Breaking News: Queen Camilla: Behind The Scenes With a Working Royal….See More

Queen Camilla’s limousine stops in front of the crowd of cheering supporters. An aide pulls open the Bentley’s armor-plated door, letting in a rush of cold air. It’s showtime. Her Majesty, wearing a heavy coat, hat and gloves, exits the vehicle to greet the schoolchildren who have waited outside on the clear, frosty February morning in Middlesbrough, northeast England, to catch a glimpse of their queen. It is just one of a couple of hundred events Camilla will attend this year.

Camilla’s journey into royal life has been perhaps the most complicated of any, from her early relationship with King Charles III through his later marriage to Princess Diana and then the gradual move to bring her out of the shadows and into the light.

Much is said about the significance of the moment Queen Elizabeth II in February 2022 said it was her wish that Camilla would be known as queen rather than princess consort, regarded as a ringing endorsement months before the long-reigning monarch died.

Speaking with Newsweek, an aide brushes off the suggestion that Camilla sees such moments as significant. “It wasn’t the role or title—whether as duchess [of Cornwall] or queen—that appealed to her, it was being with the man she loved.

That meant accepting the duties that would come with him, even at a time of life when most of her contemporaries were deadheading roses in the garden or having lovely cruises in the Med.

“She was very willing to undertake the role and responsibilities, but it was never part of the goal of what she wanted from life. And of course, it’s come with a lot of hard toil and quite a lot of sacrifice as well because everything she does is now in the public eye.”

Far from retiring, Camilla is looking to the future, taking a powerful message on domestic violence to new audiences. It is a subject that clearly affects Camilla deeply and she was moved by the recent case of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband Dominique Pelicot repeatedly drugged and raped her for nearly a decade and recruited dozens of men to do the same, filming more than 200 such attacks and storing the files in a folder he named “abuse.”

“She was tremendously affected by the Madame Pelicot case in France and that lady’s extraordinary dignity and courage as she put herself in the public eye,” a palace source said, “because, as she rightly put it, why should she be made to feel like a victim or hide away in shame?

“And, of course, she helped highlight a very significant societal problem despite all the personal suffering she’d been through.

So, as a long-term supporter of survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, the queen wrote to Madame Pelicot privately. It was very much her instigation and determination to write to express support from the highest level.”

Gisèle Pelicot is not the only traumatized woman in need of comfort, as Camilla was shown during a visit to Exeter, in southwest England, where victims are hoping for a dedicated refuge.