A Complete Timeline of King Charles and Queen Camilla's Complicated Relationship

With Charles away, and without any confidence about the future of that relationship, Camilla moved on. She wound up back with her on-again, off-again ex, Andrew, and they married in 1973. They went on to have two children: Tom (who, as it happens, is Prince Charles's godson) and Laura.

After first meeting in 1977 (while Charles was casually dating her sister, Sarah), Charles and Lady Diana Spencer tied the knot in July 1981. Televised around the world, their nuptials were a fairy-tale wedding that captured imaginations everywhere — but there were already some cracks behind the scenes.

Even before the wedding, there were a few hints that the couple weren't as perfectly suited as they tried to appear. The biggest indicator of this: the infamous 1981 TV interview where, when asked if they were in love, Diana replied "Of course!" and Charles said, "Whatever 'in love' means."

Dates differ as to when, exactly, Charles started seeing Camilla again. Caroline Graham's 1995 book "Camilla and Charles: The Love Story" suggested that they rekindled their affair in 1980, when she was a shoulder to lean on following the death of his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Charles himself, in a documentary in 1994, claimed that he and Camilla were only "very great friend[s]" until 1986, when his marriage to Diana "became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried," per The New York Times. By the mid-1980s, however, pretty much everyone agrees that the Charles-Diana marriage was in tatters and that he was having an affair with Camilla.

Following the release of the Morton biography, any illusions that the Wales' marriage could be saved were shattered, and by the end of the year, Charles and Diana announced their separation. What then followed were a few very awkward, tense years where they didn't move quickly toward divorce but clearly were no longer together.

It was in 1995, however, that Camilla really got brought into the mix again. Diana gave a now-famous BBC interview with Martin Bashir, where she famously said, "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded." That same year, Camilla and her husband announced they were divorcing. Charles and Diana's divorce was finalised a year later, in 1996.

In 2003, the BBC reported that Camilla was moving into Clarence House with Charles, where they have lived ever since. Because the relationship was still on thin ice with the public, Buckingham Palace issued a statement clarifying that, although Clarence House is a royal residence, no public funds were used for Camilla's move or for her suite, only private money.

Over 30 years after they first met and fell in love, Charles and Camilla finally married in April 2005. According to the BBC, they held a private civil ceremony first (rather than a religious wedding, due to their well-known affairs), then had a service of blessing, presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury. Prince William was his father's best man, and although the queen and Prince Philip did not attend the civil wedding, they were there for the blessing service and the reception after.

Upon their marriage, Camilla publicly took on the title of Duchess of Cornwall, rather than the "Princess of Wales" title that she was technically entitled to, in order to avoid controversy over that title's association with Diana. At the time, Clarence House said that when Charles became king, Camilla would be known as "princess consort" instead of "queen consort." However, she has been using queen consort since Charles's assension in September 2022.

During a coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London on 6 May, Charles's role as monarch and head of the Church of England was formalised. Camilla was also officially crowned as queen.