Author: Abigail Ampofo

“Blended” royal families have never received a lot of favours in fairy tales. The evil stepmother and ugly stepsisters in the story of Cinderella attempted to prevent the rightful owner of the glass slipper from marrying Prince Charming. The stepmother is always portrayed as the antagonist in Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Snow White.

There hasn’t been much done to dispel the myth of the “wicked stepmother,” not even in our own Royal family.

When it comes to adjusting to the arrival of their father’s second wife after the passing of their cherished mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex at times have resembled a modern-day version of the Brothers Grimm folk tales.

Indeed, Harry’s autobiography Spare, which was highly critical of the Queen Consort, did little to alter perceptions of tensions at the heart of the monarchy over the woman Diana famously described as the “third person” in her marriage to Charles.

Yet there is a changing of the guard under way in the Royal family which looks set to finally propel Camilla to the top of the House of Windsor hierarchy after two decades spent as her husband’s “plus one”.

As she prepares to be crowned alongside the King on May 6, the 75-year-old divorcee is set to be given equal billing at the biggest royal event in 70 years.

The news that the grandmother of five’s own family is to play a part in the ceremony at Westminster Abbey speaks to a new era of equality behind palace walls, with the King having insisted that Camilla be placed on an almost equivalent footing to his own.

It is not only a reflection of Charles III’s sense of devotion to the woman he describes as the “love of my life” but also designed to reflect a sense of the Royal family’s “realness” back to the public.

Not so much a nuclear family, as a thermonuclear one, over recent decades The Firm’s family sagas have played out somewhat like a running soap opera.

Extramarital affairs, divorces, and separations used to be the common thread of the most sordid royal headlines—until Harry and Meghan started lobbing even more explosive grenades from across the pond.

Yet while the Duke and Duchess of Sussexes’ popularity has nosedived in the UK since they first started washing the family linen on Oprah Winfrey’s primetime laundrette, in the wake of “Megxit” the public appears to find the Royals even more relatable.

Yes – William and Kate’s reputations took a bit of a kicking with tales of hormonal disagreements and fights over dog bowls.

But one unintended consequence of Harry’s memoir has been to make his nearest and dearest appear, as the late Queen once put it, as “like all the best families” with its “share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters, and of disagreements”.

While described by one royal source as a “bold move”, the decision to include Tom Parker Bowles’s children Lola, 15, and Freddy, 13, in the coronation alongside Camilla’s daughter Laura Lopes’s children Eliza, 15, and twins, Louis and Gus, 13, speaks to a generation for whom blended families are now the norm.

It is still to be decided how the youngsters, who affectionately call the Queen Consort “GaGa”, are to be included in the ceremony amid suggestions they may be asked to carry the Coronation “canopy” under which their grandmother will be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But regardless of the finer details, the inclusion of the five teenagers is designed to send a strong message that Charles and Camilla are a couple who reflect the realities of modern life.

Unlike in 1953, when royal children were seen and not heard at the coronation of Elizabeth II, step-parents and stepchildren are now common as a result of divorce. And as Buckingham Palace has stressed from the very beginning, the coronation “will reflect the monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in long standing traditions and pageantry”.

A significant role is also being planned for Prince George, nine, not only as the King’s oldest grandchild but second in line to the throne. As one source told The Sunday Times: “It sends a nice signal and is quite a bold move. It is another example of the King and Queen Consort being unafraid to shake things up a bit to reflect the realities of modern life, of which a blended family is a central element.”

Yet what might this mean for frosty royal relations with Harry and Meghan? With the couple set to be invited to the long bank holiday weekend of celebrations, but with no word yet on whether they will actually attend, the move to include some grandchildren but not others is likely to ruffle feathers in Montecito.

Harry already felt forced out by the late Queen and his father seemingly prioritising public appearances with William and George to his own immediate family. What he is likely to make of the Parker Bowles clan being front and centre is anyone’s guess (although he is said to get on well with his stepsiblings Tom and Laura, who were both invited to the royal wedding in 2018).

Laura’s daughter Eliza has already had a taste of a major royal occasion having been bridesmaid at William and Kate’s wedding in 2011, when a then Prince Charles was pictured holding her on the Buckingham Palace balcony.

Although now estranged from his youngest son, the truth is that Charles has grown extremely close to Camilla’s children and grandchildren, who spend a great deal of time at her private property, Ray Mill House, in Lacock, Wiltshire, which boasts an outdoor swimming pool. Although these teenagers may be strangers to the public – they are as much a part of the King and Queen Consort’s everyday lives as the likes of George, Princess Charlotte, seven, and four-year-old Prince Louis so it is only natural that the couple would want to include them.

As one royal aide stressed: “It is important to remember that this is a double coronation of both HMK and HMQC”.

With growing talk that she will soon drop the Consort title and be known simply as “the Queen”, the days of Camilla being the “other” woman are long gone.

Royalty has long been a family affair and the blended nature of Charles and Camilla’s brood shows the world that life in the monarchy isn’t a fairytale existence – but a lived experience.

Who’s who in the blended family

Tom – the Queen Consort’s eldest child – is an Eton-and-Oxford-educated food critic who is now in the unique position of having King Charles as both a stepfather and godfather. He started his career in publicity but made headlines for all the wrong reasons in 1999 – an incident involving cocaine at the Cannes Film Festival for which Charles gave him a stern telling off. That didn’t stop him carving out a successful career in food writing, which began with a column in Tatler magazine and has led to a career on television. He married magazine editor Sara Buys in 2005, with his cousin Ben Elliot as his best man. They have two children and separated in 2018.

At one point, there were two Parker-Bowles working at Tatler, as Camilla’s daughter Laura started there as motoring correspondent in 2001 before opening an art gallery in London called Eleven. Laura keeps a low profile. She married Harry Lopes, a Calvin Klein model-turned-chartered-accountant, in 2006, a year after the mother-of-the-bride tied the knot with Prince Charles. Prince William came to her wedding, with his brother and – in one of their early public appearances – Kate. The guests ate fish pie and the wedding cake, made of thousands of chocolate muffins, was cut with Brigadier Parker Bowles’s military sword. The couple have three children.

Harry has impeccable antecedents: on his father’s side he is grandson of Baron Roborough and great grandson of Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (a Royal aide to Queen Victoria), and on his mother’s, he is grandson of Baron Astor of Hever and great grandson of Field Marshal Douglas Haig. There are two stately homes, Gnaton Hall in Devon and the Skelpick estate in the Scottish highlands, in the family.

The Queen Consort’s eldest grandchild is the daughter of Tom Parker Bowles and Sara Buys. It was puzzle-loving Lola that Camilla referred to in a British Vogue interview last year. “I do Wordle every day with my granddaughter. She’ll text me to say, ‘I’ve done it in three’, and I say, ‘Sorry, I’ve done it in two today,’” she said.  As a Parker Bowles, her ancestors include Dame Ann de Trafford, commissioner of the Commonwealth Girl Guides Association, and the Earls Cadogan.

You may remember Eliza from her role as the tiniest bridesmaid at Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in 2011, when she was just three years old. Now, she’s all grown up. The Queen Consort has said: “The girls are beginning to get into clothes and make-up… it’s rather frightening when you see them, coming out with pierced ears and a lot of new make-up and funny-coloured hair and stuff.”

Twins Louis and Gus were born in 2009. They are similarly close to their royal Grandma, who is known as GaGa, and regularly visit when they are in London. Camilla says her grandchildren have given her TikTok training and shown her how to use the video-calling app Houseparty.

The youngest of Camilla’s grandchildren is Freddy, 13, son of Tom and Sara. He has grown up as one recipient of Britain’s most regal bedtime stories: Camilla is said to have loved reading with her grandchildren and favours Gangster Granny by David Walliams.