‘The Crown’: King Charles III’s Former Butler Reveals Why the Portrayal of Camilla in the Series Is ‘Unfair’
The highly anticipated Season 5 of The Crown has been released and many royal watchers have an opinion on how the series has been portraying several royal family members including Camilla Parker Bowles who is now King Charles III’s queen consort.
The king’s former butler, Grant Harrold, shared with Showbiz Cheat Sheet his take on how the show portrays the new queen and why he thinks it is unfair.
King Charles’ former employee says the depiction of Camilla in ‘The Crown’ isn’t fair
It’s common knowledge that Camilla and Charles carried on an affair while the royal was married to Princess Diana. This was depicted in the last and now the current season of The Crown as well. Harrold, who worked for Charles from 2004 to 2011, spoke on behalf of OnlineCasino.ca about the portrayal of King Charles’ current wife and said it’s “really not fair.”
“Based on last season’s Crown, when I watched it, it didn’t portray the queen consort in a good light, not at all,” Harrold recalled. “I remember thinking to myself ‘this is really not fair’ because there is a whole young generation that didn’t know the Princess of Wales at all and they were immediately attacking the Duchess of Cornwall, as she was then.”
The former royal butler added: “I think what’s sad is now they are telling these stories, it’s not like me watching it and thinking ‘I remember that, a shame, the whole thing was awful and you move on’ but the younger ones are watching it and thinking ‘how could they do that? How could that happen?’ then it’s this big debate for people who weren’t even around at the time.
“I think from the family’s point of view they will be aware of that. The [former] Duchess of Cornwall has grandkids, the king has grandkids too. They’ve got young family members, they’ve got friends so they’ll hear and know about it. It’s difficult because they are trying as a couple to do their best and — at that point — showing how they’d be a good future king and queen and they’ve got this audience that thinks ‘you guys are awful.’ It’s unfortunate but it’s history and is something that did happen. Maybe if it stuck to the factual parts, but the fact they’ve put things in that we don’t know that’s part of the problem.”
The king and Camilla had to turn off social media comments after she was attacked
As Harrold pointed out, some of what is depicted in The Crown did happen but some is fiction. However, a number of royal fans don’t feel the need to sift through what is factual and what isn’t because it’s known that Charles and Camilla kept up their extramarital affair and treated Diana poorly. Therefore, they became the target of abusive comments via social media when season 4 came out.
“The royal family were putting posts up and they had to turn off comments because people were saying nasty things about [Camilla] it was awful,” Harrold noted. “The fact that they have admitted stuff in the past and we know that, this generation doesn’t know that. When these things happen, nobody’s a victor are they? When relationships break down in any family, nobody comes out victorious from it, everyone suffers.”
The royal butler says the family will be ‘disappointed’ by ‘The Crown’ coming out now
As for the timing of the new season being released not too many people, including the royals, are happy that it’s streaming in homes all over the globe just two months and one day after Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
“I’m sure they are disappointed, thinking right now we don’t need this sort of stuff coming out,” Harrold opined. “But I think the thing about the Palace, as we’ve seen, the Palace can very much want to control a situation or organize things and at the end of the day, it’s better to take a back step. As the [late] queen used to say, never complain, never explain.
“Maybe on this occasion it’s best to say nothing and if their friends want to speak out, maybe encourage them not to and that’s it’s better for them not to say anything and not to comment. But then again it is all going to be brought up and it’s all going to be discussed on TikTok and Instagram and who knows what that’s going to mean. I can understand the two sides of it, that’s the difficult part.”
