So Charles and Camilla have married. Where have all those been, who are vilifying the former Mrs PB now, when the "Queen of Hearts" was corrupting an entire generation of women and girls with her obsessive self-centeredness? She was a bad mother (it is well known that she drew her then small son Prince William into her marital problems and less well known that she, whilst adoring William, neglected little Harry, the cuckoo child), a bad wife with several extramarital affairs, who - probably - did the worst to her husband any wife can do, namely to have a child by another man, she was bad - make that downright counterproductive - at her job as Princess of Wales, revelled in her power to overshadow her husband, and later deliberately tried to harm the institution that made her. As the, usually spot-on, Private Eye put it cynically:
"In recent weeks (not to mention the last ten years) we at the Daily Gnome … may have inadvertently conveyed the impression that the late Princess of Wales was in some way a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her and personally embarrassed Her Majesty The Queen by her Mediterranean love-romps with the son of a discredited Egyptian businessman."Please all your republicans out there, put aside just for a moment your (understandable) thoughts of "serves them right".
Not C+C have "destroyed" two marriages, Her Sanctimoniousness has (and not JUST two). Camilla had married Andrew Parker Bowles, a notorious womanizer, because, at that time, she thought that Charles would never marry her, and the PBs had made, as far as possible, quite a go of that marriage. About the mutual conditions and agreements we can only guess. And NO, I am NOT advocating adultery (should it have happened) as a way of life, all I am saying is that life is not always as easy as those who have never been bothered by temptation say it is.
Charles, too, had seriously tried to make a go of his marriage to Diana, had cut all ties with Camilla when he became engaged, until his wife drove him back to his lifelong confidante, friend and love, with her antics, obsessive demands and unfaithfulness. Everybody seems to forget that it was SHE who was unfaithful first. All that is in the public domain for everybody to know.
By the way, I am of the old fashioned opinion that a woman has greater responsibility regarding marital faith for the simple reason that she can bear children.
If that is a "double standard", so be it.
I was touched by the dignified way in which Mrs PB endured all the trashing by the media and the fact that she never draw attention to herself. I am disgusted by the ever-recurring snide remarks about her looks (or the lack thereof) and that by an otherwise politically correct mob, mind you, whose members would otherwise swear to their death that "looks don't matter". Every society with its values in the right place would disregard anything like that. But any society with its values in the right place wouldn't have elevated a Princess Diana to quasi-holyness because she was such a stunner to look at in the first place.
Next: Any comparison of Camilla with the Duchess of Windsor is totally and utterly off the mark. Wallis Simpson was a whore. And no, not metaphorically (that too), she was what would be called later a call girl. An expensive hooker. THAT was the main reason why the then Duchess of York, later to become The Queen Mother, was so adamantly against her. Her being American and a divorcée was, so to say, just the icing on the cake. "The woman I love" my behind! An article in a back number of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel informs us that Wallis had learned the tricks of the trade in the brothels of Hongkong where she had lived with her first husband. She had a rather colourful past and realized soon that sex would be her only way to get to where she intended to be. It helped her to climb socially and to crack David (Edward) sexually. She had had affairs with countless other important men, before, coinciding with, and after Edward, notabene with Ribbentrop, then German ambassador to Britain, as well. She was the go-between between Nazi-sympathizer Edward and Ribbentrop. I guess the line between a "socialite" and an upmarket whore is thinner than a lot of people think it is. The last paragraph of the article, which I translate, is telling:
The love story of the century hardened into a marriage of defiance, to a melancholic monument of itself. We remember them from their later photos as two dour luxury lapdogs whom a spiteful master called "Fate" had bound together.I am disgusted as well by the unfair treatment Charles got in the process. Don't get me wrong, I think he is a weak man and a politically correct innocent who backs, besides many worthy ones, too many lost, fatuous and even dangerous causes out of the goodness of his heart and, as I said before, I wouldn't have thought that the old thing had it in him to hold sway when it came to his marriage to Camilla.
But whatever! Many Happy returns of your anniversary C+C!
