People are mad at Camilla Parker-Bowles all over again following Netflix’s The Crown season four because, even over twenty years after her death, people are #TeamDiana.
In the latest season of The Crown, the series decided to push up the length of Charles and Camilla’s extramarital affair while the former was married to his very young new bride. While the Prince of Wales has insisted that he didn’t rekindle a physical affair with Camilla until several years into his marriage, the show implies it was happening from the jump.
It doesn’t help that in the semi-fictionalized meeting between Diana (Emma Corrin) and Camilla (Emerald Fennell), the mistress laid on a cloud of passive aggression so thick that I’m sure Diana (being a Cancer) would have clearly been smothered by it. Yet, as Camilla says in one episode, she will always be compared to Diana because she is beautiful and beloved. Camilla cannot win—not in fiction or, apparently, in real life.
According to The Independent, fans of The Crown have taken out their anger towards this issue on the Royal Instagram. Camilla’s official page posted a photo last Friday, and it got thousands of comments from Crown fans, which I’m sure has only added to the frustration the Royal family feels towards this current season of the show.
The series has worked hard to make the relationship between Camilla and Charles tragic, dark, and complicated. Combined with that of the You’re Wrong About podcast, the picture that has been painted about the marriage between Charles and Diana is truly just a meeting of two people who could not communicate properly together. From their age difference, tastes, and sense of formality in public, the relationship wasn’t so much doomed from the start as it was just not a relationship that could nurture both people.
Despite it all, Charles and Camilla are married, happily so, but Diana’s presence lingers between them even now. I can’t say that I have overwhelming sympathy for anyone in the British Royal Family of that generation, because they are all richer than god. That being said, we did not live in Charles and Diana’s marriage. Despite The Crown and all the public recordings we may have, biographies, and the like, we wouldn’t encourage two people who don’t love each other to stay together now.
The best thing for Charles and Diana was their divorce. If Diana had lived, I’m sure she’d eventually say the same thing, being happily married to someone on her own. What matters now is that Camilla is a good step-mother and step-grandmother to Charles’ kids and grandkids. No one can change the past, but if there is anyone who really deserves the blame, it is a society that told Charles is was better to marry a 19-year-old virgin than a woman who was a divorcée.
(via The Independent, image: Des Willie/Des Willie/Netflix)
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