King Charles III and Queen Camilla celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary on Sunday, the first after their new royal roles following Queen Elizabeth II's death in September.
It comes just less than a month before their coronation, which is scheduled to take place on May 6 at Westminster Abbey in London. They were all smiles and in high spirits on their big day.
To mark the occasion, the couple joined the royal family for a church outing at their wedding venue, also celebrating the first Easter of the new reign on a special day.
Charles and Camilla began to feel about each other in the
1970s, though both married separate partners. The couple rekindled their
romance a decade latter, and after a long road to public acceptance they
tied the knot on April 9, 2005.
Earlier this year, the King's
son, Prince Harry, revealed that he once pleaded with his father never to
marry Camilla. The Duke of Sussex discussed for the first time in detail his
feelings about his stepmother and his dad' second marriage in his memoir,
Spare, published in January.
Meghan Markle's hubby, who's
enjoying a new life in California with his wife and their two children
Archie and Lilibet, 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.
Charles set tongues wagging when he described Camilla as a
"dear friend" in his 1994 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 tragic death in car
crash, Harry writes that his father set up a meeting between his two sons
and Camilla, with whom he was in a committed relationship.
"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," Harry wrote of his own meeting.
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. 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," Harry wrote in his memoir.
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.
