Royal pastimes.(on the right)(Wedding of Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, to Camilla Parker Bowles)

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 11

THE talk of the wedding planned by the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles seems mostly genial. For a while, royal communicants thought it would not come off; but they were wrong, it seems. After April 8, when the wedding takes place (it would be provincial to say, after the wedding is "consummated"), the Prince of Wales will get on with his duties, married to Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cornwall.

But when he ascends the throne, he will be Defender of the Faith like his mother, the present queen. And indeed like every other monarch dating back to 1521, when the title was conferred by Pope Leo X on Henry VIII, in appreciation of the king's rejection of Martin Luther's schism. Little did the pope know what the Defender of the Faith would go on to do, but the honorific stayed on through the Protestantization of Britain.

There are temporal responsibilities, held formally by the crown. Prince Charles, like his mother, will be head of the Church of England. His prospective ascendancy has been troubling, because of the marital situation.

In brief, Charles was captivated, in 1970, by Camilla. But three years later she married Major Andrew Parker Bowles. They had children, but to make it clear that the close friendship survived, the son of that union was christened with Prince Charles serving as godfather. Parker Bowles even accepted the title (if you can bear it), of Silver Stick in Waiting to the Prince. Anybody who will do that for the prince will do anything, and indeed Parker Bowles was quickly cuckolded, without apparent objection, though he and Camilla eventually got divorced.

Meanwhile, Charles had married Diana, who was soon complaining about her husband's double life. But she died in 1997, so that the decks were partly cleared. But Major Parker Bowles didn't die, so that Camilla is a divorced woman with a living husband, and the rules here had been for a very long time rather firm. Kings could sleep around, but not marry divorcees, as Edward VIII discovered, forfeiting his crown.

There lingers ...