A friend of Queen Camilla’s, Fiona Shelburne, Marchioness of Lansdowne, has come to her defense in an interview with The Sunday Times. In it, she has addressed the accusations of Prince Enrique’s memoirs, in which the wayward son of Carlos III called her “dangerous” and “villain”. The Marquise has also spoken of Camila’s hard years after Princess Diana pointed out her as her rival.
Fiona, who was recently chosen to be one of the new queen’s official ladies-in-waiting and was one of her supporters in the 1990s when her relationship with the then-Prince of Wales was revealed, has revealed that Camina felt ” wounded” by the words of Prince Henry in his memoirs. The Duke of Sussex claimed that her father’s wife leaked stories about the royal family to the media to bolster her image and portrayed her as having “sacrificed” him to enhance his reputation.
Camila’s friend rules out that she used any strategy to vilify her stepson, and says that, in these cases, the philosophy of the new queen is “Don’t give it importance and it will end up happening.” “She doesn’t let it get to her,” Shelburne assures. Enrique recounted in his memoirs: “I have complex feelings about having a stepmother who I thought had recently sacrificed me on his personal public relations altar.” Evidenced the confrontation, it will be at the coronation of Carlos III the first time that the new queen and Enrique see their faces since he published those opinions.
When Camila was one of the most hated people in the United Kingdom, accused of ruining the marriage between Carlos and Diana, Shelburne says that “she was alone, without any protection. That’s where we could help her: she came and stayed with us with the children ” .
“One day I went to look for her in Middlewick [a former residence of Camilla] and there were cameras in all her windows. But she is tough, she was raised with this extraordinary sense of duty where you carry on, don’t complain and put on your best face : That has helped her a lot. She was horrible at times, but her sense of humor and knowing that she had her friends around her helped her get through it,” the Marquise of Lansdowne also recounted.
In this sense, Camila herself spoke recently for her 75th birthday. He then told British Vogue: “It’s not easy. I’ve been tested for so long that your only option is to find a way to live with it. Nobody likes to be stared at all the time and, you know, criticized. But I think I’ll finally get over it and get to work. You have to get on with your life.”
Fiona Shelburne assures that Camila never thought she would become queen, but describes her as a woman with clear things and who knows how to make herself heard in the palace. The coronation on May 6 is a great day for Carlos III, but it will also be for Camila, and, according to her friend, the queen has been very aware of the preparations and wants everything to go as planned. Now that the wife of Carlos III enjoys great acceptance in the United Kingdom and that she has chosen to flee from controversy by avoiding the use of the crown with the disputed Koh-i-Noor diamond, she will be Prince Harry the only uncomfortable guest of hers .
