May 6th, 2023, Westminster Abbey. A divorced woman kneels before the Archbishop of Canterbury and Queen Mary’s crown is placed on her head. Camila Parker BS, a woman who spent decades as the most famous mistress on the planet, is now Queen Consort of the United Kingdom. The Church of England, the institution that told Princess Margaret she couldn’t marry the man she loved because he was divorced, just crowned a divorced adulteress in a full religious ceremony.

 If that made your blood boil, stay here because this isn’t another rehash of who said what to whom. You already know the Charles and Diana story, or you think you do. This is about something worse. This is about what happens when you lay three women’s lives side by side and realize the institution didn’t just fail them differently.

 It chose who to crush, who to discard, and who to crown. Same family, same church, different rules. And the person who enforced those rules on her own sister stood by while her daughter-in-law was destroyed and then cleared the path for a coronation. Queen Elizabeth II. Let’s go back, way back. The Church of England exists for one reason.

 In 1534, King Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon. The Pope said no. So Henry broke with Rome, declared himself supreme head of a brand new church, and married Anne Bolin. He’d go on to marry six times, discarding wives like last season’s wardrobe. That’s the founding story. A church built on divorce.

 Remember that it becomes important. Over the centuries, this church founded on the dissolution of a marriage developed a firm doctrinal position that Christian marriage was indissolable and remarage after divorce was forbidden. The irony is staggering, but the crown and the church held that line for 400 years. And when it finally crushed someone who didn’t deserve it, her name was Margaret.

 Princess Margaret Rose was born on August 21st, 1930. She was 6 years old when her uncle Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallace Simpson, an American divorce the church and the government refused to accept as queen consort. Edward chose the woman. He lost the crown. [snorts] Margaret’s father became King George V 6th overnight and the lesson was seared into the institution’s memory.

 Divorce is the line you do not cross. Group Captain Peter Townsend was a Battle of Britain hero. He’d flown hurricanes, earned the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and been appointed Equiry to King George V 6th in 1944. Margaret first met him in 1947. She was 16. He was 32.

 Over the following years, they fell in love. Here’s what matters about Townsen’s divorce. He wasn’t the one who cheated. His wife Rosemary Paul had an affair with John Daslo. Townsen filed for divorce on the grounds of her adultery. The decree absolute was granted in December 1952. He was the wronged party. But under the Church of England’s doctrine, that distinction meant nothing. Divorced was divorced.

The secret broke on June 2nd, 1953, the day of Elizabeth’s coronation. Press photographers outside Westminster Abbey caught Margaret reaching toward townsen and brushing a piece of lint from his RAF uniform. A tiny gesture, tender, unmistakably intimate. Within days, their relationship was front page news around the world.

 The barriers were legal, ecclesiastical, and political, and they locked together like a trap. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required any descendant of George II under 25 to obtain the sovereigns consent to marry. Margaret was 22. She needed Elizabeth’s permission. Elizabeth didn’t say no. She said, “Wait, that sounds almost generous until you understand what came next.

” Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who was deliciously himself a divorced man who’d remarried, informed the palace that the cabinet would not support the marriage. If Margaret went ahead, Parliament would strip her of her royal title, remove her from the line of succession, and cut off her civilist income.

 Not a reduced role, not a compromise. total institutional excommunication. And presiding over all of it was one person, Elizabeth, head of the family, supreme governor of the church. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Jeffrey Fischer, had made his opposition known. There was no one above Elizabeth to appeal to because she occupied every seat of authority that mattered.

 Townsen was shipped off to the British embassy in Brussels in 1953. For two years, Margaret endured daily tabloid scrutiny while the institution constructed the conditions that made surrender inevitable. On October 31st, 1955, Princess Margaret issued her statement. She was 25 years old. I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry group captain Peter Townsend.

 I have been aware that subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indiscoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.

 She closed by saying she had reached the decision entirely alone. After two years of institutional pressure that left her no other option, the crown got its compliance and let Margaret carry the weight of it by herself. Hold Margaret’s story in your mind. We’re coming back to her. But now we need to talk about the woman who would walk into the same institution 26 years later, younger, more famous, more beloved, and discover that the machine that crushed Margaret hadn’t been dismantled.

 It had just been pointed at someone new. Her name was Diana. But before Diana enters the story, you need to understand the man she was marrying and the pattern that was already established before she ever put on that wedding dress. Prince Charles met Camila Shand in 1970 or 1971. They had a relationship. It didn’t lead to marriage.

 And in 1973, Camila married Andrew Parker BS. Charles moved on sort of. This is the part most people don’t know. During the late 1970s, while the press was busy speculating about which suitable young aristocrat Charles might marry, he was involved with a woman named Dale Harper, Australianborn. She’d married Anthony Tryan, the third Baron Tryan, and become Lady Tryan.

Charles gave her a nickname, Kanga. After the character in Winnie the Pooh because apparently even royal pet names are borrowed from children’s literature, she embraced it. Later used KGA as the brand name for her own fashion label. Multiple biographies referenced their relationship as intimate during the late 1970s.

 This wasn’t a rumor that existed on the fringes. Lady Trion was part of Charles’s inner social circle, a visible presence at dinners and country weekends, known to the people around him. Diana knew about her. When Diana later cataloged the women who orbited her husband, Kanga was on the list. And Kanga’s story doesn’t end quietly. In the early 1990s, she sustained severe injuries in a fall from a window at a clinic where she was being treated.

 Some accounts say she fell, others suggest she was pushed. The fall left her with spinal injuries and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Lady Dale Triion died on November 15th, 1997, 2 and 1/2 months after Diana’s death on August 31st of the same year. Two women connected to Charles, both dead within weeks of each other, one mourned by the entire world.

 The other barely a footnote. Why does Kanga matter? Because she demolishes the romantic narrative. The story Charles wanted told, and the one Jonathan Dimblebee’s authorized biography tried to establish in 1994, was that of a man torn between two great loves, Camila and Duty. A tragic figure. But Kanga proves Charles’s infidelity wasn’t some grand singular starcrossed passion.

 It was a pattern, a way of operating. Camila wasn’t the one woman he couldn’t quit. She was one of several. And Diana walked into that pattern at 20 years old with a family background that checked every box on the palace’s list of acceptable brides, but with absolutely no preparation for what she was actually marrying into. Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles on July 29th, 1981 at St.

 Paul’s Cathedral in a ceremony watched by an estimated 750 million television viewers worldwide. She was 20. He was 32. The same age gap almost to the year as Margaret and Townsend. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runy, called it the stuff of which fairy tales are made. He was right, just not in the way he meant. In the days before that wedding, Diana discovered something that should have been a warning flare.

 Charles had ordered a gold bracelet for Camila Parker BS engraved with the letters G and F. Glattis and Fred, their pet names for each other. Diana found it. She confronted him. She later described how Charles wore cufflinks engraved with intertwined C’s for Charles and Camila during their honeymoon. the honeymoon.

 The man was wearing another woman’s initials on his cuffs while honeymooning with his bride. The G and F bracelet wasn’t a farewell gift. It was a promise. And this is where the institution failed Diana in a way that was different from Margaret, but no less devastating. Margaret was told the rules explicitly.

 She was given a binary, obey or be expelled. There was cruelty in that, but there was at least clarity. Diana got neither. She was brought into the family, celebrated as the solution to the heir’s bachelor problem, paraded in front of the world, and then left to discover slowly alone that her marriage was a performance the principal actor had never fully committed to.

 Diana was 20 years old when she moved into the palace. She had no experience of public life at that level, no real support system inside the institution. And from the very start, she was dealing with something Margaret never had to face. the growing, nauseiating certainty that her husband had never fully left Camila.

The phone calls she overheard, the silences at dinner, the emotional withdrawal that Diana described in her secretly recorded tapes for Andrew Morton as feeling like she was the third person in her own marriage from the beginning. Those tapes became the foundation for Morton’s 1992 book, Diana, Her True Story.

 Diana smuggled her testimony out through intermediaries. When the book detonated, the palace’s first instinct was to deny Diana’s involvement. That denial held for years until after her death, when the tapes were made public, and the extent of her collaboration became undeniable. The institution’s first response to Diana’s cry for help wasn’t concern.

 It was damage control. And as the marriage crumbled through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, what the tabloids called the war of the whales, was never a fair fight. On one side was a woman in her 20s and early 30s with no institutional allies struggling to maintain her identity inside a system designed to subsume individuals into a collective image.

 On the other was the heir to the throne backed by a palace apparatus that had centuries of experience managing inconvenient narratives. Charles had courters who briefed sympathetic journalists. He had the apparatus of the Prince of Wales’s office. He had the quiet structural support of an institution that needed him to succeed because its own survival depended on the succession.

 Diana had her instincts and eventually her willingness to go public. That’s what made her dangerous to them. Not the affairs, not the tabloid drama, the talking. Margaret had suffered in silence, issued her statement, swallowed her grief, and self-destructed privately. Diana refused to do that. She talked to Morton. She went on Panorama.

She told Martin Basher on camera on November 20th, 1995. With 22.8 million people watching in the United Kingdom alone, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. That line is famous. It’s quoted constantly. But what gets lost is how precisely Diana was describing her situation. Not with hindsight.

 Not about a rough patch that developed later, but about the fundamental structure of her marriage from day one. She didn’t say there came to be three of us. She said there were three. Past tense, permanent condition. Now the argument. You’ve heard it a thousand times in comment sections.

 Probably had it thrown at you personally. Diana had affairs, too. Let’s deal with that head on because the people who say it deserve a real answer, not a dismissal. Yes, Diana had affairs. She confirmed her relationship with James Hwitt, a lifeguards officer who’d been giving her riding lessons in the Panorama interview. She said she’d adored him, that she was in love with him.

 The Squidiggate tape, a recorded phone call between Diana and James Gilby, who called her Squidgy, was from New Year’s Eve 1989 and published by The Sun in August 1992. There are references to a close relationship with her protection officer, Barry Manaki, in 1985 or 1986. Manaki was reassigned from his position and died in a motorcycle accident in 1987.

This is all documented. None of it is in dispute. But here’s what the Diana had affairs too crowd consistently conveniently leaves out. The timeline. Charles himself in his own authorized biography by Jonathan Dimble. The version of events most favorable to him admitted he resumed his affair with Camila in 1986.

He said the marriage had irretrievably broken down by then. In the accompanying television documentary, also in 1994, Charles confirmed the adultery on camera. 1986, his own word. Diana’s first documented affair with James Hwitt also began in 1986. So even in the absolute bestcase scenario for Charles, the one he personally authorized, he and Diana began their affairs in the same year.

That’s a tie at best. And the evidence from every other source suggests Charles’s involvement with Camila predated 1986 by years. The bracelet before the wedding, the cuff links on the honeymoon, Diana’s consistent testimony that Camila’s presence was constant from the very beginning. Consider the fuller picture.

 Diana was 20 years old when she married. She spent 5 years at minimum in a marriage where she believed herself to be competing with a ghost she couldn’t exercise surrounded by an institution that prioritized the heir’s comfort over hers. Isolated from any support that wasn’t carefully vetted by palace staff. By the time she found comfort with James Hwitt, she had spent the better part of her 20s in emotional freefall inside a gilded cage.

 Diana’s affairs were a response to abandonment, not a parallel offense. Sequence matters. Context matters. And the institution that enabled Charles’s affair by looking the other way for years doesn’t get to then point at Diana’s reaction and call it equivalent. One thing about the leaked 1989 phone call between Charles and Camila, the one the tabloids called Tampon Gate.

 You already know about it, so we’re moving on. Charles and Diana formally divorced on August 28th, 1996. Diana received a settlement reported at roughly 17 million. She kept the title Diana, Princess of Wales. She kept her apartments at Kensington Palace, but the institution stripped her of her style, her royal highness, a detail that mattered enormously in the protocol obsessed world of the monarchy, because it meant Diana would have to curtsy to junior royals she technically outranked in public standing. The HR wasn’t just

letters. It was the institution’s way of marking who belonged and who didn’t. Margaret lost her chance at happiness because the institution wouldn’t bend. Diana lost her identity marker because the institution decided she was no longer useful enough to protect. Different mechanisms, same principle. The crown discards what it doesn’t need.

One year later on August 31st, 1997, Diana died in a car crash in the Pont de Lalma tunnel in Paris. She was 36 years old. And what did the institution do? In the days immediately after her death, September 1st through September 6th, the royal family stayed at Balmoral, silent. The flag pole above Buckingham Palace stood bare. No flag at half mast.

 No public statement from Elizabeth for 5 days, while a sea of flowers grew outside the palace gates, while a million people poured into London to mourn a woman the institution had spent years trying to manage into silence. The country was grieving openly, viscerally, in a way that felt unprecedented, and the palace responded with protocol.

 The royal standard only flies when the sovereign is in residence, they explained. Rules, always rules. The same institution that could enforce arcane marriage statutes from 1772 to destroy Margaret’s love life suddenly couldn’t figure out how to lower a flag. It took public fury, real dangerous electoral consequence level anger before Elizabeth finally returned to London and addressed the nation on September 5th.

She called Diana a remarkable person. 5 days late and even that felt managed. The institution had miscalculated because it had treated Diana in death the way it had treated her in life as a problem to be contained rather than a person to be honored. But here’s what happened next. While the flowers were still wilting outside Kensington Palace.

Quietly, invisibly, the institution began the long project of rehabilitating Camila. Not overnight, not clumsily. This was a decadesl long operation and its final act was a coronation. And while all of this was unfolding, while Diana was alive, while she was grieving, while she was fighting for her sanity, while she was dying, while the nation was weeping, while the palace was recalibrating its PR strategy, Princess Margaret was watching.

 The woman who had given up everything the institution asked of her spent her final years watching the rules she’d sacrificed for become inconvenient suggestions. On May 6th, 1960, she’d married Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey. Biographers have called it, at least in part, a rebound from the towns in heartbreak.

 They had two children, David in 1961, Sarah in 1964, but the marriage deteriorated. Her relationship with Rody Llewellyn, a landscape gardener, 17 years her junior, became public in February 1976 when the News of the World published photos of them on Mystique. On May 24th, 1978, Margaret’s divorce was finalized. She became the first senior royal to divorce since Henry VIII himself. Sit with that.

The church founded on divorce told Margaret she couldn’t marry a divorced man. She obeyed. Then she became the first senior royal in four centuries to get divorced herself. The institution broke her and then watched her break. Margaret’s health collapsed in her final years. A severe stroke in February 1998 damaged her vision and mobility.

 Badly scalded feet from a bathing accident in 1999 left her in lasting pain. A second stroke in early 2001. By the end, she needed a wheelchair. She could barely see. Princess Margaret died on February 9th, 2002 at King Edward IIIth’s Hospital in London. >> [snorts] >> She was 71 years old. She never wore a crown.

 She never married the man she loved. She followed every rule the institution imposed and got nothing for it. Not even a public acknowledgement that a price had been paid. And in 2002, the same year Margaret died, the general senate of the Church of England voted to allow individual clergy the discretion to remarry divorced people whose former spouses were still living.

 The doctrinal wall that had blocked Margaret’s happiness in 1955 was quietly dismantled the year she was buried. The timing is hard to ignore when you consider what came next. On April 9th, 2005, Charles and Camila married in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guild Hall, not a church. Even after the 2002 cinned vote, the Church of England wouldn’t fully marry them.

 They got a civil ceremony followed by a service of prayer and dedication at St. George’s Chapel, a blessing, not a wedding. During that service, Charles and Camila read an act of penitence from the 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 against thy divine majesty.

Bewail our manifold sins. That’s the closest thing to a public confession they ever offered. Elizabeth didn’t attend the civil ceremony at Windsor Guild Hall. She did attend the blessing. She hosted the reception at Windsor Castle afterward. Calibrated presence, acceptance, not endorsement. But then February 2022, Elizabeth in one of her final major public statements expressed her sincere wish that Camila be known as queen consort when Charles became king.

 The same woman who had enforced the rules on her own sister. The same woman who had presided over Margaret’s two-year ordeal, who occupied every seat of authority that could have saved Margaret and chose not to. The same woman who watched Diana’s marriage implode under the weight of an affair everyone in the palace knew about.

 That woman used her final authority to elevate Camila. Elizabeth died on September 8th, 2022. And on May 6th, 2023, 63 years to the day after Margaret’s wedding to Lord Snowden, the marriage she entered because she couldn’t have the one she wanted. Camila Parker BS knelt in Westminster Abbey and received Queen Mary’s crown.

 The Church of England crowned her. The same church that told Margaret a divorced man was unacceptable. The same church founded by a king who wanted a divorce. They modified Queen Mary’s crown for the occasion, removed the Coenor diamond because of controversy over its colonial origins, replaced it with cullinin diamonds, they could modify a crown.

 They could modify a doctrine. They could modify 400 years of rules. They just couldn’t do it for Margaret. And they wouldn’t lift a finger to protect Diana. That’s the thing about the crown. It doesn’t have principles. It has preferences. The rules aren’t rules. They’re tools applied when useful and discarded when inconvenient.

Margaret loved a divorced man and was told it was impossible. Diana married the heir and was treated as disposable the moment she became inconvenient. Camila was a divorced woman, an acknowledged adulteress, a participant in the destruction of the most famous marriage on earth. And the institution made her queen.

 Three women, three outcomes. The difference wasn’t morality. It wasn’t doctrine. It wasn’t tradition. Margaret was the spare, so her happiness was expendable. Diana was the outsider, so her suffering was manageable. Charles was the heir, so his comfort was paramount. And Camila was the heir’s choice, so the rules bent until they broke.

 Princess Margaret followed every rule. She issued her statement. She married someone else. She drank, she smoked, she went to Mystique, she got divorced, she suffered, and she died at 71 in a wheelchair, half blind, in a hospital in London. She never wore a crown. Diana followed the rules, too. At first, she married the man they chose. She produced the heirs.

 She smiled for the cameras. And when the fairy tale collapsed, and she dared to tell the truth about why, the institution stripped her title and cut her loose. She died at 36 in a tunnel in Paris. She never wore a crown either. Camila broke every rule. She was the other woman. She was divorced. She was publicly known, documented, tape recorded.

 And the institution put a crown on her head in the most sacred church in England. Same family, same church, same institution, different rules. Margaret paid the price for loving the wrong man at the wrong time. Diana paid the price for being married to the right man at the wrong time. and Camila. Camila was the wrong woman at the wrong time, but she was the wrong woman for the right man.

 And in the end, that was the only thing that mattered. Subscribe for more stories like.