Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor

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To Andy, perennially

Author’s Note

In October 2013, a short “teaser” on
Time
’s website generated headlines across the world. These headlines quickly described a narrative arc of their own, from the factual “PRINCE CHARLES IN NO HURRY TO BECOME KING”
1
to the sexed-up “PRINCE CHARLES FEARS BECOMING KING WILL BE LIKE ‘PRISON’”
2
and through a U-turn: “PRINCE CHARLES ‘PRISON’ CLAIM DENIED.”
3
I had posted the teaser to draw attention to the newly published issue of
Time
magazine, which carried my cover profile of Charles.
4
The teaser pointed to some of the main conclusions of that longer piece: that Charles is a passionate philanthropist, one of the world’s most prolific charitable entrepreneurs. He doesn’t have the leisure to sit about waiting to be king and is driven by a sense of urgency to get as much done as possible before that day arrives. I wrote: “Much of what you think you know about the Prince is wrong.… I found a man not, as caricatured, itching to ascend the throne, but impatient to get as much done as possible before, in the words of one member of his household, ‘the prison shades’ close. The Queen, at 87, is scaling back her work, and the Prince is taking up the slack, to the potential detriment of his network of charities, initiatives and causes.”
5

Teased or not, the cover story was always bound to draw attention, and not just because Charles emerged as a bit of a charmer, who inspired his friend, the actress Emma Thompson, to the tongue-in-cheek observation that dancing with him was “better than sex.” (The quote in my
Time
profile, which launched a first set of lurid headlines, had in fact been truncated for space. Who knows what the tabloids would have made of Thompson’s unexpurgated tribute: “He’s a great, great dancer. He’s the best dancer. Not disco-dancing. Proper dancing. I’ve never danced with anyone who can actually lead me and I can just relax and go this is great, this is better than sex. He’s a very charismatic, virile dancer.”)
6

I had been given remarkable access by the standards of royal press management, which is to say, nowhere near as much as a
Time
journalist might expect from a president or prime minister, but enough to get a strong sense of my quarry and for him to get a sense of me. Before the project could be green-lit, he met me and spoke to me off the record. For six months, I trailed him, came close to learning to remember to curtsy every time we met, listened to his speeches—and his jokes—visited his homes, struggled to keep up with him as he strode across muddy fields, attended a private concert at his Welsh bolt-hole, mingled at multiple events to promote his charities and initiatives, on one occasion dined with him at the Scottish mansion Dumfries House, listened in on one of his private meetings (and inevitably became drawn into the discussion that took place), interviewed a substantial number of people close to him, and eventually sat down in his living room in Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate in Scotland, to an on-the-record conversation with him.

His aides at Clarence House—the name of his London home and the collective name for his staff—agreed to the Prince speaking on condition that this would not be billed as an “interview” and that he could review his quotes prepublication. A few of the most revealing things he said ended up on the cutting-room floor; so did some utterly innocuous remarks. Monarchy moves in mysterious ways. I did not use any rewritten quotes that changed the meaning of the original. About half of the interviewees, particularly those working for the royal households or Charles’s charities and initiatives, insisted that I send their comments about “HRH” (His Royal Highness) or “the Boss” for prior approval, and, like the Prince, excised the anodyne as well as the controversial. Other sources opted to remain anonymous.

Similar preconditions were necessary to secure some of the many additional interviews conducted for this book. In January 2014, I returned to Dumfries House and, as on the first visit, accompanied Charles on a long march around the estate, lasting about five hours while the Prince gave detailed notes to the team overseeing the development of the grounds and various projects on the estate. I seized many additional opportunities to observe him at close quarters, for example in May of the same year accompanying him and the Duchess of Cornwall on their official visit to Canada, interacting with both of them and watching them interact with others.

There is a convention that private conversations with royals are not to be quoted directly. The definition of a private conversation is less than crystalline. One such conversation, between the Prince and a volunteer guide at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Nova Scotia, found its way into Britain’s
Daily Mail
, prompting a diplomatic spat with Russia. The
Mail
explained its decision to publish on the basis that the volunteer had been standing in the official lineup at the museum.
7
I decided in this book to quote from a few conversations that Clarence House would class as private, for example, between Charles and a collective of Welsh butchers, to give a flavor of the way he speaks and how he engages with people, but I have steered clear of repeating any remarks that would lend themselves to headlines, because they either misrepresented his true views or revealed them all too clearly but without context.

In other circumstances, a biographer could rely on previously published work to fill in the gaps. With Charles, that would be problematic. Many secondary printed sources about royalty are unreliable. So my voluminous reading has been supplemented by multiple interviews with people who know Charles well. One person close to him sent me a heartening e-mail after we spoke, saying that I had clearly come to understand the essence of the Prince. I hope so. I have also drawn on a large body of research about the royals amassed over three decades, most recently authoring four
Time
cover stories and coauthoring a
Time
book, and also as the editor and behind-the-scenes point person for a
Time
cover story on the Queen in 2006 for which I also interviewed Prince Andrew. Two years before that I had shadowed Andrew on one of his trade missions to China and interviewed him in Beijing. I’ve been delving into the royals since the Diana years. Every encounter with Prince Charles, his family, staff, and friends, quotable or not, has deepened my understanding. Controlled access is better than the only alternative open to the vast majority of biographers: no access.

The Queen has never given an interview, by that name or any other; her children and grandchildren rarely do so. Britain’s Freedom of Information Act exempts communications with the Queen, Prince Charles, and the second in line to the throne, William, from public scrutiny (though at the time of going to press Britain’s Supreme Court is mulling a challenge to the strictures against revealing the content of some of Charles’s correspondence). Palace staff sign confidentiality agreements. Royal press secretaries almost never comment on stories deemed to stray into the ever-narrowing sphere of the purely personal. That policy means some journalists inevitably make honest mistakes based on faulty information from trusted sources cultivated to supplement the meager fare provided by close-lipped royal aides. More unscrupulous reporters see in such reticence a license to fabricate or embroider stories they calculate the palace will find too trivial or intrusive to rebut. There’s an assumption, too, that the royals will not sue. So the world is awash with royal nonsense. Inaccuracies and inventions, left unchallenged, are repeated. Repetition gives credence. Once a sufficient number of news organizations has repeated a fiction, it becomes a multisourced fact. News-gathering in the age of aggregation is a giant game of Chinese whispers, in which stories become, like the Prince’s eggs, more scrambled with each retelling.

In 2012, Clarence House took the unusual step of publishing on its website a list of “frequently asked questions” about Charles and rubbishing the answers generously provided by the press. “Does the Prince of Wales have seven boiled eggs cooked for his breakfast but eat only one, as claimed in Jeremy Paxman’s book
On Royalty
?” the website wondered. “No, he doesn’t and never has done, at breakfast or any other time.” Paxman, a distinguished BBC broadcaster, had told a story relayed to him by a friend of Charles. After a day’s hunting, staff would put out boiled eggs “in an ascending row of numbers. If the Prince felt that number five was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven.” The story, Paxman added, “seems so preposterously extravagant as to be unbelievable.”
8

Yet it may well have been rooted in fact. Wendy Berry, a former housekeeper at Highgrove, published a memoir of her time in service to Charles in which she described, with pride, serving perfectly cooked boiled eggs to the Prince after he returned from hunting. She put a first batch of eggs on to cook when Charles arrived but, realizing that a member of his party had been delayed, discarded the first batch and started over. There is no suggestion that Charles asked her to do so or knew of the waste, which he would as likely have reprimanded as applauded. His lifestyle, as with much else about him, is riven with contradictions. He lives high on the hog by just about any standard, but combines the showiness of royal life—the banquets, the acreage of cut flowers, retinues larger than most other family members employ—with a frugality absorbed from his parents and austere schooling at the Scottish public school Gordonstoun and more consciously informed by his environmental concerns.

Still the eggs, repurposed as his breakfast-time whim and served as proof of his profligacy, began doing the rounds, joining other half-myths of Charles, the spoiled princeling: that a valet squeezes his toothpaste for him and that he ordered his servant to hold the specimen bottle as he deposited a princely urine sample. Neither of these stories is without a kernel of truth. Michael Fawcett, one of the most compelling and ambiguous members of the Prince’s inner coterie, worked for many years as his valet, and after an accident put Charles’s arm in a sling, assisted with tasks that would have been difficult with only one hand free. Before and after that brief interlude, Charles has managed such functions, as it were, single-handed. “It’s very difficult to fight back,” says Elizabeth Buchanan, a former Private Secretary to the Prince. “Because you can fight back [but] how demeaning to have to say the Prince of Wales does not have his toothpaste squeezed. Guess what, if you break your arm funnily enough there are some things you can’t do.”
9