After all the years and all the tears, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles yesterday finally legitimized their 35-year-old love story. Their relationship survived courtship, marriages, children, affairs, divorces, gossip and humiliation. To the cheers of fans and jeers of a few critics outside the guildhall in Windsor, England, the royal mistress became the royal wife.
At a blessing service after the civil ceremony, the newlyweds read a confession from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed. . . . We do earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these misdoings."
(Library Of Congress)
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In the eyes of the church, Charles and Camilla deserve the respect due any married couple. They made a public confession, repented and have been forgiven. "They're absolved of their sins," says the Rev. Daniel Webster, an Episcopal priest in Salt Lake City. Because of that, Webster says, they should now be fully embraced. "The reality is that none of us live perfect lives. The church is the one vehicle that offers forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption."
It's not that easy in polite society, although social views of scandalous liaisons have dramatically changed in the past hundred years. "At the century's beginning, everyone touched by such a situation would have become a permanent social outcast," Judith Martin writes in "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior." Now scorn is reserved for anyone who dwells too long on the transgressions. "The aggrieved party would be at fault for not getting over it . . . and her supporters for being judgmental." Martin falls in the less-forgiving camp: "Decent behavior cannot be taught or sustained if no judgment is passed on indecent behavior."
When a big, messy love affair plays out under our noses, we silently judge based on our own beliefs, experiences or fears. Charles and Camilla are soul mates, finally getting the happiness they deserve. Or they're making a mockery of marriage. Maybe both.
It all comes down to how one feels about love, sex, infidelity and -- most complicated of all -- the institution of marriage.
The newly minted Duchess of Cornwall isn't the first mistress to marry her lover, just one of the most public. Every so often, a high-profile affair explodes into the headlines complete with sordid details and grainy photographs. After a messy divorce or two, the lovers marry and live happily ever after so far (think Rudy and Judy Giuliani, Jack and Suzy Welch) -- or not (Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Donald Trump and Marla Maples). The question now is how quickly Charles and Camilla can put the scandal behind them and be accepted as husband and wife.
The answer? It depends. Newt Gingrich married his third wife, Callista Bisek, after a six-year extramarital affair -- and Gingrich's mother was thrilled. "I liked her from the first time I saw her," Kit Gingrich said. "This is the first time I can ever remember seeing that Newty is in love. When you see him, he just beams." Mary Cunningham always denied an affair, but she complained in her book that her reputation was sullied, although she married Bendix's William Agee. "My name was tainted in the press from Day One, and that makes me more cynical than I was ever taught it was right to be." Judith Nathan fared much better. Her 2003 wedding to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had the governor of New York, Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters on the guest list, a Vera Wang dress and a Fred Leighton tiara when she "took her official place among the city's ruling class."
Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary and now an image consultant, says the more open famous people are about a relationship, the less likely they are to be harshly judged.
"What's become standard procedure is relying on the redemptive quality of the American people," he says. "They like to give people second and third chances -- as long as they feel they have a stake in it."
Those sympathetic to the couples cite the complexities of love and marriage, the mistakes of youth, the right to happiness. The unforgiving (a small group of Diana supporters protested the wedding at her former home yesterday) are adamant about morality, responsibility and the sanctity of marriage vows.
Plenty of people, it seems, have a personal interest in the subject -- judging by research on infidelity, divorce and remarriage. In studies over the past 15 years, researchers estimated that approximately 35 percent of married men and 26 percent of married women have had at least one "extramarital sexual encounter." Other studies put the numbers as high as 50 percent. The current divorce rate is roughly 43 percent for first marriages, higher for second marriages.
Experts don't know, statistically, how many of these affairs cause divorce, how often a mistress becomes a wife and how those marriages fare. The best guesstimates are that a tiny amount -- 2 or 3 percent -- result in successful marriages.
"The cliche on the eternal triangle seems to me to be that the man is always in the wrong and driven by lust, that the abandoned wife is always a victim and invariably in the right, and that a mistress is, by definition, a marriage-wrecking, sexually predatory Jezebel," says British writer Joanna Trollope, who shattered some cherished stereotypes when she wrote her 10th novel, "Marrying the Mistress."
