Canon Angela Tilby. 

Former Anglican priest rambles incoherently about marriage. Fails to make point. Doesn’t seem to like Camilla. Possibly doesn’t like Rowan Williams.

Thought Sniper 10 April 2025

Church of England
Canon Emeritus of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford

Inspiration: 20th anniversary of marriage of Charles and Camilla
Subject: Marriage 

Apparent message: The importance of liking the person you marry
Actual message: Don’t go on the radio if you’re full of bile

Link to transcript of original broadcast

Link to original broadcast on BBC Sounds

Overall impression

A genuinely awful broadcast that leaves me thinking Angela Tilby is full of bitterness and likely in need of help. I imagined at the outset of this project that I’d be evaluating the speakers largely on the basis of their liberal use of logical fallacies. I did not expect these fallacies to be accompanied by barely bridled mean spirit and sly digs. Today’s broadcast is the worst of all worlds: it’s formless and empty of purpose, yet strewn with reasoning errors. Inexplicably, it also contains sly digs at its subject matter. It’s not entirely clear with what or whom Angela Tilby has a problem. It may be Archbishops, monarchy, the concept of divorce. Who can say. She doesn’t provide sufficient detail for us to be sure. She has a problem with something, though, and the evidence is leaking out all over the place. 

Thought Sniper script

Hi, it’s Thursday 10 April 2025 and I’ve just listened to today’s Though For The Day which was by a retired Anglican priest called Angela Tilby. 

Tilby needlessly risks her credibility from the outset with a sweeping assumption that is also an unsupported claim.

The broadcast opens with a reflection on the 20-year anniversary of Charles’ marriage to Camilla. Tilby reports that the 2005 civil ceremony was followed by a service led by Rowan Williams, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. Tilby reports watching the event on television and her sense at the time that Rowan Williams seemed hesitant and uneasy. Tilby then makes what is likely an unsupportable claim, that millions of others were sharing her inability to avoid thoughts of the death of Princess Diana (eight years earlier) in 1997. Speak for yourself, Tilby. Is this a thing among the righteous, some desire to imagine their own thoughts are shared by ‘millions’ of others? Seems clinically narcissistic.

First, why weaken your credibility by making a sweeping assumption that also constitutes an unjustifiable claim in the opening seconds?

What’s most frustrating is that it was so simple to avoid.

Why not begin the sentence, “I suspect like many others, I couldn’t help but think about the tragedy of the death of Process Diana…”? 

Nothing wrong with that.

All ends achieved. 

All risk avoided.

Bloody stupid.

Second, what’s this guff about the Archbishop of Canterbury? Is Tilby’s judgement of Williams’ performance in any way relevant, or even accurate? I took to youtube and subjected myself to 20 minutes of an Archbishop. 

I don’t recommend it. 

To me he seemed, appropriately reverent and, given the limited recent experience I have of church services, he appeared to do a better than average job. Perhaps it took him a while to hit his stride but, after watching several other clips of Williams doing his thing, this is not unusual. 

 Although, I’m not sure ‘stride’ is really his goal.

Of more concern to me was the implied invitation for the listener to treat Williams’ supposed unease as corroboration for Tilby’s Diana-death-crowded mind. I might be wrong on this, or perhaps I’m missing some vital nuance. 

 I doubt it, although, if you’d spent much of your career as an Anglican priest, I suppose you might be forgiven for a higher-than-average preoccupation with death.

The whole sequence seems inescapably irrelevant and unnecessary.

Then, with barely a breath and no segue, she announces that by 2005 “…more people were prepared to shrug and accept what was going on…”.

More than what? More than when? 

Jeepers, Tilby. Not only a hanging comparative but another unsupported claim. This time, that unspecified people had both shrugged and accepted “what was going on”. 

Presumably “what was going on” was that Camilla was marrying a man she’d apparently loved for most of her adult life. And he, her for most of his.

I was at this point beginning to wonder if her live performance was so bad, what we’re listening to is the product of a heroic BBC editor desperate to have something vaguely suitable to pad the slot.

Let’s for a minute revisit that shrug. 
It was abundantly clear to reporters and observers around the world that the prevailing attitude of the British people toward Camilla had undergone a remarkable revolution. 

Describing the manner of the acceptance of Camilla as Charles’ wife and their future queen by a significant proportion the British people as a shrug might risk being interpreted as a cheap shot. 

Did Angie have a thing for Charlie? Was her opportunity dashed by Camilla’s brutal man grab? Were we all actually listening to the barely coherent ramblings of a jealous Canon? 

Oh, come on, Ang, grow up. 

I don’t think it’s that. Not a heart thing. Perhaps a churchy political thing? I’m sure someone knows exactly what it is. If so, please get in touch.

Tilby then claimed that this acceptance of Camilla was “not only due to good PR”. For Odin’s sake Tillers.

This is, at best, unsporting. My judgement of what is and what is not sporting aside, it is an unsupported and veiled claim, that the acceptance by the British people of Camilla as the wife of Charles was in significant part due to good PR.

Does Tilby have some beef with Camilla?

I guess it’s possible that Tilby hadn’t intended this to be another sly dig. If so, I suggest she urgently needs to improve her approach to preparing a broadcast to a live audience of six million people.

She had here an excellent opportunity to mention some of the other possible reasons for the acceptance revolution. The widely published accounts of Camilla’s dogged determination, her evident patience, good nature and good grace. No mention of the Queen’s public endorsement of the marriage.

Then, unfortunately, things got worse. We were led to believe that medieval clerics in England saw marriage as somewhat removed from the church and little more than a contractual means of reining in fornication and enforcing social order.

We’re then invited to contrast this dark spell of matrimonial theology with the enlightenment that accompanied the first English prayer book of 1549. 

The prevailing requisites of fornication abatement and societal order were now accompanied, for the first time, by a suggestion that those getting married should love and cherish each other.

Quite frankly, what balderdash.

I’m not an expert but there’s a lot of straightforward and verifiable information out there for anyone with 20 minutes to spare and passing familiarity with the internet. 

Primary motives for most might have been largely carnal and practical. Among the rich, perhaps a touch more practical given the riches, legacies and bloodlines in need of preservation. 

Likely only the church that noticed shifts in the tone and content of the service itself. Must be weird seeing the world exclusively through the eyes of a priest. 

 I digress, for vast the majority of Christian history before 1549 in England, direction was provided exclusively by Rome. Marriage had long been considered by the Roman church to be an act of divine significance, at least since a thing called the Fourth Lateran council of 1215. 

 Since at least then, marriage was understood to be a reflection of the union between the church and Christ. Love and cherishment had somewhat obviously been front and centre since long, long before the scribblings an English Archbishop in 1549 were turned into a prayer book.

Tilby, one would imagine, has sound and deep knowledge in this field but the arguments and evidence to suggest that her marriage theology enlightenment claims are groundless are not trivial.

If the payoff of this ill-prepared thought salad were worth it, such inconvenient facts might be considered little more than casualties of poetic licence. If only Tilby had for us such an ending.

She ends with these words:

It’s all too easy to marry for the wrong reasons. The important question for those contemplating marriage is whether they really like each other—whether they’re prepared to stand by each other, and help each other to be strong and resilient.

As I look back, twenty years on, 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—to themselves, and perhaps to the rest of us, too.

No shit.

Even to a causal observer, what Charles and Camilla have appears to be much more than a lasting friendship. Theirs appears to be a love that has survived an astonishing combination of onslaughts, including dissection by godly pundits on Radio 4. The advice to ‘marry someone you like’ is great but why the flood of drivel the preceded it? To suggest that those in a friendship are blessed by it as banal as it is true. What a wasted opportunity and a pointless effort.

A structureless cacophony of baseless claims, logical fallacies and inexplicable barbs. With a banal truism as a conclusion this broadcast is little more than a quality-control klaxon in the BBC’s department of Religion and Ethics. Genuinely pointless.

AI TRANSCRIPT OF BBC BROADCAST

Good morning.

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 it 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. Like 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 wasn’t only 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, one which has lasted fifty years.

Throughout history, royal and high-class marriages have often been arranged to firm up alliances, or to 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 accompanied by a compulsory little sermon on why God 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: that marriage was instituted for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity. He also added the words “to love and to cherish” to the marriage vows.

The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests that we owe these additions to Cranmer’s own happy experience of marriage.

It’s all too easy to marry for the wrong reasons. The important question for those contemplating marriage is whether they really like each other—whether they’re prepared to stand by each other, and help each other to be strong and resilient.

As I look back, twenty years on, 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—to themselves, and perhaps to the rest of us, too.