Prince Harry’s Blunt Nickname for Queen Camilla ‘Dangerous’ But Not ‘Cruel’
CHRIS JACKSON/GETTY; MAX MUMBY/INDIGO/GETTY
Prince Harry’s relationship with the royal family has been strained for years, and tensions escalated with the release of his memoir, Spare, in January last year. One of the major revelations in his book is his candid feelings about his stepmother, Queen Camilla. Harry expressed that he and his brother, Prince William, were unhappy when their father, King Charles, chose Camilla over their mother, Princess Diana.
According to the Mirror, Harry didn’t mince words, referring to Camilla as the ‘other woman.’ In his memoir, Harry revealed that both he and William had asked their father not to marry Camilla. “We didn’t understand what was going on with her and Pa, certainly, but we intuited enough, we sensed the presence of the Other Woman because we suffered the downstream effects,” he wrote.
Despite their protests, King Charles went ahead with the marriage. As reported by TIME, Harry reflected, “Despite Willy and me urging him not to, Pa was going ahead. We pumped his hand and wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved.”
Harry also shared that William experienced significant guilt once Charles and Camilla’s relationship became official. “Willy long harbored suspicions about the Other Woman, which confused him, tormented him, and when those suspicions were confirmed, he felt tremendous guilt for having done nothing, said nothing, sooner.”
Harry further reflected on his mother’s infamous BBC Panorama interview where she said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Harry explained how this revelation affected him and William, stating, “She left Willy and me out of the equation,” leaving them to navigate their parents’ complex relationship on their own. Viewing Camilla as a potential threat, he wrote, “I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.
Funnily, I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy?” He elaborated further on Camilla’s role in the family, writing, “She was a third person in the marriage, she needed to rehabilitate her image. That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was an open willingness on both sides to trade information.
And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there were going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” In an interview with Good Morning America, Harry hinted at Camilla’s self-serving nature. “She’s my stepmother. I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother. I see someone who married into this institution and has done everything that she can to improve her own reputation and her own image for her own sake.” Harry’s revelations provide a stark look into the dynamics of the royal family and the personal struggles he and William faced with their father’s marriage to Camilla.
