In This Fairy Tale, Not One, but Two Queens in Waiting

One of the most compelling themes of the April 29 wedding will be Britain’s odd-couple pair of “queens-in-waiting,” Ms. Middleton and Camilla. Though more than 30 years apart in age, both have come to their marriages as what are known in Britain as commoners, and stand, on their husbands’ ascent to the throne — Camilla first, and later Kate — to take their places as the highest-placed women in the land.

There, mostly, the similarities end.

Kate, glamorous and young — 29, five months older than Prince William — is seen by many in Britain, along with her future husband, as the potential savior of a monarchy whose luster has been deeply tarnished in the past 30 years.

For all the public acclaim for Queen Elizabeth II, who turns 85 this week and celebrates her 60th anniversary as monarch next year, the story of the other members of the royal family has been one of serial divorces, personal indiscretions, extravagance at taxpayers’ expense and suspicious financial dealings that have made lurid copy for Britain’s tabloid press.

Camilla, once cast by the tabloids as the most hated woman in the country for her role in dooming Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana, Princess of Wales, has gone some distance toward redeeming herself in recent years, to judge by polls that show sharply reduced levels of personal antipathy toward her.

She has been embraced by Diana’s two sons, William and Harry, who have said publicly that they love her, not least for the happiness she had brought their father.

The sense of her having achieved insider status in the family, at least with the younger generation, was enhanced when she was photographed this year emerging from a tête-à-tête lunch with Kate in a London restaurant, where she was overheard amid peals of laughter urging the bride-to-be to follow royal tradition — and Diana’s precedent — by wearing a jeweled tiara at the wedding, something Ms. Middleton apparently thought was too fusty for her taste.

But the process of rehabilitation appears to have advanced nowhere near enough — at least not yet — for Camilla, 63, to overcome the widespread opposition polls have shown to her ever being formally proclaimed queen if, and when, Charles, 62, becomes king.

For years, the polls have shown 50 to 60 percent of those surveyed in favor of skipping a generation in the succession, relegating Charles and Camilla to a leisured country retirement and jumping straight to William and Kate while they are still relatively young.

Partly, the polls reflect a concern that Charles may be too old to become king — in his 70s, perhaps even his 80s — if his mother lives as long as her mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who died at the age of 101 in 2002. Already, he is seen as a fogy, with his passion for double-breasted suits on occasions that cry out for something more casual, and an awkward personal manner that can incline to the pompous and patronizing.

But the problem is not Charles’s alone. The polls that show a majority favoring his stepping aside in William’s favor after Queen Elizabeth dies have captured only anemic levels of support — 14 percent in a Harris poll last November — for Camilla’s becoming queen even if Charles does succeed his mother.

Against this background — and the hints of a possible constitutional crisis that it carries — the wedding has emerged partly as a story of reconciliation, a stage for the royal family to showcase how far they have progressed in healing the wounds of the past.

What more striking demonstration of that could there be than the sight of Camilla seated in the abbey only a few places from the queen, who is said to have described her at the height of the turmoil over Charles and Diana as “that wicked woman”?

Friends of Camilla’s interviewed for this article say the public resistance is deeply unfair to a woman who has put barely a foot wrong since marrying Charles.

From the start, they say, she and Charles understood that winning public acceptance would be a lengthy process — “the pursuit of a gradual acquiescence,” as one friend put it. One acknowledgment of that came with Camilla taking her titles, Duchess of Cornwall in England and Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland, from Charles’s lesser entitlements, instead of Princess of Wales, the normal title for the wife of the next in line to the throne.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.