Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (17 page)

When it occurred to Santa Cruz that her friend might be a good match for the Prince, she wasn’t thinking like a courtier. Camilla Shand was sixteen months older than Charles and wouldn’t have passed Mountbatten’s pedestal test. The Prince wasn’t her first boyfriend. She had been passionately involved with one of his friends, Andrew Parker Bowles. She once donned leathers and rode a motorbike in the US. She smoked and drank and enjoyed life rather too visibly for comfort. But Santa Cruz correctly anticipated that Camilla would appeal to the Prince. “I always thought that he needed more emotional life,” she says. “And I thought that Camilla was such a human, down-to-earth, warm person that she would be a very good addition to his life. I thought, ‘She’s someone who’s going to appreciate him, in spite of his position’ and that was his greatest need. To be appreciated for what he was in spite of what he represented. Anyway, he was coming for a drink or to pick me up and I said ‘Can Camilla come up?’”

The rest is—mostly inaccurate—history. A media legend grew up that Camilla had approached the Prince on the polo field and introduced herself with brazen wit: “My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress, so how about it?” A similar joke was made at the first meeting, but not by Camilla. Santa Cruz presented Camilla to the Prince, “and I said ‘Now you two watch your genes’ because of Alice Keppel.”
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With Camilla, the Prince would eventually develop his first—and, arguably, only—truly adult relationship combining love and passion, respect and equality, plus a sense of humor that often leaves both of them guffawing and weeping. Camilla is “rude and raunchy,” says Emma Thompson, approvingly.
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Charles and Camilla enhance and complement each other. It seems obvious they should have stayed together and spared everyone, especially their spouses, considerable aggravation. But the Prince hadn’t begun to learn to be a good partner to anyone. He had few measures against which to judge his feelings for Camilla. Still lacking in confidence, choosing her would have meant overriding his family, the Buckingham Palace apparatus, and his own belief that in doing so he risked damaging the monarchy he had been brought up to serve.

“It was out of the question for [the Prince] to marry Camilla because she was older, and there was this idea that you had to be a virgin and with no past that the press could do anything about,” says Santa Cruz. “Lord Mountbatten had been very firm about that and he had a lot of influence over Prince Charles and so [the Prince] went away to the Navy and then Camilla started seeing Andrew again and married him. Emotions are complicated and she had this kind of obsession about Andrew. The other thing was out of the question, and she thought she shouldn’t keep [the Prince] in this involvement because his duty was to marry and procreate.”
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The Prince convulsed in anguish when he heard the news, but he did nothing to intervene. Mountbatten responded to the Prince’s distress by intensifying his campaign to promote his own granddaughter Amanda Knatchbull, sister of Tim, as a prospective royal bride. Those closest to the Prince have not always easily distinguished their interests from his, and Mountbatten wished to bind his dynasty, already intertwined with the Windsors through Prince Philip, yet closer to the monarchy.

Amanda Knatchbull, more than eight years Charles’s junior, rejected his offer of marriage when eventually he made it. She had seen enough of his life to know what being Princess of Wales might entail. Mountbatten didn’t live to see the Prince walk up the aisle with a woman who in every respect fulfilled the marital prospectus he had laid out, nor would he witness the toxic fruits of his advice.

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To this day, the Prince apparently maintains the denial he issued in Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 film about him: that he did not resume his relationship with Camilla until after the irretrievable breakdown of his relationship with Diana. This seems to him an important point—a point of honor. Despite everything that has happened, a source says he still doesn’t realize that it is also semantic. Whether or not he and Camilla consummated their passion in the early years of his marriage to Diana, they never entirely relinquished it. There were, as Diana observed, three people in her marriage.

Lady Diana Spencer had accepted the Prince’s proposal in the belief that she was in love with him and he with her, no matter that he publicly queried what “in love” might mean. She had scant understanding of the process that had selected her or the life that awaited her. Yet only five months after getting engaged, she already suspected her fianc
é
’s commitment. During a joint interview broadcast on the eve of their wedding she averred that Charles had been “a tower of strength” as she learned to deal with the unfamiliar pressure of media attention. “Gracious!” he interjected, instinctively rejecting such undeserved praise. “I had to say that because you’re sitting there,” she shot back, smiling but perhaps not joking.

Her answers also betrayed a blankness about the future. She had plotted every second of her three-minute walk down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral but not a single moment of her subsequent reality. “After the marriage how do you see your role developing, Lady Diana, as Princess of Wales?” one of the interviewers asked. “Well I very much look forward to going to Wales and meeting everybody,” she replied, stumbling over her answer. “But my life will be a great challenge.”
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It already was. Behind the scenes, both bride and bridegroom grappled with swirling anxieties but separately persuaded themselves that to bolt would prove more damaging than to continue the pageant. Curled venomously amongst a pile of wedding presents and cards, Diana had discovered a bracelet bearing the initials “GF,” intended for Camilla. (A piece of jewelry for Kanga escaped her notice.) Diana already recognized in Camilla not a potential friend but a rival. The Princess told Andrew Morton that the initials stood for “Gladys” and “Fred,” supposedly Camilla and Charles’s pet names for each other; Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby reported that the letters stood for “Girl Friday,” the Prince’s sobriquet for Camilla. Both versions are plausible, the first reflecting the Prince and Camilla’s shared sense of humor, the second the Prince’s reliance on Camilla.

Since Gladys and Fred first met there have been few areas of Fred’s life not susceptible to advice from Gladys. She has been his sounding board even in matters that directly concerned her and therefore should have excluded her counsel. He consulted her as he dithered over marriage to Diana and then got cold feet ahead of the ceremony. He shared with her the manifestations of Diana’s distress, much of it caused by Diana’s justified jealousy.

He courted Diana only briefly before the engagement, itself just five months long. He didn’t understand her at all or recognize the baggage she carried from an upbringing as difficult in its way as his own. The more he sensed that she was not the jolly country girl he had assumed, the more she revealed her vulnerabilities and began to succumb to the eating disorder that would dog her for much of the rest of her life, the more he struggled with the prospect of marriage. Family members and most friends encouraged him to get a move on, though there were dissenting voices, including that of Nicholas Soames. On the eve of the wedding, the Prince, says a member of his inner circle, “was desperate. ‘I can’t go through with it.… I can’t do it.’ I always told him afterwards that if it had been a Catholic marriage, it could have been declared null. Because he wasn’t really [committed], because she started with the bulimia and everything before the wedding.”

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The British royals and their advisers believe—and they’re probably right—that their hereditary monarchy relies for its survival on the inertia of tradition. For as long as the show continues without obvious hiccups, low-key but offering occasional excitements such as weddings and births, most subjects of the Crown seem content. Ruptures spark questions. Older courtiers—and the Queen herself—shudder at the memory of the national soul-searching that attended Edward VIII’s abdication to marry the American double divorc
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e Wallis Simpson. His face had already been printed on coronation memorabilia when he signed away his birthright on December 10, 1936. Forty-four years later the prospect of redundant souvenirs proved sufficient to persuade a fearful Diana to go through with her looming marriage. After she found the bracelet for Camilla, she contemplated calling it off. “I went upstairs, had lunch with my sisters who were there and said: ‘I can’t marry him, I can’t do this, this is absolutely unbelievable.’ They were wonderful and said: ‘Well bad luck, Duch [her nickname, short for Duchess], your face is on the tea towels so you’re too late to chicken out.’”
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She had no idea her bridegroom also had to be coaxed to the altar.

So Charles and Diana took their vows, had their sons, made a stab at building a marriage and a much better job of destroying it. Defined not only by this period, but so often defined against Diana, the Prince is most frequently mistaken for a person lacking in feelings. A man who did not already know what love means might have developed a deeper affection for his fragile partner. Guilt often pushes people into behaving worse, not better. Damaged by formative years of being told to deal with his feelings by burying them, criticized for his failure to do so, the Prince sometimes meted out similar treatment to his wife, like the syndrome of an abused child who grows up to abuse.

The question of whether he ever loved her is problematic, like everything about the relationship. At the beginning of the marriage he imagined he could love her. He loved the idea of enveloping domesticity and children. He always loved the boys. Yet he was at sea when it came to dealing with his wife. When trying his hardest to respond to her obvious turmoil, he turned to the wrong people for the support he could not provide: not only to Laurens van der Post, but most startlingly to the show-business personality Jimmy Savile. But better advice—the best—could never have reconciled the Waleses. Their brief period of amity was based on the sense of a joint project done well: they reveled in the experience of pleasing Queen and country. Greater forces pulled them apart. This wasn’t just the clash of two ill-suited people, beauty versus beast, or of their courts and champions, though it became all of those things. It wasn’t simply that Diana discovered that her star power had grown independent of the institution that granted it. It wasn’t just about a lack of common ground. Camilla shares only some of Charles’s interests. In many ways—in the intensity of their emotions, their febrile passions, their desire to make an impact—Diana and Charles more closely resembled each other. Both grew up starved of affection. Both sometimes channeled their neediness into acts of great kindness, at other times gave in to self-absorption. The unbridgeable conflict was generational.

“[Diana] was the expression of a huge change in our way of relating to each other, that has happened in the last 40 years, where emotion has completely taken over reason,” says Lucia Santa Cruz. “The previous generation were taught that emotions were a bad advisor, that they had to be subordinated because emotions include fear, hatred, resentment, anxiety and so forth and therefore they must be controlled. He was very much an expression of that old upbringing.”
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There is an irony here. Much of the philosophy the Prince now advocates, explained in later chapters of this book, revolves around the conviction that too rational an approach is reductive; the spirit—and the emotions—must be equally engaged for a holistic, harmonious relationship with the world and, presumably, your spouse. “He’s completely intuitive,” says Tim Knatchbull. “I know very few people who are as emotionally intelligent as Prince Charles because that’s all part and parcel of the spiritual intelligence of the man as well. It’s not just about doing, it’s about feeling. It’s about intuition and it’s about faith. It’s about the metaphysical. It’s about love. And therefore if you’re in that territory it’s second nature that it’s about emotion as well. He’s a very emotional man. And many of the most emotional people I know, if they don’t choose to wear it on their sleeve all the time, they carry it around with them and it will come pouring out in other ways, in their appreciation of great art or music or ballet or whatever their outlet is.”
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Watching Charles now, it is easy to see how close to the surface his emotions always are. He has a thin-skinned quality—veins that pulse when he’s displeased, a childlike delight that sometimes breaks through. But as a young man raised in the postwar era by the most austere of parents, the Prince not only lacked the equipment to understand his young bride, he recoiled from the messiness of the emotions she so liberally splattered. She brought to their combustible pairing an upbringing at least as dysfunctional as his own, but with radically different results. His background endowed him with a homeopathic reflex, to treat like with like. If the burden of royal life is making you sick, the answer must be to take on more of the burden.

Archbishop Runcie remembered having tea with Sarah, Duchess of York, “in a very lofty corner of Buckingham Palace” during her breakup with Prince Andrew. “She’d just come back from some public engagement, and was trying to live in that echoing place, and I felt sympathy for her.… And she said, ‘I just can’t take the stiff upper lip syndrome. And the you-are-never-ill syndrome. And that’s what got Diana.”
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If the Princess had swerved at the altar or if her fianc
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’s fevered eve-of-marriage misgivings had led him to break off the engagement, the monarchy would doubtless have faced an immediate backlash. Instead, it would be the disintegration of the ill-matched, ill-considered union that posed the most serious threat to the monarchy since the abdication. In 1992, the
annus horribilis
, Princess Anne also divorced her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips, and Prince Andrew separated from the ebullient Sarah. The siblings’ failed marriages, though far from demographically unusual as UK divorce rates spiraled, undermined one of the key symbolic functions of monarchy: to present to its subjects an idealized view of themselves, happy and glorious.