After a fairytale wedding to Diana, Charles was willing to be 'humiliated' to marry Camilla

By Rebecca Armitage, ABC

For a couple who has loved each other for half a century, who overcame scandal and vitriol to be together, and nearly toppled the monarchy as a result, King Charles and Queen Camilla had a rather sedate celebration for their 20th wedding anniversary.

The royal couple posed for pictures at the British ambassador's residence in Rome before continuing with engagements as part of their state visit to Italy this week.

But despite clearly being very happy together, it has always been tricky for Charles and Camilla to publicly celebrate their love.

The king's first wife, Princess Diana, has been gone for almost three decades, but she continues to loom large in the British psyche.

The enduring popularity of Diana has forced Charles and Camilla to make certain concessions to avoid the public's ire.

When they first married in 2005, Camilla was styled as the Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales because the palace decided the title was inextricably linked to her beloved predecessor.

She also faced a long and protracted debate over what she would be called when her husband acceded the throne.

Amid speculation she would be forced to settle for the lesser title of Princess Consort, her mother-in-law Elizabeth II intervened, proclaiming it her "sincere wish" for Camilla to eventually be queen.

But never did the couple have to endure as many humiliations as they did on their wedding day.

Charles's sons begged him not to go through with it. The date was shifted multiple times - then the venue was changed. The groom's mother couldn't attend, and the bride woke up with a cold.

Worst of all, the couple was forced to "repent" for their sins in church.

"They had a blessing in the church, and goodness me, they got a talking to [from the archbishop]," Associate Professor Giselle Bastin, a royal commentator from Flinders University, told the ABC.

"It strikes me they were all but taken out to the town square and humiliated."

The nuptials stand in stark contrast to Charles's first wedding - a lavish ceremony watched by 750 million people that eventually gave way to a catastrophic marriage.

A fairytale wedding and a disastrous marriage

On the night before his wedding to Diana Spencer, a then 32-year-old Prince Charles stood at a window in Buckingham Palace and looked at the crowds already filling the streets ahead of the ceremony.

Then he began to weep.

"Had he been a private individual, he would not have pressed on, but by then he was too committed," Charles' godmother, the late Patricia Mountbatten, told royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith.

"He realised that if he called it off, it would ruin Diana's future."

Down The Mall at Clarence House, 19-year-old Diana also seemed to realise the union was doomed.

But when she confided in her sisters that she was fairly certain her future husband was in love with another woman, they were blunt in their assessment of her situation.

"'Bad luck … your face is on the tea towels, so you're too late to chicken out now'," they said according to royal biographer Andrew Morton.

The next day, Diana and Charles buried their doubts and trudged down the aisle of St Paul's Cathedral to deliver the fairytale fantasy the public demanded.

Their marriage produced two sons, turned Diana into a global superstar, and gave the ailing monarchy a fresh surge of romance and youthful glamour.

But as both parties foresaw, the union was indeed doomed.

"Charles and Diana had nothing in common. The age difference was significant. The worldview was completely different, and they were just utterly and totally incompatible," Bastin said.

His standing with the public took a huge hit when it was revealed that he had engaged in an extramarital affair with Camilla.

"Charles met the love of his life back in 1973 and that never changed, even during his marriage to Diana," Bastin said.

"So I think he tried to commit himself to Diana, but I think there's, there's just so much evidence to suggest that really, Charles and Camilla were soulmates from the beginning."

While Charles was roundly condemned after he and Diana divorced, the public saved most of its ire for Camilla.

The tabloids called her "the rottweiler", "the other woman", and even a "gin-soaked, hatchet-faced, horse-faced, loose but frumpy woman with a Rothmans fag never far from her grasp".

No longer willing to sacrifice love for duty, Charles was determined to marry Camilla.

But their journey down the aisle required patience, a good PR strategy, and ultimately, a very public apology.

A bad wedding and a blissful marriage

The death of Diana in a car crash in 1997 plunged Britain into grief, robbed two boys of their mother, and forced Charles and Camilla to hit pause on their efforts to be accepted by the public.

"Camilla basically had to go underground again for a good few years until she was slowly eased back into the public eye," Bastin said.

So they hired public relations executive, Mark Bolland, to help plan Camilla's quiet return.

Two years later, Operation Ritz saw the couple finally come out of the shadows, appearing together at her sister's birthday at the luxe hotel in London.

It was the first time they had been caught in the same frame since the 1970s, and when the tabloid reaction was muted, Bolland knew they were on the right path.

"The alchemy he performed for Charles [was] raising his popularity rating from 20 per cent after Diana's death to 75 per cent, and rendering the prospect of a remarriage palatable to the British public," Mary Ridell wrote for the British Journalism Review.

Finally, after a three-decade wait, Queen Elizabeth permitted them to marry in 2005.

But their obstacles weren't over yet.

Prince Harry, wrote in his memoir, Spare, that he and his brother begged their father not to remarry.

"All that we asked … was that he did not marry her," he wrote.

"'You do not need to remarry,' we begged him. A wedding would … make the whole country, the whole world, compare our mother and Camilla, something that nobody wanted."

Then, the Archbishop of Canterbury refused permission for a church wedding because Camilla's ex-husband was still alive.

The couple opted for a civil ceremony instead, initially planning to wed at Windsor Castle, though proceedings had to be relocated to Windsor Guildhall to avoid the royal grounds becoming legally enshrined as a wedding venue.

Queen Elizabeth RSVPed "no" to the ceremony, as she felt it was inappropriate for her as head of the Church of England to attend the wedding of two people who had been divorced.

But she promised to attend the church blessing and host the reception afterwards.

A week out from the ceremony, Pope John Paul II died, forcing them to shift the wedding date by 24 hours to allow Charles to attend the funeral.

Finally, on 9 April 2005, after a three-decade affair that was at times messy and irresponsible, but also passionate and irrevocable, Charles married Camilla.

The bride woke up with a bad case of sinusitis and had to be forced out of bed by her sister.

And at the blessing, the newlyweds had to apologise to God for their past behaviour.

"We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us," they said.

But despite it all, in every photo taken on that day, Charles and Camilla look thrilled.

"She is a rock on whom Charles places his trust and his faith. And I think for Charles, that was just essential, that he could relax and be himself with the woman in his life," said Bastin.

Charles 'regrets' treatment of Diana

Twenty years on, Charles and Camilla's lives look very different, though their bond remains as strong as ever, according to royal commentators.

They divide their time between Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Balmoral.

But they also maintain separate country homes. Charles has kept his beloved Highgrove even after acceding the throne, and Camilla has Ray Mill House in Wiltshire.

"They're so incredibly bonded and compatible, but Camilla still has carved this very tiny space away from the royal system where she goes and spends time with her children, and all her pets, and her grandchildren," Bastin said.

"So it's a sign of the maturity of their relationship that they give each other space as well as look after each other."

And after struggling to come to terms with the marriage, Charles's son Harry is now estranged from the family.

His reasons for stepping back as a working royal are complicated, but in his memoir Spare, he made clear that he suspected his stepmother of leaking damaging information about him to the press to keep the heat off herself.

"I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar," he wrote.

"In a funny way, I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy?"

He doubled down on these comments during his book tour, insisting Camilla was the "villain" in his mother's story.

"There was open willingness on both sides to trade information [with the tabloids]," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper.

"And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being Queen Consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street."

Charles will probably always reckon with the fallout of his disastrous relationship with Diana.

Some of his subjects remain unable to forgive him for betraying a woman they never knew personally, but continue to adore.

And his own bereaved son, for whom Diana was not an icon or a martyr, but the woman who barely got the chance to raise him, says there is a lot of "space" in his relationship with his father.

This week, as Charles marked 20 years married to the love of his life, royal sources still made sure to reiterate to tabloid reporters that the king "deeply 'regrets' the pain and sadness caused".

"Both of them [Charles and Diana] behaved badly in that first marriage and made decisions that none of us could ever condone … but we can seek to try to understand them," a "friend" of the king told the Daily Mail's Rebecca English.

"When you look back on it now, asking someone to sacrifice … happiness for the sake of their public persona seems really quite cruel."

- ABC