The coronation is less than two months away. But how is Charles going to shape up as monarch? Kind, dutiful and happily married (second time around)? Or irascible, insecure and easily frustrated by malfunctioning fountain pens? Hilary Rose reports.
What do the following have in common: alternative medicine, the National Gallery, old huts in the Antarctic, Cumbrian farmers and Patagonian tooth fish? The answer is the King, who has at one time or another expressed strong opinions about all of them. The list could also include most architecture, all farming, red squirrels, badgers and the National Theatre, which Charles once described as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting”. The man who has spent most of our lives, and his, being heir to the throne has finally got the top job, after the longest probation period in employment history. But will he be any good? And apart from badgers, what makes the new king tick?
“I think it would be criminally negligent of me,” the man himself said in 2006, “to go around this country and not actually want to try to do something about what I find there. I think it’s my duty to do so.”
A friend describes Charles as a “driven man, who wants to do as much, with the time he is allotted, to make a real difference”. Charles himself wrote privately to a friend that unless he “rushes about doing things” he feared that both he, and the monarchy, would be seen as irrelevant. But that was as Prince of Wales. Asked a few years ago if he would continue to be as vocal in his opinions from the throne, Charles replied tartly, “I’m not that stupid. I do realise that it is a separate exercise being sovereign.” Elizabeth II said almost nothing in public unless it was scripted, and went to the grave without ever sharing her views on badgers. Her eldest son might find it temperamentally more of a struggle.
Some of the King’s friends compare him to Eeyore, prone to melancholy and self-pity, not to mention the petulance briefly on display during the accession when a fountain pen didn’t work. Many agree that what the Queen, Camilla, excels at — as she did with the pen, stepping in with another — is managing him: cheering him up when he’s glum, indulging him when he needs it, geeing him up when he doesn’t and knowing how and when to persuade him of a particular course of action when his staff have tried and failed. “Leave it with me,” she says to courtiers, with one press secretary describing her as “the final court of appeal”. The interior designer Robert Kime, who decorated various homes for Charles from his bachelor days onwards, said he is like a lighthouse whose beam shines brightly but briefly and then moves on.
The diarist James Lees-Milne often found himself invited to stay at Chatsworth for the weekend with the prince, when Debo Devonshire was in charge, and described Charles as “rather touching, a figure of tragedy with abundant charm”. “Alas,” he added after sitting next to him at dinner on another occasion, “he is too ignorant, groping for something which eludes”. Lord Mandelson told the future king in 1997 that he was seen by the public as being a bit sorry for himself, a bit “glum and dispirited”. The news sent Charles into a monumental funk and showed a recurring character trait in a man so often surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear. He’d invited Mandelson to Balmoral specifically to ask him how he was viewed, but then sulked when he didn’t like the answer.
Tina Brown, the author of The Palace Papers, quotes a member of his Highgrove set saying that the problem with Charles is that he was always desperate for his mother’s approval, “but knew he’d never really get it. He was the wrong sort of person for her — too needy, too vulnerable, too emotional, too complicated, too self-centred. Arts, charitable causes that aren’t wrapped in a rigid sense of duty — it’s all anathema to her.” He is also, his friends might add, kind, serious, dutiful and modest, with a keen sense of humour and the absurd.
The Queen was 22 when Charles was delivered by caesarean section at Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948. The arrival of her son and heir was greeted by a 41-gun salute and the fountains in Trafalgar Square were floodlit blue. A crowd of 4,000 waited outside the palace for news, while inside his father declared with typical candour that the baby looked like a plum pudding.
The plum pudding was brought up entirely by nannies, because by and large that was how the aristocracy thought their children should be brought up. Charles told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that it was nannies, not his parents, who played with him, read to him and watched his first steps, while the Queen ploughed dutifully through her state papers and planted trees. He was taken in to see his mother at 9am sharp, and she would occasionally see him again in the evenings.
“If the Queen had taken half as much trouble about the rearing of her children as she did about the breeding of her horses,” a private secretary remarked drily to Robert Lacey, “the royal family wouldn’t be in such an emotional mess.”
For Charles, his mother was a remote and glamorous figure who, if at all, arrived to say good night dressed for dinner. Nobody really spelt it out to him that he would one day succeed her as king. Instead, he recalled, “It’s something that dawns on you with the most ghastly, inexorable sense. I didn’t wake up in my pram and say, ‘Yippee.’ It just dawns on you slowly that people are interested in one and slowly you get the idea that one has a certain duty and responsibility.”
What one did not have was an emotional hinterland. He grew up feeling “emotionally estranged” from his parents, not to mention emotionally repressed, although Charles might well view emotional repression as a stiff upper lip and class it as an asset. Either way, when the Duke of Sussex wrote in his book, Spare, about the day his mother died, he points out that his father “wasn’t great at showing emotions under normal circumstances, so how could he be expected to show them in such a crisis?” Sitting on his “darling boy’s” bed that morning, Charles patted his knee but couldn’t manage a hug.
If James Lees-Milne thought Charles was not exactly an intellectual giant, at least it wasn’t a failure of education. He’s the first monarch in British history to be educated at a school and the first to hold a university degree, and some of his teachers were more impressed than people who later sat next to him at dinner. An early school report, from Hill House prep in London, described him as “determined but slow, with above-average intelligence”. The headmaster said his young pupil was “full of go, full of physical courage — a damned good lad”.
In 1962 the lad went north to Gordonstoun, against the better judgment of his grandmother who thought, correctly, that he would hate it and lobbied unsuccessfully for Eton. Charles spent five years at Gordonstoun and loathed every one of them. While his father, Philip, had found the school challenging and invigorating, with its focus on bracing activities in the freezing Highlands, the more delicate and artistically minded Charles found it intolerable. One of his classmates admitted recently that, “He was badly bullied and very isolated. On the rugby pitch, you could see it. There were a couple of people who said they would ‘do’ Prince Charles and they would beat him up in the scrum, pull his ears and thump him.” Charles has since admitted that he “didn’t enjoy school as much as I might have” and sent both of his own sons to Eton, but he did credit his time in Scotland with developing his willpower and self-control. Privately, in a letter, he described the school as “absolute hell”.
After Gordonstoun, his father decided that Charles still needed toughening up, although for what exactly is unclear. He was dispatched to the Australian outback and, as the Times royal correspondent Valentine Low recounts in his book Courtiers, Charles’s six-month stay there was the making of him, chopping wood, nursing blisters and trying to master the boomerang. His equerry in Australia remarked that he went out with a boy and returned with a man. He enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge to read archaeology and anthropology, switched to history, and graduated in 1970 with a 2:2.
While still a student, he was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in a ceremony partly designed and organised by Lord Snowdon, for the eccentric reason that his aviary at London Zoo was judged a great success. As the monarchy grappled with how to present itself in the 20th century and the Swinging Sixties drew to a close, Charles faced his mother at Caernarfon dressed as a medieval prince. The Queen, handbag as ever at the ready, sat on a throne with a precautionary umbrella propped against it, colour co-ordinated with her outfit. She later told Noël Coward that she was trying not to laugh, because at the rehearsal the crown was too big and went straight over her son’s head like a candle snuffer. According to Snowdon, Charles was extremely nervous ahead of the ceremony, while Tina Brown claimed that an eight-year-old Lady Diana Spencer watched the investiture on television and was “spellbound by the romance of the pageantry and the man at the centre of it”.
After his final year at Cambridge, Diana’s future husband trained as a jet pilot in the RAF and a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy, then left the armed forces in 1976. And that was when the trouble began.
The sole point of Charles’s life, the reason for his very existence, was held in abeyance until his mother died. Until then, what to do? When Charles and Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson became friends with him in the Seventies, they thought he was the loneliest human being they had ever met.
“My great problem in life,” he told the Cambridge Union Society a couple of years later, in 1978, “is that I do not know what my role in life is. At the moment I do not have one. But somehow I must find one.” While he did that, he cut a glamorous figure on polo fields and out hunting (his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby makes the observation that all his passions as a young man involved death: hunting, shooting and fishing). He was dubbed the most eligible bachelor in Britain, the dashing action man heir to the throne. But there was no job description for the Prince of Wales, he complained, so he had to make it up as he went along.
What he made up was the Prince’s Trust, and what he started doing was speaking out: the perils of upsetting the balance of nature; the evils of modern architecture; the dangers of plastic; the advisability of talking to plants. Apparently nothing was off limits to a man who once said, “I don’t see why politicians and others should think they have the monopoly on wisdom.” Over the years he has spoken passionately about small farmers, big business, urban planning and forests. Dissatisfied with modern architecture, he built his own model village, Poundbury, in Dorset, to antiquated ideals, some argued, and mixed reviews.
He has launched schools for artists, teachers, architects and artisans, and written dozens of letters to government ministers. They became known as the “black spider memos” after some of them were published following a long battle by the government to keep them private. With the Prince’s Trust he wanted to focus on children who’d been written off: who were homeless, on the dole or had failed at school. The Trust once gave a £1,500 grant to an aspiring actor called Idris Elba to help launch his career.
The King starts his days in a particular way. He is up before 7am, to find the day’s papers laid out for him on a tray. He sips tea from a bone china cup. In the background, the radio is tuned to the Today programme. He may take the opportunity to do a headstand in his boxer shorts, for the benefit of his spine, or he may save that for later. He dresses in a bespoke suit from his Savile Row tailor, a bespoke shirt from his Jermyn Street shirtmaker and bespoke shoes from his cobbler. He douses himself in Eau Sauvage and breakfasts on seasonal fruit, seeds and yoghurt. At 8am he starts on his paperwork. The day has begun.
Engagements run from 10am-5pm, when he stops for a sandwich and a piece of cake, having once proclaimed, somewhat histrionically, “I can’t function if I have lunch.” After tea he carries on working, breaks for dinner, served at 8.30pm sharp, then works again from 10pm until midnight. His diary for the next six months is put together twice a year with military precision and crafted around invitations from patronages and charities, military affiliations and state occasions: Remembrance Sunday, the state opening of parliament, Trooping the Colour. The Queen once said that one of their greatest pleasures was simply being in the same room, reading.
“He’s a demanding boss because he’s very demanding of himself,” one of his staff told Valentine Low. He could be at turns indecisive and stubborn, with an explosive temper, a man who would kick furniture in his rage. He had no interest in hearing criticism and no intention of acting on it. He yearned to be recognised for his efforts on everything from organic farming to climate change, and sought out people who agreed with him rather than challenged him. One dinner companion realised that he became actively annoyed if challenged. He cherished the role of convener, however, bringing people together to solve whichever passion on which the lighthouse beam was shining.
He suffered from terrible nerves before giving speeches on controversial topics and often had second thoughts once he’d done it. “It would be so much easier to lead a quiet life,” he wrote in a letter in 1989. However, his sympathetic biographer Robert Jobson concluded that it was his “constitutional duty” as heir to the throne to draw attention to topics on which his position might have given him an insight, for example on climate change, organic farming or youth empowerment. Jobson argues that, as such, he isn’t interfering, but showing leadership. A High Court judge disagreed, rebuking the prince for his “unexpected and unwelcome” intervention in the design process for a development in Chelsea. Charles disapproved of the plans put forward to the Qatari developers by the Richard Rogers Partnership, and made that clear to his friends the Qatari prime minster and ruling family. A furious Rogers said that Charles had single-handedly and unconstitutionally destroyed the project and called for an inquiry into his interference in other areas including medicine and farming. “I don’t think he is evil per se,” Rogers said. “He is just misled.
Back in the seventies, as the decade drew to a close, what Charles needed wasn’t friends in Qatar but a wife. He first met Camilla Parker Bowles in 1971, although there are two stories as to exactly how: one is that she propositioned him at a polo match; the other is that they were introduced by Lucia Santa Cruz, a mutual friend who had known Charles since Cambridge — and took his virginity — and who now lived in the flat above Camilla’s. Charles and Camilla dated for a while, but Camilla was infatuated with her on-off boyfriend, a dashing army officer called Andrew Parker Bowles (who is allegedly at peace with rumours that he was the inspiration for Rupert Campbell-Black, the handsome, charming bastard in Jilly Cooper’s novels). Camilla may even, some suspect, have dated Charles to make Parker Bowles jealous, or as tit for tat after her boyfriend had a fling with Princess Anne.
Either way, while Charles was away for eight months with the navy, Parker Bowles proposed and Camilla said yes. “I suppose the feelings of emptiness will pass eventually,” Charles wrote to a friend. Tina Brown argues that Camilla then “deftly” wove Charles into her life with her unfaithful husband as an insurance policy, making him godfather to their first child, keeping alive the sexual chemistry and vetting potential brides for their suitability and how much of a threat they posed to her. At one ball, when Charles was dating someone Camilla didn’t consider suitable, she is said to have snogged him passionately on the dancefloor. The unsuitable girlfriend duly departed in a huff, never to be seen again. “HRH is very fond of my wife,” drawled Andrew Parker Bowles, “and she appears to be very fond of him.”
Meanwhile Charles worried, with good reason, that he wasn’t taken seriously and was seen as a playboy prince. Martin Charteris, an adviser to the Queen, said her son was perceived as someone devoted only to “hunting, shooting, polo and fornicating”. His uncle Lord Mountbatten, ever alert to the chance of a giant leap up the social ladder, was keen for Charles to marry his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull. There was no chemistry, but he duly proposed when she was 21. She turned him down flat, citing intrusion, unwanted publicity and what she called “the surrender of self to a system”. It left him believing, Sally Bedell Smith writes, that marrying into the Windsors was “a sacrifice that no one should be expected to make”.
“Marriage is basically a strong friendship,” Charles once said, “so I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share.” By the time he met the teenage Lady Diana Spencer, those interests included daily cold showers, historical biographies and books on anthropology, psychology and sociology. His musical tastes ran to Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi. L’enfance du Christ by Berlioz made him cry. Their 13th date was also their wedding. He was 32, she was 19 and it was obvious, a friend said, that they were incompatible. The bride’s own grandmother thought she was “unsuitable and unreliable” but she fitted, or at least Charles thought she did, the bridal template pushed by Mountbatten for a sweet-natured virgin. According to Bedell Smith, Penny Romsey, the wife of Mountbatten’s grandson, warned Charles against the marriage on the grounds that Diana appeared to be “auditioning for a central role in a costume drama”. But on July 29, 1981, the Archbishop of Canterbury talked about the stuff of fairytales, and how marriage was a life-long partnership nourished by shared joy. Alas, the marriage was none of the above, but the route was lined by 600,000 people and 1 billion more watched on TV around the world and sighed happily at the romance.
“The royal family of England pulls off ceremonies the way the Israeli army pulls off commando raids,” wrote an admiring Boston Globe. Diana described it as “the most emotionally confusing day of my life”. Six years later the groom wrote to a friend, “How could I have got it all so wrong?”
In Battle of Brothers, Robert Lacey argues that for Charles the marriage was “essentially a business proposition” about succession, not love. Diana later told Andrew Morton that she felt “like a lamb to the slaughter”. A furious row is said to have erupted at the start of the honeymoon, on the Royal Yacht Britannia, when two photos of Camilla fell out of Charles’s diary. Continuing the honeymoon at Balmoral, Charles took his young bride on long walks and talked to her about Jung.
His working life continued unabated. In 1982 he told off the British Medical Association for its “outright hostility” to alternative treatments and cited Paracelsus, a 16th-century healer. The year after, he scolded the Royal Agricultural College, citing farmers’ use of herbicides and pesticides and the depletion of fossil fuels for fertiliser. Farmers should, he said, be making “more effective use of renewable resources”. A couple of years later he was on the case of genetically modified foods, warning that man was “experimenting Frankenstein-like with the very stuff of life”. He didn’t help his attempts to be taken seriously when he announced that he talked to his plants “and they respond”. Besides, all anyone was interested in was his wife, and it irked. By the time Prince William was born in June 1982, their incompatibility had become painfully obvious. While some of Charles’s friends thought he should be tough with what they saw as self-indulgent histrionics, Charles realised that Dina’s misery was at least partly due to the scrutiny and attention while she was pregnant with a future heir to the throne.
“I feel desperate for Diana,” he wrote in a letter. “How can anyone, let alone a 21-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?”
Diana was quite simply unwell, in ways that Charles was totally unequipped to deal with, and long before mental ill health was taken seriously. Sympathetic biographers argue that he tried hard, with well-meaning but hopeless interventions. He instructed the American ambassador’s wife to invite young people to a dinner, people Diana might enjoy meeting, and to seat her next to an astronaut. He asked the headmaster of Eton to give her lessons on poetry and Shakespeare, in an effort to broaden her horizons. Family and friends failed to convince her that she needed proper diagnosis and treatment for problems that she later said included paranoia, acute anxiety, depression, self-harm and eating disorders. In the end, Tina Brown argues, Charles’s needs had always been met by other people and Diana’s were “unappeasable. He had neither the ability nor the inclination to try to answer them.”
“How awful incompatibility is,” Charles wrote to a friend in 1986. “How dreadfully destructive it can be.”
He was jealous of the attention lavished on Diana wherever she went and whatever she did, complaining bitterly in 1987 that the press were only interested in running stories about his marriage, as opposed, perhaps, to his trip to a youth club on a wet Monday in Aberdeen. He was determined, he said, to have an “active role” and not just unveil plaques. In a strange forewarning of Harry and Meghan, he told a group of newspaper editors, “I’ve had to fight every inch of my life to escape royal protocol.” While the charismatic, glamorous Diana was shaking hands with Aids patients and manipulating her press coverage like a seasoned PR professional, Charles looked like a boring old fuddy-duddy. The result was that, behind closed doors, William and Harry were brought up in an unhappy home by warring parents who were prone to shouting, sullen silences, vicious arguments and tears. According to one infamous story, William was seven when he pushed tissues under the bathroom door to his weeping mother and told her, “I hate to see you sad.” At school, he took it out on others and was known as Basher Wills. A nanny described the atmosphere at home as at best difficult to deal with, at worst toxic.
“I hate you, Papa, I hate you so much,” William once shouted. “Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?”
By the time Patrick Jephson arrived in 1988, as Diana’s private secretary, he found the marriage was “largely a sham”. Diana later said that it effectively ended four years before, with the birth of Prince Harry. She had had flings and romances, while Charles and Camilla became an open secret in their discreet inner circle, many of whom were in the happy position of owning vast stately homes at which the lovers could tryst. The infamous Camillagate phone call between Charles and Camilla was recorded the following year, in 1989, but only hit the headlines four years later. When The Sun set up a phone hotline asking its readers if it should publish the full transcript, 21,000 people said yes.
By that point, Charles and Diana were separated but not divorced. Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story had just been published and the Queen had spoken in her Christmas broadcast of her annus horribilis. Diana lied that she knew nothing about the book, Camilla lied that she knew “nothing more than the average person on the street” about the Waleses’ divorce, and Charles became an object of ridicule for talking about being a tampon inside his married lover. His approval rating in February 1993 was 4 per cent, with 38 per cent of the public thinking he should never be king, and his suitability for the role questioned by senior government officials. Barely more than a decade previously, pre-Diana, 70 per cent of respondents thought he was the most likeable member of the royal family, far more than his mother. His 1994 broadcast interview, in which he admitted adultery, was a public relations disaster. It was compounded by Diana’s interview the following year with Martin Bashir, in which she basically said he was unfit to be king and would find being monarch “suffocating”. Overall, between 1991 and 1996 the percentage of people who thought Charles would be a good king fell by half, to 41 per cent.
The late nineties were a turbulent time for the royal family, not just Charles. Thanks to the very public marital problems of Fergie and Andrew, as well as Charles and Diana, its popularity was at a low ebb. Celebrations for the Queen’s 70th birthday were minimal. Ben Pimlott, biographer of Elizabeth II, writes that Charles was generally seen as an unsuitable heir to the throne, with eccentric hobbies and public obsessions. With Diana a global superstar, Charles’s ongoing relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles was a festering wound on his reputation, a constant reminder that there had been three of them in the marriage. In one TV debate in 1997, any mention of Camilla was met by boos and hisses from the 3,000-strong audience. True, that same year Charles threw a 50th birthday party for her at Highgrove and led her onto the dancefloor to Dancing Queen. But his mother thought he would either have to renounce Camilla or the throne, and his grandmother would have nothing whatsoever to do with her.
For Charles, though, she was non-negotiable. The novelist Jilly Cooper, a near-neighbour of Camilla’s in Wiltshire, has said that the couple share a sense of humour and laugh together “a huge amount. Camilla’s ability to see the funny side of life has made an enormous difference over the years.” For his part, Charles was obsessed with rehabilitating his public image and in winning public acceptance of Camilla, whom Tina Brown describes as “sexual and emotional comfort food” for the king. “Camilla stops the pompous thing with Charles,” a friend told Brown, adding that she put up with his endless whingeing about how underappreciated he was and his “self-pitying paranoia”.
At her behest, Mark Bolland was hired to rehabilitate Camilla and end the so-called War of the Waleses, a public and bitter slanging match conducted through the pages of the national press. Bolland’s skill at planting and killing stories earned him the nickname Blackadder from the young princes William and Harry. The Blackadder analogy went even further than they intended, as Charles’s court was said to be medieval in its modus operandi, with secretaries still refusing to use computers and Charles replying to emails by letter. But all Bolland’s attempts to sidle Camilla into the literal picture came to a juddering halt with the death of Diana.
According to Robert Lacey, Charles’s immediate reaction was self-pity — “They’re all going to blame me” – then to fret down the phone to his private secretary that the fallout could destroy the monarchy. By the time Harry wrote Spare, he was painting Charles as so devoid of emotion that he couldn’t even hug him, but long before Megxit the Duke of Sussex was more generous. “He was there for us,” he once said of his father. “He was the one out of the two left and he tried to do his best and to make sure we were protected and looked after.”
The fact was, though, that nothing in his temperament or upbringing had prepared him for single parenthood, so he largely outsourced the job to others, immersing himself in his work and his mistress. Although today the monarchy is riding high on the glamorous new Prince and Princess of Wales and their three small children, at the turn of the century, Tina Brown argues, a “damp melancholy” and “deep dullness” had settled over it. The Queen had been crystal clear that the monarchy must never again be outshone by any one member and, once the dust had settled over Diana’s death, solid, dependable, middle-aged Camilla could at least tick that box.
Yet Charles had still not married her. To be sure, there were plenty of things she liked about being his mistress, not his wife, not least never having to travel in a helicopter. But she had been divorced a long time now and was in a precarious position unless her long-time lover put a ring on it. However, in typically aristocratic fashion, it was reported that her patience finally snapped because of the seating plan at a society wedding. While Charles was guest of honour, Camilla discovered in advance that she was to be placed not just below the salt, but in social Siberia, the seating equivalent of another room entirely. She put her foot down. Charles must go without her or not go at all. Needless to say, he didn’t go. Meanwhile, her 87-year-old father turned the screw on the dithering prince by effectively telling him to make an honest woman of his daughter.
As for the Queen, she had by now come to the view that since Camilla wasn’t going to go away, she might as well be welcomed. Charles proposed on bended knee at Birkhall, his home on the Balmoral estate, and the ceremony took place in Windsor in 2005. Andrew Parker Bowles was said to have behaved like the mother of the bride and the Queen, after giving a warm speech, spent most of the reception watching the Grand National. Jonathan Dimbleby writes that “in Camilla Parker Bowles, the prince found the warmth, the understanding and the steadiness for which he had always longed”.
Steadiness in a royal partner was all very well, but what the royal family also needed was an antidote to the damp melancholy, an injection of youth, fun and glamour. In the maturing princes William and Harry, it got both. In 2011, Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton was a PR triumph for the family, albeit not entirely unalloyed for Charles, who went on a tour of Australia shortly before the event. When he got back, a poll found that 60 per cent of Aussies thought the throne should pass straight to William. However, in the meantime, the Queen was still very much in charge. At the Diamond Jubilee the following year, and in the years since, Charles has been able to play the doting grandfather, dandling his young grandson, Louis, on his knee during the Platinum Jubilee and reading bedtime stories to Camilla’s grandchildren.
As monarch he will have to cure his Achillies’ heel, which as Prince of Wales was courting what his father called “foreign toadies”, many of them in the Gulf, who might donate money to his various charitable causes. One despairing secretary-general of the Commonwealth told biographer Tom Bower, “Why does he prefer to meet dictators and not democratically elected leaders of the Commonwealth?” He borrowed a fortune to buy Dumfries House, a stately home in Scotland, which he wanted to refurbish and turn into a force for good in the local community. It landed him in a cash for honours scandal thanks to the dubious activities of his long-time fixer, Michael Fawcett, who resigned — and not for the first time.
On the one hand, the King has enough emotional intelligence to send handwritten letters to strangers who are bereaved or bereft. On the other, he seemingly couldn’t even bring himself to hug Harry the day his mother died. He is a kind man with a terrible temper, a visionary who sometimes cannot see beyond his own navel, and a man who delights in hunting and shooting but told his future daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle, that he couldn’t bear to think of any animal suffering. (For her part, Meghan told Harry that she found his father “welcoming, warm, hard-working, kind and stable”.) He’s sufficiently engaged with the real world that he set up the Prince’s Trust, but so detached from reality that he thought Lucian Freud might be up for a painting swap: one of his for one of Charles’s watercolours. And he is so tone deaf to the feelings of friends that he turns up to dinner parties with his own martini and to house parties with his own furnishings. The Palace Papers recounts how the arrival of Charles for the weekend was often preceded by a lorry delivering his bed, furniture and pictures, the hanging of which would be overseen by Fawcett. The hostess would be told what he would like to eat, and his police protection officer would accompany him to dinner carrying the royal martini, which would be handed to the butler to serve to the prince.
While the Queen was famously thrifty, with one-bar electric fires and Tupperware containers, Charles models his domestic life more on that of his grandmother, who kept four homes permanently staffed, drank so much vintage pink champagne that she was Veuve Cliquot’s biggest private client, and summoned staff at mealtimes by ringing a Fabergé pearl bell. Like hers, Charles’s homes are cluttered, with one friend calling him an outright hoarder. Clarence House and Birkhall, both remodelled for Charles by Robert Kime after the Queen Mother’s death, are a riot of rugs, cushions, tassels, swags, pelmets, paintings, china, ornaments, books and serried ranks of silver-framed photos on cloth-covered tables.
Having taken the job of his lifetime when way past retirement age, Charles has long lived in the shadow of others: his mother, his first wife and now his warring sons and their glamorous other halves. At his father’s 70th birthday party in 2018, Harry gave a generous speech in which he described Charles’s energy and enthusiasm as “truly infectious”. The role Charles carved out for himself as Prince of Wales was one of what he saw as action, and others sometimes saw as meddling. Still, he told his press secretary phlegmatically, it was better to be criticised for doing something than nothing. Kings, however, are more defined by their inaction, by the virtue of being, not doing, and definitely not saying.
“It is perseverance that counts,” he said in a speech 50 years ago, “even if you are frustrated 10 or 20 times over. The only trouble about this is that it requires effort, willpower and discipline.”
And a fountain pen that works.
Written by: Hilary Rose
© The Times of London