On April 9, 2005, Charles and Camilla were married at Windsor Guildhall, just a few yards from the castle but outside the royal estate. It was an intimate civil wedding with only 28 guests. Their children, siblings, and close friends were present.
What drew attention then, and continues to do so today, is that neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Duke of Edinburgh were present at the ceremony.
There was only one reason: the Church of England. Elizabeth II was the visible head of the Church of England, and attending the civil wedding of two divorced individuals would have been, from her perspective, too great a contradiction with that role.
It was not a gesture of rejection toward Camilla or a sign of personal disapproval. Ultimately, it was an institutional decision presented as a matter of discretion.
That said, the Queen was not entirely absent on the day. She and Philip attended the blessing of the union in St. George’s Chapel, and afterward hosted a reception for the newlyweds. In other words, they participated, but only in settings where they could do so without religious contradiction. That says a lot about how Elizabeth handled these kinds of tensions.
And if anyone still doubted her true stance on Camilla, the answer came before her death in 2022, when she expressed her wish for Camilla to be recognized as Queen Consort when Charles ascended the throne, thus putting an end to so many years of speculation.