Prince Harry revealed something in his memoir Spare that has gone largely unnoticed. Yet it reveals a worrying pattern for the royals. Photo / File
Prince Harry revealed something in his memoir Spare that has gone largely unnoticed. Yet it reveals a worrying pattern for the royals. Photo / File
OPINION
Stray arrows, eating too many eels, being stabbed on the loo, falling off a cliff, falling off a horse after it stepped on a mole hill, a stroke triggered by gorging on strawberries, smallpox, accidental lead-poisoning, syphilis, an aneurysm while drinking hot chocolate on the toilet, gangrene, bipolar disorder, and meeting an unfortunate end in a cannonball accident.
When it comes to the sorts of maladies that have blighted British Kings and Queens over the centuries, there is a veritable cornucopia of diseases, bad habits and pointy things that have brought them asunder. (Maybe someone needs to slap a health warning on the inside of the St Edward’s crown?)
So, is our relatively newish, slightly shopworn monarch Charles III as hale and hearty as Buckingham Palace image-makers would have us think?
Thanks to something of a throwaway detail in his son Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex’s recent memoir Spare, it would appear that Buckingham Palace has not been entirely upfront about just how fit the King might be. (Don’t worry, no more eels will appear in this story).
Harry wrote about spending time at Balmoral, the King’s private Scottish residence (well, his biggest one anyway) with its 50 bedrooms and 50,000 acres – and trying to find his way around the hulking Victorian property.
As he explains it: “Open the wrong door and you might burst in on Pa while his valet was helping him dress. Worse, you might blunder in as he was doing his headstands. Prescribed by his physio, these exercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back. Old polo injuries, mostly.”
And therein lies the quite literal rub. Never before has there ever been any suggestion that the unflagging Charles might have been in “constant pain” for all the decades that he was undertaking hundreds of engagements annually, serving as patron of more than 420 organisations and running the Prince’s Trust, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and helped hundreds of thousands of young people throughout the UK and the Commonwealth.
The obvious question here is, if we didn’t know about this “constant pain” situation, what other royal health problems might we not know about?
This is not the first time the world has only found out long after the fact that Charles was in a much worse way than anyone in a pinstriped suit was letting on.
Take a polo accident involving Charles that took place in 2000. He was playing on a team alongside Harry and elder son Prince William. Let’s assume it was a sparkling Blakeian English summer’s day at the famed Cirencester polo ground, all sweating glasses of Pimms and idyllic birdsong, I’m imagining, when Charles fell off his horse.
Charles playing Polo with his youngest son, Prince Harry, at the Guards Club in Windsor in 2003. Photo / Getty Images
All that was reported by the UK press, based on information provided by the palace at the time was that the Prince of Wales had been “hurt”, having taken a “tumble” and had been trundled off to hospital. Overall, the impression was that he might have a scratch or two, nothing that a children’s aspirin and an early night couldn’t sort out.
It was only years later in 2006, when Charles, William and Harry sat for a TV interview, that the now King gave a very different account of the fall, revealing just how serious things actually were. Speaking to buffoonish TV hosts, he said that he “landed absolutely on my head” and that the mishap “completely felled me.”
Harry, Charles said, “thought when I was lying on the ground. He thought, ‘Oh Papa’s just snoring’!
“There I was, busily swallowing my tongue, quietly dying!”
Now clearly there was some good humoured exaggeration going on here but it still illustrates perfectly the chasm that exists at times between the scorchingly economical particulars revealed by The Firm and the truth.
Charles was playing on a team alongside Harry and elder son Prince William when he fell off his horse. Photo / Getty Images
You don’t have to look that far into the past to find plenty of other examples of the palace tiptoeing around the truth about various health matters within the royal family.
In 2020, it was only five months after the fact that it was revealed that Prince William had actually contracted Covid during the early days of the pandemic.
Likewise the highly traumatic birth of Prince Edward and Sophie, Countess of Wessex’s daughter Lady Louise in 2004. For a number of hours both mother and baby’s lives hung in the balance, with the countess suffering from massive blood loss and doctors fighting to save both of their lives.
You would never have known just how close the Queen and Prince Philip came to losing their daughter-in-law and granddaughter based on the statement which was put out by the palace the next day which read: “Her Royal Highness The Countess of Wessex was safely delivered of a baby girl by emergency caesarean section … Her Royal Highness and her daughter are both stable.”
Or, there was the mysterious incident in 2009 when Buckingham Palace confirmed that Her Majesty had taken the highly unusual step of cancelling a state visit to an undisclosed nation because she and Philip had “other commitments.” The suggestion that this decision was connected with the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh had pulled out of three engagements in the month prior was met with some clipped-vowel scoffing. Riiggghtt…..And maybe the Queen and Philip just stayed because there was a Morse re-run on.
In 2009, Her Majesty had taken the highly unusual step of cancelling a state visit to an undisclosed nation because she and Philip had “other commitments.” Photo / Getty Images
In the later years of the duke’s life, the question mark over his health and his recurrent hospitalisation generally all came with statements that could serve as a masterclass in obfuscation and repetitiveness. The phrases “precautionary measure” and “in good spirits” got hauled out with such regularity, you’d think they had a proforma statement on which they just changed the date.
Even during his final hospitalisation two months before his death in 2021, the palace was insisting that it was only “as a precautionary measure” and that he was “in good spirits.”
There is no more glaring example of the palace’s very opaque approach to what it communicates about royal ailments than in the 12 months up to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September last year.
In October 2021, Monarchy HQ tried to keep the fact that the Queen had spent a night in hospital, for the first time in years, under wraps, going so far as to continue flying the Royal Standard over Windsor Castle, rather than lowering as would be usual when Her Majesty was not there. The truth only came out after The Sun did some digging, forcing the palace to reveal the truth.
In October 2021, Monarchy HQ tried to keep hush that the Queen had spent a night in hospital. Photo / AP
Then as Her Majesty pulled out event after event, all the public was told was that she had “episodic mobility issues,” a phrase I typed with such ubiquity during that period I should have come up with some sort of keyboard shortcut.
It was only after her passing that the impeccably connected Gyles Brandreth (who just happens to be chummy with Queen Camilla), and author of the excellent Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait, claimed that Her Majesty had actually been battling myeloma, a rare form of bone marrow cancer. (It’s worth noting that the palace has not uttered a peep of denial or pushback).
Look, I get it, it’s a complex situation. The duality of reigning lies in the idea that sovereigns are both national symbols embedded in the national psyche and flesh and blood human beings with fears, hopes and the occasional runny nose. Balancing the demands of kingship with the privacy of the individual is not a challenge I would ever want.
However, what is as clear cut as the need to exile Prince Andrew to somewhere in the back of Yorkshire and take away his prepaid mobile, is that the question of how courtiers handle communications around royal health is something they need to improve – and quick sticks.
Charles is “only” 74 years old, meaning that if he lives as long as his mother, he will be on the throne until the year 2045. In the coming decades, he and Camilla will very obviously age like other mere mortals, with all the attendant aches, creaky knees and droopy bits that come with ever-advancing years.
King Charles is ‘only’ 74 years old, which means that if he lives as long as Queen Elizabeth, he will be on the throne until the year 2045. Photo / AP
So, what’s the palace’s plan? In an age when the public expect a much higher degree of transparency and openness from their leaders, trotting out the “precautionary measure” and “in good spirits” press releases will go down about as well as Andrew putting the crown’s collection of ivory on eBay.
The good news here is that the Hanoverian Windsor genes generally come with some decent longevity and a tendency towards the hale and hearty. Also, King Charles has given up polo. We wouldn’t want him to have another one of those “tumbles” again.
