Camilla Parker Bowles

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, had three affairs with Camilla Parker-Bowles over a 20-year period, according to excerpts from his authorized biography published here Sunday. Charles also initiated the separation from his wife, Princess Diana, two years ago because he thought he was being denied access to his two sons, William and Harry.

So you hate royal weddings. Or you love them. Or maybe you've caught yourself attending to arcane details of Prince William and Kate Middleton's plans for April 29, but you can't say exactly why. Here's one reason: They defy time. Start with just the idea of monarchy. It may be a deadly serious issue in the Middle East, but as practiced in Britain of late, it all seems so quaint and bygone. Who else in the 21st century gets to walk a red carpet without an agent taking 10%? Yet a few Fridays from now in London, you can count on a Gothic church, a carriage procession from that church to Buckingham Palace, great queues of commoners and vast inventories of souvenir spoons.

She got her man. And if Prince Charles becomes king, she's entitled to the title: Queen Camilla. Camilla Parker Bowles will automatically become Charles' queen unless Britain and 15 other countries change the law, Constitutional Affairs Minister Christopher Leslie said. Announcing his engagement last month, Charles said his future wife would be known by the lesser title of Princess Consort when and if he became king.

Alun Hoddinott, 78, a composer who wrote music for the British royal family and was an influential promoter of modern music in his native Wales, died Wednesday at a hospital in Swansea, Wales, his family said. They did not release the cause of death. Hoddinott composed more than 300 operas, symphonies and songs, including music for Prince Charles' 16th birthday and a fanfare for the prince's marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Born in the Welsh mining town of Bargoed in 1929, Hoddinott took violin lessons at age 4 and won a university scholarship at 16. He studied with Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin and wrote his first major concerto in 1949 while he was still a student.

Camilla Parker Bowles, who is to marry Prince Charles April 8, does not want the title of queen even if Charles becomes king, his office said. Paddy Harverson, communications secretary for Charles' office, Clarence House, said the government's legal opinion that she would be queen if he became king did not prevent her from choosing a different title. The couple have said she would be known as princess consort.

Prince Charles should end his relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles or abdicate his claim to the British throne, a senior clergyman said. "We are not going to have a confessed adulterer as supreme head of the Church of England," said the Rev. David Streeter, director of the Church Society, the senior evangelical body of the state Church of England. Princess Diana blamed Parker-Bowles, 49, for the failure of the royal marriage. Charles, 48, confirmed long-standing rumors of an affair.

Alun Hoddinott, 78, a composer who wrote music for the British royal family and was an influential promoter of modern music in his native Wales, died Wednesday at a hospital in Swansea, Wales, his family said. They did not release the cause of death. Hoddinott composed more than 300 operas, symphonies and songs, including music for Prince Charles' 16th birthday and a fanfare for the prince's marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. Born in the Welsh mining town of Bargoed in 1929, Hoddinott took violin lessons at age 4 and won a university scholarship at 16. He studied with Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin and wrote his first major concerto in 1949 while he was still a student.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II met the longtime lover of her son Prince Charles at a gathering Saturday in what royal watchers portrayed as a historic encounter. A Buckingham Palace spokesman said the queen and Camilla Parker-Bowles were among 100 guests at a party Charles threw to celebrate the 60th birthday of ex-King Constantine of Greece. British media said it was the first time the queen had met Parker-Bowles since she and Charles, the heir to the throne, made their public debut last year.

Princess Diana's death casts a shadow over another important relationship in Prince Charles' life--his love for Camilla Parker Bowles. Reviled as "the other woman" in the failed marriage, Parker Bowles now has the most formidable of rivals for public acceptance. Diana's beauty can no longer fade; a memory of kindness had been gilded by an international outpouring of praise.

The widespread publication of an intimate telephone conversation reportedly between Britain's Prince Charles and a married woman friend raised doubts in political and editorial circles Wednesday that he will ever be king.

John Panzer, once homeless, sat in his room in the Empress Hotel in this city's seedy Tenderloin district with Britain's prince of Wales and duchess of Cornwall, who have several homes. Talk turned from the plight of the homeless to fear of flying. "Are you going back today?" Panzer said he asked the couple.

Prince Charles, one of the world's wealthiest and most famous organic farmers, traveled more than 5,000 miles to support a message children worldwide are fond of ignoring: Skip the junk food and get to know vegetables. Guided by restaurateur and organic food doyenne Alice Waters, the prince and Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, toured the "Edible Schoolyard" of Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where children grow food, cook it and learn the cultural value of sharing meals.

Any chance that Charles, prince of Wales, and Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, might have a rough go of it in this decidedly un-royalist west Marin County town was dispelled by the scene that awaited their nine-car motorcade Saturday morning. More than 1,000 people lined the main road in this picturesque town while the farmers at Point Reyes Farmers' Market expectantly waited at their stalls, their vegetables placed just so.

In New York, the newest member of Britain's royal family, the Duchess of Cornwall, was criticized for wearing a pink Italian wool crepe dress to ground zero, pickets denounced her as "Cam-zilla" and one headline read: "Queen Camilla is New York's Frump Tower." But by the time the heir to the British throne and his bride of seven months arrived in Washington on Wednesday, they had turned a corner.

The Charles and Camilla show descended on Manhattan on Tuesday with a royal grip-and-grin that saw the duchess of Cornwall and the prince of Wales mixing it up with the masses in Hanover Square. Camilla, accompanying her husband on his first official overseas trip since their April wedding, emerged from a black sport utility vehicle as about 500 curious, admiring and occasionally cynical bystanders looked on. Charles, in pinstripes, followed.

As Prince Charles and his wife prepare to visit the White House and other sites this week during their first trip to the United States since they married in April, Camilla was said to be "a bit nervous" about her reception in a nation that doted on his first wife, the late Princess Diana. But at the White House, which has been besieged by weeks of bad news and is bracing for a donnybrook with Democrats over the nomination of conservative jurist Samuel A. Alito Jr.

So ends years of tabloid and taxicab speculation. In a surprise announcement, Britain's future king, Prince Charles, declared Thursday that he would marry his live-in lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, in a spring ceremony at Windsor Castle. The divorcee will never become Queen Camilla, nor will she take the title Princess of Wales that was bestowed on Diana, her predecessor.

Are Americans ready for a possible Queen Camilla? That's the question Prince Charles and his new bride may be hoping to answer next week as they embark on an eight-day tour of the United States that will take them to New York, Washington and San Francisco. The couple began testing the waters last week with some unusually solicitous attention to the media. Charles invited American journalists to his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, and taped an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes."

Are Americans ready for a possible Queen Camilla? That's the question Prince Charles and his new bride may be hoping to answer next week as they embark on an eight-day tour of the United States that will take them to New York, Washington and San Francisco. The couple began testing the waters last week with some unusually solicitous attention to the media. Charles invited American journalists to his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire, and taped an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes."

Nearly 35 years after their romance began, Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, took Camilla Parker Bowles as his wife Saturday, pledging to be faithful to her and to forsake all others as long as they both shall live. The wedding, an important act of tidying up for the oft-troubled monarchy, represented the formalizing of a love affair that many blamed for the breakup of Charles' marriage to the popular, beautiful Princess Diana.