Prince William and Prince Harry have squabbled throughout their lives—royal author Robert Lacey revealed that their rift goes back as far as 22 years ago, to 2002, Marie Claire reported last week—but one fact they could always agree on? Their feelings for Camilla Parker-Bowles, who married then Prince Charles in 2005 and, at that time, became Duchess of Cornwall. (She elevated to Queen Camilla upon her husband, now King Charles, ascending the throne in September 2022 and his subsequent Coronation in May 2023.)
Harry revealed in his 2023 memoir, Spare, that he and William asked their father, in no uncertain terms, not to marry Camilla in 2005; if you’ll remember, Camilla was for years and years the mistress of Charles during his marriage to William and Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, which lasted from 1981 until their divorce in 1996.
But much has changed in the royal family as of late, not the least of which the dual cancer diagnoses of both Camilla and William’s respective spouses, the King and the Princess of Wales. Through the tumult, William has found an “unlikely ally” in his stepmother, Camilla, after years of what outlets have called a “strained relationship,” Marie Claire reported recently. Drawn together by the unique experience of a spouse battling cancer in the public eye, Camilla and William now have a genuine warmth and have gotten far closer in recent months. Tatler reports that “the two have been in regular phone contact, while the sense of solidarity between the two at the recent Commonwealth Day Service was palpable.” At the service on March 11, the two greeted each other with a kiss and an embrace, and “They were pictured chatting with one another, seemingly showing off their new, closer relationship,” Tatler writes.
Of his stepmother and his older brother’s newly forged bond, Harry “distrusts” the whole situation, royal author Tom Quinn told The Mirror: “He really distrusts that William actually gets on rather well now with Camilla—Harry will see this as a betrayal,” Quinn said. “He was shocked when William realized that Camilla, far from being the monster they thought her when they were children, is actually a rather nice woman.”
Quinn added of Camilla that “She is exceptionally good at listening with a sympathetic ear and William has definitely warmed to that,” he said. “Harry, on the other hand, sees this as one more example of William letting the side down—for Harry, things have never moved on, really, since his mother died.”
In the pages of Spare, Harry described Camilla as “dangerous” and, in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper to promote the tell-all, said of Camilla that “She was the villain, she was a third person in the marriage, she needed to rehabilitate her image,” he said. “The need for her to rehabilitate her image…that made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade information and with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.”
Quinn added of Camilla and Harry’s relationship “For Harry, Camilla was the wicked stepmother back then, and she still is,” he said. “It’s all very sad, but shows that the huge geographical divide between the brothers—Harry in America, William in London—has become a physical manifestation of their emotional separation.”
For Camilla and William, the relationship is faring far better. “Recent events have obviously brought William and Camilla much closer,” royal expert Jennie Bond told OK. “They have been left, almost literally, nursing the Crown while the King and the Princess recover. Their teams will be working more closely to coordinate diaries and cover the engagements that have been planned, and Camilla and William are bound to have been in much closer regular contact.”
That closeness, Bond said, goes beyond just royal duties: “Apart from the business side of things, I’m sure they will have been an emotional help to one another as well,” she said. “Both will have been so worried about these unexpected health issues, and I imagine they will have shared their concerns.”
For his part, William seems to have been able to move on from the Camilla of the past. “As an adolescent, William took his time to accept Camilla as ‘the other woman’ in his father’s life,” Bond said. “His feelings towards her were complicated, having witnessed his mother’s unhappiness in marriage. But maturity brought with it the realization that Camilla makes his father extremely happy…and the prince [William] knows now that she is the love of his life.”
