After 34 years, wedding bells to ring for Charles and Camilla
LONDON, April 8: After 34 long years in and out of romance, and two months packed with preparations, Prince Charles will wed Camilla Parker Bowles on Saturday and give Britons a new, if not entirely welcome, Princess of Wales.
The second marriage for the heir to the throne, after the failed “fairy tale” union to the late Princess Diana, who died in 1997, has stirred little love but some bemusement in Britain, as mishap after mishap has piled up during its planning.
In contrast to the glamorous 1981 wedding to Diana, watched by a global television audience estimated at 750 million and attended by 3,500 people, the modest affair for Charles and Parker Bowles could come as a letdown.
Their plans have been dogged by an almost comical series of gaffes, starting with a rushed announcement on February 10, a forced move of the civil ceremony site and the awkward announcement that it would be missed by Charles’s mother Queen Elizabeth II.
Most recently, they were confronted on Thursday with a security stunt when a journalist drove a fake bomb onto the premises of Windsor Castle, the queen’s residence west of London where the religious blessing and reception for the wedding will be held.
The most unfortunate coincidence will see the wedding squeezed between two major funerals — that of Pope John Paul II on Friday, and of Monaco’s Prince Rainier exactly a week later.
Charles and Parker Bowles had to delay their wedding by 24 hours so that the prince could attend the funeral at the Vatican. Younger brother Prince Andrew will act as the queen’s representative in Monaco while the couple honeymoon in Scotland.
Last-minute delays and awkward mishaps have not, despite the odds, sidetracked the earnest intentions of a couple long in love — middle-aged, divorced with children, and on-off intimates for more than three decades.
Charles, 56, will marry Parker Bowles, 57, at 12:30 (1130 GMT) on Saturday in a civil ceremony at the Windsor town hall.
Their eldest sons — 22-year-old Prince William and 30-year-old Tom Parker Bowles — will serve as witnesses before an intimate gathering of 28 mostly family members inside the Guildhall.
Twenty short minutes later, Parker Bowles will be the Duchess of Cornwall, the Princess of Wales, and future queen should Charles accede to the throne — a possibility which still riles most Britons.
The bride-to-be has said, however, she will not use the Princess of Wales title, nor queen, preferring the more modest title of Princess Consort.
By 2:30 pm, some 800 guests will be assembled inside St. George’s Chapel at the hilltop Windsor Castle, to watch the couple’s blessing conducted by the head of the Anglican church, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
The throng will lack the star-studded quality of Charles’s first wedding but will have a few notable names like Prime Minister Tony Blair and pop star Sting, as well as the monarchs of Bahrain, Greece and Norway.
They will be treated to princely rites of contrition, as the couple — both divorcees and adulterers — acknowledge their “sins and wickedness” in reading the strongest act of penitence from the Anglican Church’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
By 3:15 pm, duly blessed after vowing everlasting fidelity to one another, the couple will move from the chapel to the sumptuous reception rooms of the castle for a party hosted by the queen.
But after an event likely too short and well-behaved to be very memorable, with only a harpist for accompaniment, guests will be filing out of the castle by 5:45 pm.
Windsor, a picturesque enclave nestled on the Thames, has put on its best face for the royal bash, and enjoyed a last-minute boom as tourists hunt for pre-wedding souvenirs.
But many Britons — especially those whose enduring love for Diana has hardened them to Charles’s new marriage — may choose to snub the weekend events.
Others may merely opt to follow the blessing ceremony on television.—afp
