Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (14 page)

To a BBC interviewer he said: “As long as I don’t get covered in too much egg and tomato, I’ll be all right.”
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He joked, nervously, in a first televised interview with David Frost: “I don’t think I can sort of rush in and declare the whole place a republic or home rule for everybody, you know.” Did the Prince consider his childhood an advantage or a disadvantage? Frost asked. “Well it’s a disadvantage I suppose in the sense that one is trying to lead as normal a life as possible at school and at Cambridge,” replied Charles, steepling his hands. “But it’s not a disadvantage because it’s not.… If you’re leading a more sheltered life, you know, because obviously one’s been brought up…” He tailed off, spread the hands, tried again. “It’s a very … It’s a sort of dual upbringing that one has to try to do, and I think that perhaps that I’ve gone to school and university and everything in a much more normal way than any of my predecessors did has been an experiment in royal education. And of course it has been slightly difficult and there have been disadvantages at moments when I’ve regretted it but I think one gets over this.”
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It would take him half a lifetime to do so. He fitted into university a little better than school but he always felt conspicuous, never at ease. “He was immensely distracted by the fact that he had to go off and be invested and so it was a very difficult life,” says Richard Chartres, a fellow undergraduate and close friend, now Bishop of London. “He’s a person of high intelligence which I think is often denied by people. He got a really very good degree when you realize the distractions that he had to cope with. [Charles graduated with a respectable but not exceptional lower second class honors degree.] But he was a bit young for his age, perhaps. Not so knowing.” He adds: “I was struck by things that continue to be the case with him. Elaborate courtesy, the real desire to put people at their ease and a sense of humor and memory of what you said. We had great conversations about witchcraft I remember.… Very very agreeable, courteous person who never threw his weight around or presumed. He was very good news, very good news indeed.”

Lucia Santa Cruz, the daughter of the Chilean ambassador, met the Prince at a Cambridge dinner party thrown by Rab Butler, for whom she worked as a research assistant. The Conservative politician, twice passed over as Prime Minister, had by now become a Lord and the Master of Trinity. “Charles was very mature intellectually insofar as his interests and his curiosity and maybe not so mature emotionally, which is understandable because he had been submitted to very few experiences personally in terms of friends and relationships,” she says.
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That duality would endure for years.

Never certain of his father’s approval or his mother’s affection, Charles has tended to form bonds with older men and women, and even in friendships with people closer to his own age, the child prince is still visible. He looks up to the preternaturally confident Richard Chartres, unfolds in the serene presence of Patrick Holden, relaxes with the buoyant Nicholas Soames, blossoms around the vibrancy of Emma Thompson or, indeed, his dearest wife Camilla, and has employed more than a few warm, enveloping women over the years: his longtime adviser Julia Cleverdon; Martina Milburn, who runs the Prince’s Trust; and his former Private Secretary Elizabeth Buchanan, for example. He enjoys the company of people who respect his position but don’t stand on ceremony. In return, he has learned to overcome the reserve that was the legacy of his parents’ generation and class even before its magnification in palace culture. “The fact that Prince Charles is such a kissy man is brilliant, because how the hell does he stand up to all the pressure on him not to be kissing his sons or even his cousins or godchildren. But I grew up with that relationship with him and it continued,” says Tim Knatchbull.
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Two older family members provided the young Prince with much-needed measures of surrogate parenting and a range of formative influences. The Queen Mother was the most nurturing presence in royal circles, gladly looking after her grandson when her daughter traveled and becoming one of his mainstays as he grew older. The Prince credits his grandmother with inspiring his love of the arts and music. She supported him through turbulences, but rarely gave sharp advice. “That was not her style,” explained the Queen Mother’s official biographer, William Shawcross. “She never liked to acknowledge, let alone confront, disagreeableness within the family. It was a characteristic which had earned her the nickname ‘imperial ostrich’ among some members of the [royal] household. She thought her role was not to try and change people’s courses but to be an anchor.”
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Nevertheless, her disapproval could be as palpable as her daughter’s and she imbued her grandson with a “tremendous sense of duty,” according to Nicholas Soames, who recalls watching the Queen Mother stand “ramrod” straight as she realized members of the public were watching her. “When you’re on parade, you’re on parade.”
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In his great-uncle Louis Mountbatten, Charles found a father figure who closely resembled his real father. Mountbatten had dash, raffish charm, and a compelling backstory as a statesman, war hero, the last Viceroy of India, and its first Governor-General when it became an independent dominion. Unlike Philip, he rarely crackled with contempt, spoken or unvoiced, toward Charles. And unlike the Queen Mother, Mountbatten doled out advice—vigorously. The mentoring started in earnest in 1972, when Charles’s naval career stationed him in Portsmouth, not far from Mountbatten’s Hampshire house, Broadlands. Mountbatten’s advice on women and marriage would prove disastrous, but he gave better counsel on being a royal, frequently warning Charles against any behavior that recalled another of the Prince’s great-uncles, the feckless Edward VIII, known to the family as David, whose self-indulgence led to “his disgraceful abdication and his futile life ever after.”
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He told the Prince off for proposing a sudden change in his travel plans that would have inconvenienced other people. This was “unkind and thoughtless—so typical of how your Uncle David started.”
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This useful reprimand came in April 1979, just a few months before Mountbatten’s assassination.

The loss of Mountbatten made him want to die, too, Charles wrote in his diary: “In some extraordinary way he combined grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother and friend.”
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The fates were kinder in respect of the Queen Mother, who lived to 101. Yet when she died in 2002, just a few weeks after the death of her daughter, Princess Margaret, the Prince fell into despair. Despite his belief in an afterlife, the comfort his faith should bring, and a wider philosophy that sees death as a necessary part of the ecosystem, Charles never quite relinquishes his grief. He fills his domains with little shrines and memorials; he goes into his gardens not to talk to the plants but to the deceased. He tries to keep the Queen Mother, Mountbatten, Laurens van der Post, and a host of other departed spirits alive in his heart even if there is one persistent, shape-shifting ghost called Diana he would sometimes prefer to forget.

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A 1998 movie centers on Truman Burbank, a salesman who turns twenty-nine before he discovers that his life is a fiction spun for a reality television program,
The Truman Show
. He reacts by rebelling against the unseen director and then opting out of the show. Charles has lived a version of that story, always observed, but, unlike Burbank, painfully aware of the fact. He never walked off the set, despite the temptation, nor did he rebel consciously. Yet by embracing duty and simultaneously redefining it in terms provided by his parents and his education, he created a narrative strand for the Windsor Show that its directors didn’t anticipate and couldn’t control.

To be fair, there weren’t many other options available to the young royal. Worthy precedents and inspirational role models were in short supply. Since the eighteenth century, male heirs to the throne had welcomed their fate not as a challenge but as an invitation to make hay while the sun still shone on their predecessors. “There’s a long history of relationships between Princes of Wales and actors,” says Emma Thompson. “Not just actresses, not just the rude relationships as HRH would say, though,” she jokes. “God knows I’ve tried, I’ve tried—he wasn’t having any of it.”
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It’s a familiar theme among friends and members of the Prince’s household. “If he had been more frivolous and less hardworking he may well have been more popular,” muses Richard Chartres. “But actually when you think of the possibilities of frivoling in such a position they’re considerable.”
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“He could do what most of his predecessors did—he could be sitting on a beach in the Caribbean with fast cars and fast women and fast horses and fast boats and everything else and living off the money of the Duchy of Cornwall, and be very comfortable,” says Elizabeth Buchanan.
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“HRH has every right to sack all of us and go round the world on a yacht,” says Andrew Wright, Treasurer to the household of the Prince and Duchess and also Executive Director of the Prince of Wales Charitable Foundation. “Over the last forty years he could have said, ‘I’ll spend all of that money on myself and do the odd engagement just to keep my profile up.’”
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“He works like a Trojan,” says his former Private Secretary, Clive Alderton. “That’s one of the reasons people close to him buy into him. If you have £19 million [$30.5 million] a year, you could choose to have quite an easy time of it. I think the UK and other Realms are fortunate to have someone who didn’t choose the easy road.”
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Would press and public look any more kindly on a Playboy Prince than they do on the Perturbed Prince who inhabits the space? George, Prince of Wales, later Prince Regent and King George IV, became the butt, almost literally, of gloriously savage caricatures that mocked his rotund backside and pilloried his extravagant lifestyle. A century later, Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Edward, known as Bertie, earned a similar treatment and the malicious nicknames “fat Edward” and “Edward the caresser” during his fifty-nine years as heir apparent, the longest such apprenticeship before Charles’s.

Bertie’s many mistresses included theater stars Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt, the aristocratic Lady Randolph Churchill (great-grandmother to Nicholas Soames), and Alice Keppel, who endured a second, postmortem bout of notoriety during the breakup of the Waleses’ marriage as Camilla’s great-great-grandmother. His accession as Edward VII, far from intensifying the criticism, helped to dissipate it. After Victoria’s long and increasingly somber reign, his evident enjoyment of life represented permission to wider society to loosen up a bit.

Yet the louche conduct of a Prince of Wales has also accurately predicted failure as King. Mountbatten was right to hold up Charles’s great-uncle David as an example to avoid. “For some years after I joined his staff, in 1920, I had a great affection and admiration for the Prince of Wales,” wrote Sir Alan Lascelles, former Private Secretary to the man who would reign as Edward VIII for only 325 days. “In the following eight years I saw him day in and day out. I saw him sober, and often as near drunk as doesn’t matter; I traveled twice across Canada with him; I camped and tramped with him through Central Africa; in fact, I probably knew him as well as any man did. But, by 1927, my idol had feet, and more than feet, of clay.

“Before the end of our Canadian trip that year, I felt in such despair about him that I told Stanley Baldwin (then Prime Minister, and one of our party in Canada) that the heir apparent, in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was going rapidly to the devil and would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown. I expected to get my head bitten off, but he agreed with every word. I went on: ‘You know, sometimes when I am waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.’ ‘God forgive me,’ said SB. ‘I have often thought the same.’”
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Edward VIII didn’t fulfill their wishes and tumble from a horse. He fell further than that, abdicating the kingship. His marriage to a divorc
é
e meant he could not remain on the throne; his admiration for Hitler and support for appeasement may have caused a different set of problems if he had stayed. His specter still haunts palace thinking, and not without reason. He showed up the danger to the institution from members who put desire before duty. Some of Charles’s harshest critics within the palace accuse the current heir to the throne of similar behavior. It’s not that they blame him for choosing Camilla over Diana. They feel he puts his activism before his royal job. They are a long way from being persuaded of Charles’s evolving view: that campaigning and kingship can be synthesized.

Yet if a Prince with a purpose inevitably creates controversies, purposeless royals are often liabilities. Charles not only grew up schooled on stories of his great-uncle David’s disastrous reign and more disastrous departure but grew older watching his younger brothers flounder. Despite the similarities among the siblings, the shared genes, their Planet Windsor sensibilities, and Gordonstoun education, the alchemy that created in Charles a compulsion to make a difference seems absent in Andrew and Edward.

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Military service tends to suit royals; institutionalized from birth, they are comfortable inside a system where everybody knows their rank. The comparative anonymity of uniform also affords them their best chance at blending in, and even then it’s only a partial pass to real-world experience. “For me [being stationed at Camp Bastion] is not that normal because I go into the cookhouse and everyone has a good old gawp, and that’s one thing that I dislike about being here,” said Prince Harry, during one of two deployments to Afghanistan as Captain Wales of the Blues and Royals. “Because there’s plenty of guys in there that have never met me, therefore look at me as Prince Harry and not as Captain Wales, which is frustrating. Which is probably another reason why I’d love to be out in the PBs [patrol bases], away from it all. It’s as normal as it’s going to get. I’m one of the guys. I don’t get treated any differently.”
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The remarkable dysfunction of a war zone offered Harry a simulacrum of the commonplace.