How Prince William and Prince Harry Truly Felt During King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Wedding
When King Charles III married Camilla Parker Bowles on April 9, 2005, the world was watching history unfold. The ceremony at Windsor Guildhall and the blessing at St George’s Chapel were deliberately understated, yet they carried enormous weight. For the public, it marked the formal acceptance of a relationship that had once been shrouded in secrecy and scandal. For Charles, it was the chance to legitimize the woman he had long loved. For many royal observers, though, the real question was how Princes William and Harry, still grappling with the loss of their mother, Princess Diana, would react to their father’s second marriage.
Grant Harrold, Charles’s former butler, recalled a lighthearted moment after the ceremony. In his new book, The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service, he describes how William and Harry decorated their father and stepmother’s car with a “Just Married” sign before chasing after it as the newlyweds left for their honeymoon, as per Vanity Fair.
"At the end of the festivities, Charles and Camilla were catching a flight to head straight to Birkhall [on the Balmoral estate],” he writes in the book. “We all went outside to wave them off and laughed as we saw William and Harry had decorated their car with ‘Just Married.' As they drove off through the arches to cheers, the boys raced after the car.”
But Harry himself tells another story. In his memoir Spare, he flatly denies the anecdote, saying, “There are published reports that Willy and I snuck out of the church and hung JUST MARRIED signs on their car. I don’t think so. I might’ve hung a sign, BE HAPPY. If I’d thought of it at the time.” For Harry, the lasting memory wasn’t a prank but a painful conversation with his father beforehand, wherein he said, “We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.”
In Spare, Harry made headlines with his harsh portrayal of Camilla, describing her as “dangerous” and accusing her of rehabilitating her image at his expense. According to palace insiders, the now 39-year-old has privately admitted he cannot see anyone but Diana as “Queen” by his father’s side.
Royal commentator Petronella Wyatt has suggested that Harry’s resentment toward Camilla may be rooted less in the past than in the present. “Like most forms of hatred, it seems based on envy; envy of the fact that his father’s marriage to Camilla is, as he has publicly conceded, ‘very happy,’ and envy, perhaps, of the humorous and invaluable support she now gives him,” Wyatt wrote.
The TIME reported, as to why, Harry went further in explaining why he never fully embraced Camilla as his stepmother, as per his memoir. He claims that his father and Camilla’s “spin doctor” decided they should throw him “right under the bus.” According to Harry, in 2002, they leaked stories about his drug use, presenting it as though Prince Charles had sent him to a rehabilitation center to “garner sympathy for Charles as a father and for their relationship.”
Harry also recalled how, years later in 2019, William was “seething” because “Pa and Camilla’s people had planted a story or stories about him, and Kate, and the kids, and he wasn’t going to take it any more. Give Pa and Camilla an inch, he said, they take a mile.”