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Camilla has revealed how she keeps her marriage with Prince Charles solid, her fears for her grandchildren and how she is a secret Wordle addict.
The Duchess of Cornwall gave a fascinating behind the scenes look at her royal life with in a new tell-all interview with British Vogue.
The 74-year-old, who has spent much of the last 30 years in public eye, lifted the lid on what her life is like and how she maintains her relationship with the future King.
Speaking to the magazine, she said despite their incredibly busy schedules she and her husband always try to make time for each other.
Camilla said balancing work with her marriage is ‘not easy sometimes’ but she and her husband of 17 years make sure to ‘sit down together and have a cup of tea and discuss the day’.
Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, lifted the lid on her life in a tell-all interview with British Vogue
She revealed the secret to maintaining her marriage with Prince Charles, pictured here together in November 2015, was ensuring they make time for each other at least once a day
She said: ‘You know when we go away, the nicest thing is that we actually sit and read our books in different corners of the same room.’
She told the magazine the early years of her relationship with the prince were ‘not easy’ due to the negative reaction of the public.
She told Vogue: ‘I was scrutinised for such a long time that you just have to find a way to live with it. Nobody likes to be looked at all the time and, you know, criticised. But I think in the end, I sort of rise above it and get on with it. You’ve got to get on with life.’
In the nearly two decades that have followed, her popularity has risen, and earlier this year the Queen confirmed she wants her new daughter-in-law to become Queen Consort when Charles becomes King.
Camilla gave the interview ahead of her 75th birthday later this year, and joked with a photographer she was sorry he had to take pictures of an ‘old bat’.
She considers family important, with photos of loved ones adorning her desk in Clarence House, including one of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their wedding day.
In addition to her royal step-grandchildren, Camilla also has five grandchildren from her son and daughter, Tom and Laura, who she had with her ex-husband.
She says she spoils her grandchildren, who are between the ages of 12 and 14, but is taken aback by them sometimes.
‘The girls are beginning to get into clothes and make-up and, you know, it’s rather frightening when you see them, coming out with pierced ears and a lot of new make-up and funny-coloured hair and stuff,’ she said.
Camilla, pictured here with Meghan Markle in May 2018, has a photo of the Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry on their wedding day on her desk
She added that she compares her Wordle score with her granddaughter every day, adding that she loves it ‘tells you how brilliant you are’, boasting that she had even got a score of two before.
During the interview, she also raised the lid on the work domestic violence charities she supports do to help women in abusive relationships.
‘I think we all know somebody who it’s happened to,’ Camilla said.
‘I was hearing it too often, from friends who knew friends, and I thought maybe I ought to look into it to see if there was somewhere for me to help.
‘There’s been such a taboo. People can still love the people that abuse them, and feel such guilt and such shame that they think it’s their fault, so they bury it.
‘It becomes a sort of terrible hidden secret.’
Camilla said she would continue supporting domestic abuse charities following her ascension to Queen Consort because ‘you can’t desert things that you’re in the middle of’.
She added that as a feminist she loves to see women gaining confidence before they ‘fly the flag’ for their gender.
Back on his high horse! Meghan Markle cheers Prince Harry on as he loses polo semi-final in Santa Barbara and William’s ‘grief and anger’ over their rift is revealed
By HARRIET ALEXANDER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and REBECCA ENGLISH FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Meghan Markle was cheering her husband on from the sidelines of the polo field on Friday, as Prince Harry’s team battled in vain for a place in their league final.
Casually dressed in a denim shirt and shorts, with flat Grecian-style leather sandals, the Duchess of Sussex watched the match intently.
She appeared animated as she followed the game, lemonade in hand.
The prince, 37, joined the Los Padres polo team in May under the name Harry Wales, and has spent the last few weeks playing alongside his teammates.
The team, which competes in the Pacific Coast Circuit Inter-Circuit Cup, was founded by Nacho Figueras, 45, an Argentine polo professional and model, and longtime friend of the prince.
It came as friends revealed last night how Prince William is still at ‘rock bottom’ over the fractured bond with his brother.
Meghan Markle is seen on Friday in watching her husband play polo in Santa Barbara
Harry, 37, has been playing since May with the Los Padres polo team, only a few miles from his Montecito home
During intervals in the game, Meghan and Harry sought shade under an awning, Meghan crouching down and resting her hand on his knee
Figueras, who has a handicap of five – out of a maximum of 10 – is the most experienced player in the team.
Harry’s handicap is one.
The pair are accompanied by two 16-year-olds, Keko Magrini, on a handicap of four, and Juan Guerrero, a two-goal player.
Meghan, 40, was cheering on the chukkas from the sidelines, besides Figueras’s wife Delfina Blaquier.
During intervals, she and Harry sat together under an awning.
She was also seen hugging Figueras.
Harry’s team was playing in the semi-final, against the Folded Hills team.
They were hoping to win through to Sunday’s final, but ultimately lost the match.
Meanwhile, friends of William lifted the lid on the brothers’ relationship, which has been put under strain in recent years.
‘He alternates between grieving for what he has lost and feeling really, really angry about what his brother has done,’ said one.
‘He truly loves Harry and feels he has lost the only person, aside from his wife, who understood this strange life of theirs.
‘But he believes there are things you just don’t do. And Harry has 100 per cent crossed that line.’
Meghan Markle hangs out with the Polo WAGS as she enjoys a cold drink and watches Prince Harry play Polo
The Duchess of Sussex was accompanied by a barefooted Delfina Blaquier, wife of Harry’s teammate Nacho Figueras
Prince Harry gets emotional after losing his polo match while Meghan Markle supports him from the sidelines in Santa Barbara, California on Friday
In a new series for the Daily Mail — ahead of Prince William’s landmark birthday on Tuesday — impeccable sources within his circle, some on the record, some on condition of anonymity, have revealed what makes him tick.
The result is illuminating, encouraging — and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.
Yet his strained relationship with his brother does, inevitably, come heavily into play.
Asked whether they thought William would ever repair his bond with Harry, one friend says: ‘That’s a hard question to answer. The truth is they have got to find some common ground again.
‘But to do that both have to admit fault — and it’s pretty obvious that one of them is absolutely refusing to do that.
‘William is also very principled and believes Harry has crossed a line. He’s thrown accusation after accusation, knowing that silence is the family’s only option because it doesn’t want to get dragged into a public slanging match.
‘He sees how upset his father has been by it all, and it hurts.
‘William is absolutely allergic to drama, but Harry has ensured that the family laundry is being aired on a global scale.
‘I think they will find themselves in a better position in the future, but not now. And too much water has gone under the bridge for things to ever go back to the way they were.
‘Truthfully, William thinks Harry has been sucked into an alien world and there’s f*** all he can do about it. But he does want Harry to be happy, and if he stops throwing dust in their faces, then maybe he will find a way to forgive and forget.’
Another source is more conciliatory. ‘He’s actually always been very protective of Harry and has a very low tolerance of people being disrespectful about him, even now. I think he’ll keep the door open to him for ever,’ they insist.
‘In some ways, it’s not like any of this was a surprise. Harry always had concerns about life within the Royal Family.
‘And in hindsight the pressure that was put on him and William, living and working together as some sort of dynamic duo, placed a massive strain on their relationship. They had no room to breathe. But Meghan complicated it.
‘Harry had to pick a side — and there was only one side he was ever going to choose.
‘But I also find it impossible to believe there is anything these two brothers could say about each other that means they will never find a way to repair things.
Meghan is seen hugging Figueras, who founded the Los Padres team
The 37-year-old has been playing polo since he was a boy, following in the footsteps of his father and older brother
‘They were too close and have been through too much together for that to happen.’
Meanwhile, discussions with members of William’s close circle leave no doubt that he is, at last, as comfortable as he will ever be with his future — and ready for the challenges ahead.
He will always be his mother’s son, but he has grown more like his father than anyone — including he himself — might care to admit.
One confidant, who has known the prince for many years, says the second-in-line to the throne hasn’t always been as dull and dutiful as some would think.
‘Let’s just say that, like his younger brother, William enjoyed himself immensely in his teens and 20s. Unlike Harry, though, he was never caught!’ they laugh.
William was always more cautious about who he hung around with, preferring to let his hair down with a small group of trusted friends in less public places. He had to be more mindful of what lay ahead.
His long-term mentor and former private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton (a godfather to his son, Prince George) says William was always someone of deeply impressive maturity.
‘He hasn’t rubbed his hands in glee [at what is to come], but has looked at it in a dutiful way,’ says Lowther-Pinkerton. ‘One of the lovely things I remember early on was this sense of disbelief that people were really interested in who he was or what he was doing.
‘But he quickly decided that if they were, he was going to turn it to whatever good use he could.’
Lowther-Pinkerton was hugely supportive of William’s determination — as a future head of the armed forces — to ‘serve’ in whatever way he could, even if he couldn’t do it from the frontline.
He did this first with the RAF as a search and rescue pilot, then with East Anglia Air Ambulance — both jobs, Lowther-Pinkerton, says, allowed him to look the forces ‘square in the face’ and shaped him as a man.
‘If you’re going out in the Atlantic or the Irish Sea in a Force 8 and flying your helicopter right up to a cliff face to rescue a climber, you can look anyone in the face, even someone who has been on operations in war zones. The danger is the danger. And he was bloody good at it,’ Lowther-Pinkerton says.
The roles also afforded William space in which to marry and start a family away from the goldfish bowl of royal life: first in Anglesey, then Norfolk. He did not move to London to become a full-time working royal until 2017.
Anyone who knows William will say that becoming a husband and father has been the making of him. ‘He just loves being a dad and having a settled family around him. Having children always puts things into perspective, and doubly so for him,’ says one friend.
A touch of frost: Meghan and Harry with William and Kate on the Buckingham Palace balcony in July 2018 for the RAF flypast
Very happy Father’s Day: Charles and William in 2019. Charles has delighted in finding new happiness as a grandfather and William has come to understand and appreciate his papa’s devotion to duty
‘Whatever happens ‘at work’, he has to go home and be a ‘normal’ person for the sake of his kids, which has made him more at peace with the reality of his other life.’
Indeed, for William, the single most important priority in his life in recent years has been to protect his children and secure their future.
He has worked hard to build a ‘fortress’ around them, shielding them from the paparazzi and the pressure of being born into such public roles.
Now that they are growing up as happy, unaffected youngsters who enjoy football, ballet and play dates like all their other schoolmates — along with the occasional public appearance — everything else has fallen into place.
William turns up like any other dad to sports matches and school events. ‘It was a bit of a head-spinner at first,’ says a fellow parent. ‘But then you get used to it. He’s just George or Charlotte’s dad.’
Throughout all of this, Kate, 40, has been not just his wife, but his best friend and ‘anchor’.
Their relationship has, inevitably, been picked over at length and subjected to scrutiny and gossip.
I have discussed this with several in William’s circle and all are of the same opinion.
‘It’s just b******s,’ says one.
‘They honestly couldn’t be happier as a couple. You can’t get a cigarette paper between them. They are so tight, just inseparable.’
Kate has now been by William’s side for half of his life, since they first became friends as teenagers at university.
‘They spend all their time together. They lunch together every day, they sit and watch television together every evening.
‘They do go out and see their own friends, of course, but they spend an inordinate amount of time together and live a very conventional married life,’ says one who knows them well.
‘They aren’t a flashy couple — he likes his motorbikes but that’s about it. They are both very outdoorsy people and spend every minute they aren’t working with their children. That’s what they really care about.’
Another source makes clear that William’s approach to his future has very much been dictated by his past.
‘When you speak to William, he’s actually quite puritanical in his attitude when he talks about his parents’ marriage and what went wrong.
‘It hugely affected the way he approached his own relationship with Catherine and why it took so long for him to settle down. He wanted it to be with the right person and [for it to last] for ever.
‘William is very conscious that if it wasn’t for him, the man she fell in love with, Catherine would be living a nice life in the country and bringing up a family away from the spotlight.
‘There’s a bit of snobbery, sadly, when you marry in from outside. It’s a lot better now than it was, but William is still very protective of his wife.
‘The way he sees it, she is as important to the institution as he is. He genuinely admires the way she has just dug her heels in and stuck with it.’
There’s no doubt that William is a complex character — and perceptions of him sometimes depend on who you speak to.
There are some I know who have had angry run-ins with him over the years and describe him as controlling and suspicious — someone who sees an ‘agenda’ everywhere, particularly in terms of the palace machinery (something he has in common with Harry).
But those individuals, it should be stressed, are few and dealt with William as a younger man, when he was still railing against authority — and, particularly, his father.
Prince Charles loves both his sons deeply, but is scarred by his own emotionally difficult childhood.
He is also a workaholic whose diary is organised to the letter six or seven months in advance, making it difficult for him to attend ‘impromptu’ birthday parties for his grandchildren — something for which William and Kate, initially, failed to give him much leeway.
As a result, William gravitated towards his ‘surrogate family’, the Middletons, leaving a rather bruised Charles feeling ‘airbrushed’ out of his life.
Pointedly, when his first grandchild, Prince George, was a baby, Charles told one confidant that ‘I see him as much as I can — within the constraints’.
Explosive rows between father and son were often overheard by staff, with Charles — who hates family confrontations — burying himself in his paperwork to avoid the conflict.
But over the years the situation has righted itself.
Charles has delighted in finding new happiness as a grandfather and William has come to understand and appreciate his papa’s devotion to duty.
‘They are much more on the same page now,’ one insider tells me. ‘They will always be quite different characters, but there’s a mutual respect.
‘The duke ‘gets’ his father much more and there’s no doubt the Prince of Wales is extraordinarily proud of what his son has achieved in terms of Earthshot [his ground-breaking environmental prize] and mental health.’
As for his stepmother, William has grown increasingly fond of Camilla. He sees how good she is for his father and how diligently she has approached her new royal role.
‘It’s complex for him emotionally, of course, but that’s families for you,’ shrugs a friend.
One of the issues that has brought father and son closer together — in addition to a shared passion for the environment and social justice — is Harry.
‘The rift with his brother has been really hard on William,’ says one confidant. ‘It’s as if he is mourning the relationship he has lost.
‘People don’t realise he sort of fathered Harry to a degree. He wasn’t just his brother, he was also a parent, always trying to pull Harry back from the brink.
‘But make no mistake, he’s angry. He believes Harry has disrespected the Queen and their family.’
Much has been made of the distance between the two men at this month’s Jubilee celebrations, when they failed even to glance in each other’s direction, let alone speak.
But William does not just feel personally betrayed, he is angry for his wife who he believes was ‘massively disrespected’ by Meghan when she claimed in last year’s Oprah interview that it was Kate who made her cry in the run up to her wedding — not the other way around — and that Kate had brought her flowers to apologise.
‘It obviously never occurred [to Meghan] that they were a peace offering, not an apology,’ one insider insists.
‘Despite much provocation, both William and Catherine have tried to keep the peace more than anyone will ever realise.’
Indeed, I understand from multiple sources that when Harry flew over last July for the unveiling of a statute in memory of their late mother, Princess Diana, Kate had been due to attend to support her husband.
But after much discussion between her and William, she gracefully pulled out at the eleventh hour as they were fearful of what reaction it would provoke in Montecito if Meghan, who remained in California, were to see Kate there.
It is said that William never entirely got on with his sister-in-law: they are very different beasts and the prince found Meghan’s lifestyle ‘rather too showbiz’ for his taste, I am told.
For now, though, William is very much looking forward to the future.
As I revealed last year, a move to Windsor with his family is imminent, with all three children starting at a ‘wonderful’ new co-educational prep school in Berkshire this September, which the Mail has chosen not to name.
The couple want to ensure their young family enjoys as carefree an upbringing as possible, away from the spotlight, and to be closer to both the Queen and the Middleton clan.
Kensington Palace, however, will remain their London base, even when Charles accedes to the throne and William takes on the Duchy of Cornwall and a new professional role.
He has worked hard to create a close-knit and devoted team around him, and while he takes his responsibilities seriously (something I will explore further in the second part of this series in Monday’s Mail), he’s considered an engaging boss — and something of a practical joker.
‘Kensington Palace is actually a really fun place to work in and that largely comes from him,’ one insider reveals.
‘He can be very earnest when it comes to his work because he takes it so very seriously. But once that is done he’ll sit in the car sharing memes that his protection team have sent him, often at his own expense.’
One such example of his naughty sense of humour happened in 2012 during his and Kate’s successful royal tour of the South Pacific. The couple were staying in a private house on one side of a large sandy bay, and their staff in another residence on the other side.
After a particularly gruelling day, the couple’s team decided on a moonlight swim in the balmy waters.
‘Out of nowhere one aide (who shall remain nameless) was pulled down under the water, coughing and spluttering. All hell broke lose as everyone thought they were being attacked by a shark and were freaking out,’ reveals my source.
‘Turns out William had got wind of their night-time dip and had swum all the way round the bay, pretty much underwater because he is such an expert diver, to prank them!’
William is also able to laugh at both himself and the rather crazy world he sometimes finds himself in.
On the recommendation of his staff, he has even dipped into The Windsors, Channel 4’s brutally hilarious — but very close to the bone — parody on the Royal Family in which Kate comes from a family of gypsies (a sharp reference to her parents’ business background and the scrutiny this once attracted) and can’t resist filling Kensington Palace with second-hand white goods.
William is portrayed as a rather hapless do-gooder who thinks being a hands-on dad is shouting a little louder for ‘nannnnayyyy’.
He’s also said to be an ‘incredibly empathetic boss and really cares about his staff’.
‘He’ll send gifts to people if they are off sick, knows the names of all their partners and children, loves to chat about their dates when they go wrong — and even keeps tabs on people who have left,’ one close friend tells me.
That emotional openness — somewhere in the mid-ground between his grandmother’s stiff upper lip and the professional victimhood now espoused by Harry — is likely to serve William well moving forwards.
‘The Queen’s model has largely been followed by the Prince of Wales and it has served them well,’ concludes one member of William’s circle.
‘But the public mood towards the monarchy is evolving and when it comes to the duke, people will get to know more about what he’s feeling or thinking, what he stands for and, yes, what his opinions are.
‘The decades ahead are going to be some of the most challenging we have experienced as a nation in modern history. And William is ready to step up to the plate.’
The loss was the end of a frustrating week for Harry, who on Sunday, in the quarterfinals, fell from his pony in front of celebrity friends who came to the grounds to cheer him on.
Harry was unscathed in the incident at the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club, as was his ride.
He didn’t appear too downcast by the result, because he was seen hanging out with friends on the sidelines including American idol runner up Katharine McPhee, 38, her composer husband David Foster, 72, and their young son Rennie.
Foster, who is just a year younger than Prince Charles, has been described by some as a ‘father figure’ to Harry.
Charles was also well known for falling off his horse in polo – breaking his arm on occasion.
In New Zealand Charles tumbled from his ride three times in six weeks.
In 2000 he was taken to hospital in Cirencester and forced to stay the night after a fall during a charity match in the Cotswolds when his sons, then 19 and 16, were on his team.
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