Will Camilla be Queen when Prince Charles becomes King?

The rules and traditions of the British Royal Family might date back centuries, but they've also been adapted as the monarchy has entered the 21st century.

One big question is what will happen when Prince Charles eventually becomes King, and whether his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, will then become Queen.

According to Alastair Bruce, a former equerry to the Earl of Wessex and a friend of the Royal Family, Camilla will technically become Queen Camilla once Charles takes the throne, rather than Princess Consort, the title Clarence House previously said she "intended to use" when she married Charles in 2005.

Bruce pointed out that even though Camilla goes by the Duchess of Cornwall, she’s still technically the Princess of Wales. By that logic he explained she would be Queen when Charles ascends to the throne.

“We all know in Common Law [that] at the moment [Camilla] is Princess of Wales… she is, she’s just not called that. [So] if she is married to the King when he becomes King, she will be Queen. They may decide to call her something different but she will be Queen.”

This backs up what Professor Pavlos Eleftheriadis, a professor of public law at Oxford, explained would happen once Charles took the crown. Eleftheriadis told the Daily Star, “Camilla will be a ‘Queen’ in the limited legal sense of being the wife of the sovereign, or ‘Queen Consort’... She cannot be forced to be called ‘Queen Consort’, but her role as the wife of the King is, by definition, that of Queen.”

But as Bruce and Eleftheriadis suggested, even though Camilla will legally be a Queen she doesn’t have to take the title. When Parker Bowles married Prince Charles in 2005, following his divorce from the late Princess Diana, she took the Duchess of Cornwall as her title instead of Princess of Wales.

Marlene Koenig, a royal expert, told Town and Country, “Camilla was not popular or well liked, [though] this has changed a lot since the marriage as Camilla has taken on a lot of patronages and Charles is a lot happier. Still... it was decided that Camilla would be styled as the Duchess of Cornwall, even though, of course, she is the Princess of Wales.”

Only a change in the law would mean Camilla wouldn't technically be Queen. Bruce said, “[She will be Queen] unless Parliament wishes otherwise…Parliament can do what it likes, but I can’t see Parliament passing primary legislation to [change the current law].”

“Parliament can at any time intervene. A new act of parliament could determine the titles of the Royals and their duties in a different way. Nothing is set in stone about the monarchy under the United Kingdom’s flexible constitution,” Eleftheriadis explained.

In fact, there was a major legal change relating to royal titles in 2013 when the Succession to the Crown Act was passed. Prior to its creation, men in the line of succession to the throne would take precedence over women.

However the act decreed, “In determining the succession to the Crown, the gender of a person born after 28 October 2011 does not give that person, or that person’s descendants, precedence over any other person (whenever born).”

On a related note, Express claimed in 2018 that the palace “removed from its website the statement issued following the couple’s wedding that the Duchess will be known as Princess Consort”.