Prince William and Prince Harry officially welcomed Queen Camilla as their stepmother on April 9, 2005. At the time, the whole world was watching the second marriage of King Charles III—then the Prince of Wales—who divorced the late Princess Diana nine years earlier.
Grant Harrold, the monarch’s former butler, shared excerpt from his book, The Royal Butler: My Remarkable Life of Royal Service, to the British newspaper The Telegraph on the occasion of its publication. One of the passages contains a sweet memory of King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s big day. But it was above all the reactions of Princes William and Harry that struck the former butler.
“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.”
There are, however, other versions of this anecdote, less poetic than the picture painted by Harrold.
In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry tells a very different story. “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,” he wrote. According to the book, the two brothers instead asked their father not to marry his beloved. “We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.”
One thing’s for sure: a mystery remains, and only the principals involved know the truth.
Original story from Vanity Fair France.
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