekend before the wedding,” Brown wrote. “The arrangements revealed Mrs Parker Bowles to be relegated to the social margins of the event.”
Camilla, she said, expected to sit behind her now-husband, who’d be sitting with his parents at the front.
Camilla didn’t want to be ‘humiliated’ in front of King Charles’s friends or royals at the wedding
Brown continued, saying Camilla was less than pleased with the seating arrangements. “But no, that Dutch Cow” is how Camilla referred to the groom’s mother, Emilie Van Cutsem. She’d “stuck her on the other side of the cathedral with the bride’s friends at the back and told her that she could not enter or leave by the main door.”
A courtier told the Daily Mail it “sent Camilla over the edge” at the time. Van Cutsem insisted she’d been following protocol, refusing to seat the former Queen Consort behind King Charles as she’d wanted. Meanwhile, Queen Camilla, Brown claimed, “refused to be understanding” about the situation.
“She would not be humiliated in front of all of Charles’s snotty circle and, more importantly, the royal family,” the author wrote of Queen Camilla. “The prince had to choose between attending the wedding without her or snubbing his closest friends and his godson,” Brown explained, calling it “Camilla’s line in the sand.”
Ultimately, King Charles skipped the wedding due to a scheduling conflict. Photos from the ceremony showed royals, such as Harry, William, Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Philip, but no King Charles or Queen Camilla.
Less than two months later, over the New Year, King Charles proposed to Camilla, with the pair announcing their engagement in February 2005.
King Charles and Queen Camilla faced ‘new obstacles’ planning their April 2005 wedding
In his January 2023 Spare memoir, the Duke of Sussex revisited the day his father and stepmother married. Harry recalled how King Charles and Queen Camilla kept encountering “new obstacles” as they planned their wedding.
“First there was the controversy over the nature of the ceremony,” he said, noting courtiers “insisted” it be a civil ceremony because, “as future supreme governor of the Church of England,” the then-Prince of Wales “couldn’t marry a divorcée in the church.”
Then came a “furious debate about locations,” with the bride and groom ultimately setting Windsor Guildhall as the venue.
“Other than feeling sorry for them,” Harry wrote, “I couldn’t help but think that some force in the universe (Mummy?) was blocking rather than blessing their union. Maybe the universe delays what it disapproves of?”
April 9, 2023, marked King Charles and Queen Camilla’s 18-year wedding anniversary.
