She’s not particularly popular. That’s really it. If people had liked her more in 2005, they never would have come up with that cockamamie “princess consort” scheme.
It isn’t some great theological or legal debate regarding the nature of marriage. People who care about divorce as a moral issue in 2018 are a tiny segment of the population.
So it’s that she’s an elderly out-of-touch aristocrat without much of a common touch and not particularly good looking?
(kinda like … Charles!)
For very similar reasons that applied to Albert when he married Vicky. There would probably have been a large enough body of opinion in the country as to shake the foundations of the monarchy itself. It’s not as if Charles is hugely popular anyway. Add in the Diana legacy and the potential for disaster was not insignificant.
Albert never wanted to be Queen, anyway.
How do you know? He was foreign… And, it has been suggested, the product of an incestuous liaison.
Being divorced isn’t the problem; remarrying while your first spouse is still alive is the problem. Charles did not remarry while his first spouse lived, but Camilla did.
Plus, there is the whole “who broke up the Wales’s marriage?” thing. Yes, Charles was dicking around during the marriage, but he doesn’t get to be king by virtue of dicking around; the two things are unconnected. Whereas, were Camilla to become queen, there would be a clear causal chain in which that event was traced back to her seducing, with her honeyed words and blandishments, the husband of Princess Lady Saint Diana of Spencer.
Also while the Church of England now allows people to remarry after divorce while their ex-spouse is still alive it’s supposed to be an exceptional circumstance and it frowns on marrying a couple who committed adultery with each other while they were married to other people. The issue was less than Camila was remarrying while her ex-husband was still alive and more that the was marrying the man she cheated on her husband with.
And as Prince Charles’s wife she legally holds all the same titles Diana did up to an including Princess of Wales, and barring an act of parliament to the contrary she’ll become queen consort the moment Charles become king whether she decides to use the title or not.
I’m not aware of any statute law on royal titles. It’s all down to custom and practice and what the monarch of the day wants, and judges that enough of the public and parliament won’t object to. There’s a quiet PR offensive on Camilla’s behalf, and she certainly appears to be doing the business of lending support to good causes, meeting and greeting and all that, pretty well. What gets resolved about titles and ceremonial when the time comes, remains to be seen.
I believe that when George IV succeeded, he tried to keep his estranged wife, Princess Caroline, from being recognised as Queen, and was advised by the Attorney General that she had a legal right to be Queen.
Yup. If Charles succeeds to the throne (and, of course, is still married to Camilla at the time) Camilla will be Queen. The only question is whether the title will be used in practice.
Just as, right now, she is the Princess of Wales, but the title is not used.
See, that’s the advantage of having so many spare titles lying about:
“Camilla, dear, how about Duchess of Rothesay?”
“Too Scottish. I’ve never really liked bagpipes.”
“Lady Chester?”
“Dear, you know I was teased about my bosom in school!”
"Children can be such little swine! Baroness Renfrew?
“Baroness makes me think of 19th century spy thrillers.”
“Lady of the Isles?”
“Sea-sickness.”
“Oh, quite. Duchess of Cornwall?”
“My family used to summer on the south coast of Cornwall when I was growing up! Lovely!”
Oh, she is Duchess of Rothesay, though, which is slightly funny because Rothesay is only a little town.
I am quite looking forward to the whole amusement of the queen dying and Charles having to be crowned, if only because I think a lot of royalist-minded people will be somewhat conflicted between their “queens and kings are wonderful” view, and the view (held by a lot of them, at an unscientific guess) that it is all very very bad because of adultery and divorce and the sainted perfect dead Diana. 
It should be fun to observe.
I know that the actual reigning monarch can choose a different name. Does that apply to the consort? /Her middle name is apparently Rosemary. Could she be Queen Rosemary or even Queen Rose?
Sure. A queen has the same right as anyone else to call herself whatever she likes.
I don’t know that there’s ever been a consort who changed their name in that circumstance before, though. Queen Mary (wife of George V) used her second given name, but I think she always preferred it over Victoria (her nickname was May, which obviously isn’t short for Victoria).
The standard title for the wife of the reigning monarch is simply HM The Queen - no actual names are harmed in the making of this title. She might commonly be referred to as Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary, Queen Alexandra, etc, but that doesn’t become part of her formal title unless she survives her husband.
In that circumstance, could a queen mother choose to be “Queen X”, where X isn’t the personal name that she normally used? Formally, this wouldn’t be a decision for her, but for the new monarch, since the crown is the fount of all honours, including titles, but obviously her wishes would play a large role in the matter. In practice it’s not very likely.
The issue actually arose when George VI died. His wife, officially known up to then as HM The Queen, became HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. “The Queen Mother” was included in the formal title in order to distinguish her from the new HM The Queen who had, of course, the personal name of “Elizabeth” and had up to that point been HRH Princess Elizabeth. Any possibility of confusion could have been avoided if the Queen Mother had chosen to use a name other than Elizabeth, but her own personal name was too well known, and too widely-used, to make this a good idea.
In short, a queen mother pretty well has to take an official name that involves the personal name with which she is already commonly associated.
That’s interesting. You know? I have absolutely no idea. I would tend to think that Camilla whatersname probably would be expected to stick to her real name, because there is no reason to do otherwise, because she is not the main thing, really. Not a queen regnant, but a consort. And old Charlie-boy will probably call himself Charles, or he might be Philip or Arthur or George. Or Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz or anything that strikes him as being a good idea. King Charles of the Very Bad Handwriting & Very Bad Interference. She can be Queen Camilla.
BUT, you see, I think it might not cause any problem for the monarchist sort of commentators. Just a bit of sneakily planned speaking. There might be announcements of the sort that go:
“Today, King Charles did actually go and look at something for ten minutes, and the homeless people were extremely grateful and very much enjoyed the visit of their majesties”.
With a bit of tabloidy things referring to Majesty, yep, they will gradually play the game of telling us “Look! People! Here is King! And his most charming lady wife, who does be doing stuff so as to become as lovable as our own dear Queen”.
Well, OK, that might take a couple of years, or it might not, but consider the power that some tabloid newspapers have. Add that to one or two “real” newspapers. The whole “let us adore and worship the king/queen because they are the best thing ever and are set above us by God” public relations thing will happen along, and some newspapers will join in with much enthusiasm.
Quite how everybody on the Clapham omnibus will view the whole circus, I don’t know, but I do look forward to finding out.
FWIW, at the time of her marriage to Wales, it was announced that she would go by “Duchess of Cornwall” while Charles was Prince of Wales, but “Princess Consort” when he became king. The latter title seems to be modelled on the “Prince Consort” title used by Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. However that’s a decision that could always be revisited when the time comes.
Queen Mary evidently did see herself as having changed names in 1910. She’d been using Victoria Mary as her name, but her husband asked her to pick one or the other and she “could not be Victoria.” (Presumably she thought memories of her husband’s grandmother were still too strong.)
Your link says “for obvious reasons”. Maybe not quite so obvious today, but any reference to Queen Victoria would become confusing if there were two of them. Queen Victoria II? I think not. Of course, she was not the first Queen Mary, although “Bloody Mary” was queen in her own right, but that was so long ago that no confusion would exist.
George VI (Albert Frederick Arthur George) was Albert to the public and Bertie to his friends, but chose to be King George, probably for similar reasons.
Queen consorts don’t get regnal numbers, so she wouldn’t be Victoria II, just like she wasn’t Mary III.