King Charles, Camilla Mark 18 Years of Marriage Harry Didn't Want To Happen

King Charles III and Queen Camilla celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary today, the first after their accession to the throne last September.

The couple's relationship began in the 1970s, though both married separate partners. They rekindled their romance in the 1980s and after a long road to public acceptance of their prospective union, married on April 9, 2005.

The anniversary falls less than a month before their coronation, which is scheduled to take place on May 6 at Westminster Abbey in London, but it also comes just four months after the king's son, Prince Harry, revealed that he once pleaded with his father never to marry Camilla.

Harry discussed for the first time in detail his feelings about Camilla and his father's second marriage in his memoir, Spare, published in January.

He placed his feelings, and those of his brother Prince William, about the issue within the context of grieving for the loss of their mother, Princess Diana, who famously described Camilla as the third person in her marriage to Charles in the 1990s.

Prince Harry's 'Spare' Revelations

In his memoir, Harry details his own relationship with Camilla, which developed after the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Charles and Camilla's relationship was widely commented on and criticized throughout the early 1990s. In 1994, Charles described her as a "dear friend" in his TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, before going on to admit that he had been unfaithful to Diana once their marriage had "irretrievably broken down."

After Diana's death, Harry writes that his father set up a meeting between his two sons and Camilla, with whom he was in a committed relationship.

Of his own meeting, the prince wrote: "I have a dim recollection of Camilla being just as calm (or bored) as me. Neither of us much fretted about the other's opinion. She wasn't my mother, and I wasn't her biggest hurdle."

In a later meeting with Charles and William, Harry revealed that the princes agreed to give their father their blessing to be with Camilla, but pleaded with him not to marry her.

"Willy and I promised pa that we'd welcome Camilla into the family," he wrote.

"The only thing we asked in return was that he not marry her. You don't need to remarry, we pleaded. A wedding would cause controversy. It would incite the press. It would make the whole country, the whole world, talk about mummy, compare mummy and Camilla, and nobody wanted that. Least of all Camilla. We support you, we said. We endorse Camilla, we said. 'Just please don't marry her. Just be together, pa.'"

A marriage between Charles and Camilla did take place despite these pleadings however, after a carefully constructed PR campaign to win around public support and ultimately Queen Elizabeth II, who had to formally grant her permission.

On April 9, 2005, (delayed one day owing to the funeral of Pope John Paul II) the couple married in a civil ceremony at the Guildhall in Windsor, followed by a blessing ceremony at St George's Chapel. Harry wrote of the ceremony: "I mostly kept my head bowed, eyes on the floor."

Not won round to liking Camilla, the prince wrote that the wedding marked a poignant moment for him and his father who would be taken away to some degree, busy with married life.

"I didn't relish losing a second parent, and I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar," he explained.

"But I saw pa's smile and it was hard to argue with that, and harder still to deny the cause: Camilla. I wanted so many things, but I was surprised to discover at their wedding that one of the things I wanted most, still, was for my father to be happy. In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy?"

Charles and Camilla Today

Over their 18 years of marriage, Charles and Camilla have undertaken and attended a number of royal tours, engagements and milestone royal events.

When they married, public attitudes towards Camilla were still low, and as a concession, Buckingham Palace announced that when Charles became king, Camilla would be known as "Princess Consort," not queen.

However, over the years, the royal won round many of her critics, to now being the fifth most popular member of the monarchy, ahead of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle.

In February 2022, Queen Elizabeth announced that it was her "sincere wish" that when the time came for Charles to become king, Camilla would take the title of "Queen Consort."

This came to pass in September 2022, when Elizabeth died at the age of 96. In his accession speech, Charles paid tribute to his wife and her work, saying: "I count on the loving help of my darling wife, Camilla. In recognition of her own loyal public service since our marriage 17 years ago, she becomes my Queen Consort. I know she will bring to the demands of her new role the steadfast devotion to duty on which I have come to rely so much."

Today, the couple live between their London residence of Clarence House, the royal estates at Sandringham and Balmoral, and they also own separate homes in the English countryside where they spend time apart. Charles has Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, and Camilla, Ray Mill House in Wiltshire.

James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek's royal reporter based in London. You can find him on Twitter at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek's The Royals Facebook page.

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