Footage of Prince William’s gesture towards Queen Camilla as they stepped onto a stage in the days after the death of Queen Elizabeth II has been widely shared online after being uploaded to social media network TikTok.
Speculation over the prince’s relationship with his stepmother was pulled into focus earlier this year when Prince Harry published his memoir Spare, in which he described Camilla as “dangerous” and revealed he and his brother pleaded with King Charles not to marry her.
William himself has not discussed his relationship with his stepmother publicly. Since the death of Queen Elizabeth in September 2022, he has appeared at a number of events alongside the new queen and was present at her coronation on May 6.
Uploaded to TikTok by user the.royal.watcher, resurfaced footage from King Charles’ accession council at St. James’s Palace shows William appearing to offer a gesture of support to Camilla as she climbed onto a stage, appearing nearly to stumble.
Captioned “Prince William catches Queen Camilla and stops her taking a tumble…,” the video has been viewed on the platform over half a million times and received in excess of 5,000 likes.
A number of commenters have praised the prince for his “gentlemanlike” behavior.
“He gets on okay with her and knows she makes his father happy,” wrote one user.
I “I mean he braced his hand there in case she tumbled,” posted another. “And of course he did, he’s a gentleman and she’s his Dads wife & his stepmother.
The footage was filmed on the same day as another royal viral sensation which saw King Charles lose his temper with royal aides over a tray of fountain pens placed on a small desk he was using to sign his first official proclamations.
The relationships between Camilla, William and Harry have been the focus of media speculation since the 1990s, when it was made public that she was in a relationship with the princes’ father, Charles.
In 1993, a recorded phone conversation between Camilla and Charles was published by tabloid newspapers which was intimate in nature and nicknamed “Tampongate” by the press.
Charles admitted in a television interview a year later that he had been unfaithful to his wife, Princess Diana, during their marriage and that Camilla was a close friend who would remain one.
A year later, in 1995, Diana addressed Camilla’s role in her husband’s life publicly during her own interview for BBC’s Panorama. When asked whether she thought Camilla was a factor in the breakdown of her marriage, the princess responded with the now infamous line: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage. So it was a bit crowded.”
An insight into how the royal couple’s children viewed Camilla was provided by Harry in Spare. He recounted meetings with his father’s partner after his mother’s death in 1997.
“When asked, Willy and I promised Pa that we’d welcome Camilla into the family,” he wrote.
“The only thing we asked in return was that he not marry her. ‘You don’t need to remarry,’ we pleaded… ‘We support you,’ we said. ‘We endorse Camilla,’ we said. ‘Just please don’t marry her. Just be together, Pa.'”
On the day of Charles and Camilla’s 2005 wedding, the prince explained that he “mostly kept my head bowed, eyes on the floor,” but felt mixed feelings about the marriage.
Though William has not made similar revelations to Harry’s, his wife, Kate Middleton, appears to have warmer relations with the new queen.
In 2022, Camilla asked Kate if she would take her photograph for a collaboration she was working on with a British countryside magazine.
“We had a lot of fun doing it,” she told magazine editors in a special documentary marking the collaboration. “She’s an extremely good photographer and it was all very casual.”
