In the early 1990s, the then Prince Charles had lunch with Sir Max Hastings, then editor of The Daily Telegraph.
When Hastings suggested that Charles, facing the crisis of his broken marriage, should show moral courage, the prince banged his fist on the table, rattling the silver, saying, “Nobody but me can possibly understand how perfectly bloody it is to be Prince of Wales.”
Hastings said the prince was then consumed with self-pity. But the crisis of his first marriage and the tragic death of his first wife have, more than two decades on, been eclipsed by a happy second marriage. And, for all his sadness at the death of his adored mother, he now, at last, aged 74, has the job he has been training for all his life.
As he limbers up for his coronation this Saturday, he can’t, though, entirely escape the effects of his remote upbringing and his cantankerous character.
We had two glimpses of that cantankerous side just after the Queen’s death. During his official accession at St James’s Palace, an irritated King twice told his aide to remove a silver pen holder in his way. “I can’t bear this bloody thing… every stinking time,” he cried three days later, when his pen leaked on signing the visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle, Northern Ireland.
Where does this grumpiness come from? Well, partly it’s from a lifetime of pampering as the heir to the throne. Wherever he travels, his bed is flown out with him. A cushion is laid on chairs below the royal posterior at public events. A valet mixes his Martinis to his own specification.
The Queen was never fussy. But, then again, she wasn’t born expecting to come to the throne, as Charles was destined to do from his birth in 1948. It was only at the age of 10, in 1936, with the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, that her destiny as monarch was set. By then, her character, as laid out by her nanny, Marion Crawford, aka Crawfie, in her diary, The Little Princesses, had been fully formed: dutiful, modest, hard-working, uncomplaining.
The young Princess Elizabeth had had the benefit of the close, loving attention of her parents, George VI and the Queen Mother, before their heavy destiny fell on her shoulders.
Young Charles, although beloved by his parents, had a much more difficult childhood. When he was only three, his mother came to the throne and suddenly became the most famous person in the world, at the age of only 25, in 1952.
That overpowering sense of duty to her God-given fate, as she saw it, meant her adored children had to take a back seat. When Charles was only five, his parents went on a four-month tour of Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand and Australia. Princess Anne suffered from the same absence, of course, being less than two years her brother’s junior. But she never faced his mountainous responsibilities.
It didn’t help that Charles’s education was full of grim, unrelenting misery. His great fame made him a target for bullying at Cheam and Gordonstoun. Those were the same schools his father, Prince Philip, attended. Therein lies the problem. Like many a father who loved his school, Prince Philip made the mistake of thinking his son would love it, too.
But Prince Philip had reacted to his own rackety childhood, transplanted from his native Greece, the son of unhappily married parents, to become extremely tough – positively relishing the austere, cold showers and muddy sports fields of public school. His son was a sensitive soul, who desperately needed mothering and the buttresses of comfort and consolation.
Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, said he “could see that Charles was a terribly sensitive boy who was going to come up against a lot of problems, and he thought he should help him not to take to heart a lot of the things that children take to heart, and not rush to pick him up every time he fell over and say, ‘Oh dear, dear have you hurt yourself’ but rather, ‘Oh come on, that’s not so bad.’ I’m sure he just wanted to help make his character more robust … but in retrospect I think he overdid it sometimes and perhaps he was a bit untactful.”
Prince Philip rejoiced in the things Charles hated. He said in a preface to a history of Cheam: “Children may be indulged at home but school is expected to be a spartan and disciplined experience in the process of developing into self-controlled, considerate and independent adults.”
Charles went on to hate Gordonstoun, which he called a “hellhole”. Things were slightly better for him at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he got involved with his beloved amateur dramatics. He made friends, too, including Richard Chartres, later Bishop of London. Lord Chartres is still a friend today and, at the coronation, will carry the Queen Consort’s ring and present the Queen Consort’s sceptre.
But, at Cambridge, too, Charles remained a soul apart from the other undergraduates. He always had his private detective alongside him. And there was always a suggestion he hadn’t got into Cambridge on merit, given his A-Level results: a B and a C in history and French. In his finals, he scraped a 2:2 in history, archaeology and anthropology.
And so, via his childhood, you can piece together the essential amalgam of his character: a shy, kind, slightly lost soul, seeking approval, later bathed in a damagingly comforting, warm bath of flattery and privilege.
You end up with his touching levels of self-deprecation – really the pride that apes humility. He has become so used to flattery and getting his way that, when he doesn’t get it – like with those badly behaved pens – he lashes out.
An adviser of his – now sadly dead – told me he’d once gently disagreed with the prince on public policy. The prince exploded: “I do not see the point of employing advisers who disagree with me.” This adviser realised his role had become pointless and politely handed in his notice a few months later.
But that was long before Charles became King. He, more than anyone, knows how drastically his life had to change when he came to the throne. In 2018, he was asked if he would be an activist king. “I’m not that stupid,” he said, with a touch of his customary petulance. “You can’t be the same as the sovereign if you’re the Prince of Wales or the heir. But the idea somehow that I’m going to go on in exactly the same way if I have to succeed, is complete nonsense because the two situations are completely different.”
Thus far in his reign, he has indeed changed. Apart from those stinking pen eruptions, he has fulfilled his constitutional role, as a monarch who must stand back from the fray, political or otherwise.
Charles III, a Shakespeare fan, will know the famous Henry IV quotation in Henry IV, Part II: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” In his case, his head has been strangely less uneasy ever since it took on the burden of the crown.
Harry Mount is the co-author, with John Davie, of Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury, £14.99)
