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This week marks twenty years since Prince Charles married Camilla Parker-Bowles at Windsor Guildhall. The civil ceremony was followed by a service of prayer and dedication in St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. I remember watching on television, not quite knowing what to make of it. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams seemed a bit hesitant, a bit uneasy as he conducted the service.

With millions of others I couldn’t get out of my mind the tragedy of Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and the massive outpouring of grief at her funeral. But by the spring of 2005 more people were prepared to shrug and accept what was going on. And that was not all due to good PR. Over time the public became used to the idea and it has become more and more obvious that the now King has a genuine partnership with Camilla which has lasted fifty years.

Throughout history royal and high-class marriages have often been arranged to firm up alliances, or keep assets within royal or aristocratic circles. In the theology of the Middle Ages, marriage was a kind of contract, a way of ordering society and holding lust in check. Marriages took place in the Church porch, as if they were half worldly and pragmatic, half holy.

In the first English Prayer Book of 1549 a more positive view was stated. The ceremony was brought into the body of the Church and was now accompanied by a compulsory little sermon on why God had ordained marriage.

Three reasons were given: first to provide for the procreation of children and to ensure they were brought up in the fear of the Lord, second, for the avoidance of the sin of fornication – sex outside marriage. But then Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury who drafted the new service, added something quite new. ‘Marriage was instituted for the mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity’. Cranmer also added the words ‘to love and to cherish’ to the marriage vows. The historian Dairmaid McCulloch, suggests that we owe those additions to Cranmer’s own happy experience of marriage.

It is all too easy to marry for the wrong reasons. The important question for those couples contemplating marriage is whether they really like each other, whether they are prepared to stand by each other and help each other to be strong and resilient. As I look back twenty years to that rather tentative ceremony in St George’s chapel it seems to me that Charles and Camilla’s lasting friendship has been a blessing, both to themselves and perhaps to the rest of us too.

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