A Brief History of the House of Windsor (30 page)

He was born on 21 June 1982, and has naturally been the subject of close public interest ever since. Just as he is the product of a home in which two such different people tried to live
together, so his background and nature represent a blend of the two cultures – the traditional and the modern, the old and the new – to which he was exposed. Shortly after his parents divorced, an American magazine commented that a glance at the clothes worn by the two boys would indicate which of their parents had had custody of them that day. With their father they wore tweeds, or blazers, and ties, while with Diana they were dressed in baseball caps and sweatshirts. While with him they went to shoots and to the Guards Polo Club; she took them to have hamburgers at Ed’s Diner in the King’s Road and on funfair rides at Alton Towers. However much this may cause traditionalists to shake their heads, it looks as if she succeeded in giving them a hefty dose of normal childhood experiences. In addition she ensured that they learned about the other side of life by, for instance, having them accompany her on night-time visits to the rough sleepers on the Embankment. She gave both her sons a sense of duty toward the less fortunate that has later been manifested in the charity work they undertake.

She also enabled them to suffer the occasional frustrations of ordinary life. To cite one example out of many, she took the boys on an unscheduled visit to the Imperial War Museum in London. One of the attractions there is The Blitz Experience, a simulated Second World War air raid. Visitors sit crammed into a shelter while appropriate sound effects can be heard outside. The ground shakes, and there is the smell of cordite and of burning. It is realistic and popular. When Diana and the boys arrived, museum staff explained that there was a lengthy queue for the shelter but offered to take them straight in. Diana refused to inconvenience people who had waited their turn, and the boys went home without seeing it. This too can have done them nothing but good.

In the ‘culture war’ between tradition and modernity it was always going to be the former that won. William had from the beginning a strong sense of duty and this was nurtured by the influence of the queen (who regularly invited
him to tea at Windsor while he was at school across the river), Prince Philip, Prince Charles and the Queen Mother. His
own
mother, whatever her views on the rest of her husband’s family, also wanted him to be a good king. He has, all his life, had access to good advice and good example. The surroundings in which he has grown up are the kind that stir the imagination and impart a sense of history and duty and of privilege that must be earned. He has responded to this, as has his brother, by choosing a career of service, and in both cases this has won the approval of the public. If, instead, he had wanted to be a craftsman and furniture designer like Viscount Linley, would it have made much difference? Probably not. The important thing is that he is a decent young man seeking to earn his way, and to achieve a sense of personal worth through what he does before his future catches up with him.

William is nothing like his father was at a similar age, but he is comfortable in a world of tradition and ceremonial and conservative, guards-officer values. He pursues hobbies – the polo and shooting to which he was introduced by Charles have become his passions too – that are typical of the class to which his mother belonged. He looks relaxed in tweeds and suits and uniforms. He loves the armed forces and, having been in all three of them, has had intensive experience in two. It has always been obvious, too, that his involvement is more than merely cosmetic. He relishes the chance to know and to work with members of other classes. Significantly the Service in which William feels most at home is the most relatively democratic of them – the Royal Air Force. He is genuinely interested in his job and in continuing with it for as long as he can. He sees it as a career, though it is very likely it will come to an end as soon as his father succeeds and he himself becomes Prince of Wales, if not before.

His upbringing has been entirely different from his father’s. While Charles was the son of an affectionate but preoccupied reigning sovereign, William’s parents were both affectionate
and available. He had from the beginning – and without any debate in the media – the opportunity to go to normal, if private, schools, attending a nearby day school then a boarding prep school followed by a major public school. He does not appear to have suffered in the way that Charles did from bullying or from others’ fear of being seen to toady. He has a circle of friends who seem entirely average and more varied than one might think, although he could be expected to be most comfortable within the social class in which his background and interests lie.

In the case of William and Harry there was no formal committee to decide the course their education would take, regardless of their natural inclinations or abilities. Rather the priority was to give them an experience that was conventional and as sheltered as possible from both the media and the responsibilities of public life. There was, for instance, some talk of William attending with his father the handover of Hong Kong in June 1997. This was one of the major public events of the decade, but he said he did not yet feel ready for such duties, and it was left at that.

The choice of Eton for both boys’ secondary education was surprising – and disappointing – to some who might have hoped for a less predictable, or conventional path. Though Gordonstoun has naturally featured in recent royal history, Charles’s memories of his own time there are likely to have been decisive when it came to choosing his sons’ school even though William, a more robust and less thoughtful young man than his father was, might ironically have fitted in better there. Eton, however, is not only a royal foundation but the school which some of his relatives – James Ogilvy, and Lord Frederick Windsor – had recently attended. It was particularly favoured by the Queen Mother, and Diana’s father and brother had also been there. There was never, as far as is known, any serious suggestion that they should go to a local comprehensive school. The populist gestures made by the monarchy tend to be rather smaller and more subtle than that.

William managed the Common Entrance exam successfully; Harry found it more of a struggle. The school, whatever its historical associations with aristocracy, is academically very hard to get into and perhaps even harder to stay in. It requires its pupils, who have to learn to organize their time for themselves, to work according to personal motivation and not the demands of staff. There is such a heavy workload to get through that there is no time for idleness, and to keep up requires constant, sustained effort. It had been thought that Harry might be happier at Radley College, which is nearby, but he enrolled in the same house at the same school as William.

It cannot have helped either boy that during this formative time of their lives their parents divorced, the newspapers were filled with highly personal – and deeply embarrassing – revelations, and that many members of the public took sides with either their father or mother. After that, in the late summer of 1997, their mother suddenly died just as they were about to return to school, and they were required to attend their first official funeral. Though they naturally garnered immense public sympathy their father was vilified and they must have been aware of it too. At least their mother’s death had ended a protracted and upsetting feud between their parents that would surely otherwise have carried on for many years to come.

Both of them spent happy years at Eton. Set in water meadows in the shadow of Windsor Castle, a cluster of venerable ancient buildings that represent probably the most historic few acres of English ground apart from Westminster, it would be a difficult place to dislike. William kept up with his academic work and excelled at sports, becoming ‘Keeper’, or Captain, of the water polo team. He ended his career as Captain of his house and a member of ‘Pop’, the gorgeously dressed prefectorial society. He did well enough in his A-levels (C in biology, B in history of art and A in geography) to go on to university.

Harry too found his forte, in the school’s Combined Cadet Force. Destined by inclination to be a soldier, he followed this path and won the Sword of Honour for best cadet. Both princes played polo. Both grew up to be ordinary, pleasant young men.

William’s education may have been ‘elitist’, but the process of applying to university and spending a gap year put him through the same experiences as thousands of other young men and women, and his life was at least comparable with theirs. His spent time doing military training in Belize, went to East Africa, and spent weeks in Chile with Raleigh International, sleeping in a communal room and carrying out chores that included cleaning the lavatory. He never complained about discomfort or hard work. People are now so accustomed to the notion that royalty are just like the rest of us that no one expected him to do other than ‘muck in’.

It was similarly taken for granted, given the furore that had erupted when Prince Edward sought to go to Cambridge, that the notion of waving royalty through the gate without the need for proper qualifications was now over. Any member of the family who arrived at university under such circumstances would never have achieved credibility or respect. William had, in any case, another opportunity here to step outside the gilded world in which he had lived and try something new.

St Andrews, a small university on the east coast of Scotland, is a comfortable distance from Fleet Street, and indeed from any major city. Until recently it seemed half-forgotten, frozen in time. Founded six hundred years ago, it is the oldest in Britain after Oxford and Cambridge, and like them it is not a ‘campus’ university but a series of colleges scattered through the town. It is a place of high winds, high gables, narrow alleys, cobbled streets, ivy-covered walls and lamp-lit quadrangles. St Salvator’s Hall, in which both William and Kate Middleton were to live, is all panelling and mullioned windows and founders’ portraits set in stained glass As an
environment, the town is magnificent. It has sea, cliffs, and a harbour as quaint as anything in Cornwall. There are long miles of golden beach, immortalized in the opening scene of the film
Chariots of Fire
. There are romantic ancient ruins, the rolling greensward of the world’s most famous golf links, and vistas of distant, snow-capped mountains.

Socially, St Andrews is an unusual community. Lacking the diversions of a large city, cut off from the rest of the world, its student body becomes unusually close-knit. Surprising numbers of them form a very strong bond with both the place and their fellow students, sharing a sense of privilege at attending this university – a feeling of being in on a secret no one else knows. More of them marry each other than in any other British university, and after graduation they often continue the sense of fraternity that to outsiders seems like smug clique-ishness. St Andrews is unlike the other Scottish universities in that it has for a long time recruited its student body from far afield. It is so full of wealthy and public school-educated English that many Scots do not think of it as belonging to their country at all – a feeling that can be borne out by listening to the accents in the streets on any given day. It also attracts significant numbers of wealthy American ‘preppies’, and in many ways seems like an annexe of the Ivy League.

It was not as unfamiliar a place to William as many people might suppose. One of his cousins – the eldest son of the Duke of Kent – holds the title Earl of St Andrews. Another cousin, James Ogilvy, attended the university in the 1980s. William’s housemaster at school, Andrew Gailey, had been at St Andrews, as had the headmaster, Eric Anderson. The first Old Etonian to attend the university did so in the 1790s, and in recent generations – at least since the sixties – there has been a well-beaten path between the school and the university. When William arrived, he had half a dozen old acquaintances at his elbow, all the time. He soon made new ones too. Though his circle remained largely that of the rich
and privately educated, he had a certain ‘blokishness’ – a no-nonsense expectation that he would be treated like anyone else – that disarmed both snobs and critics. His fellow students gave him the codename ‘Steve’ so that eavesdropping journalists might not be aware of who was being discussed in pubs or coffee shops. The townspeople proved extremely protective, leaving him to wander the streets unpestered, and brushing aside the questions of any journalists in search of anecdotes. When he met Kate Middleton, they were able to pursue their friendship in private for a considerable time.

They graduated on the same day. William, with his upper second in geography, was dubbed ‘the brainiest royal ever’ by the press, and both his grandparents attended the ceremony. The next phase of his life would be devoted to the military. Harry, who was never university material, had already gone to Sandhurst. William was to join him there and, being junior, would have to salute him. Both of them thrived in this disciplined environment. They passed out successfully and their grandmother attended the graduation parades.

In what has become a militaristic age, dominated by foreign wars, both princes have kept entirely in step with the public mood as well as with family tradition by serving in the armed forces. The unprompted choice of both has been to join the Army or the Royal Air Force, as a long-term career and not merely as a time-filling activity for a few years. (William did initially sign up for a three-year commission, but extended it.) This has fitted in particularly well with a climate of opinion that expects royals to pay their way.

The determination of both of them to run the same risks as their comrades is well documented. Prince Harry succeeded in serving most of a tour in Afghanistan with his regiment, and is known to have trained as a helicopter pilot because this represents his best prospect of getting back into action. In the autumn of 2012 he succeeded in returning to ‘theatre’. William, whose senior position in the line of succession makes it impossible for him to undertake a tour of duty, has found
another highly useful, and acceptable, form of risk-taking. After undergoing training with the Royal Navy, he was seconded to the Army Air Corps and, presumably bitten by the flying bug, he transferred in 2009 to the RAF. Not only has this demonstrated commitment and enterprise, it has won him international plaudits (when he saved a Russian trawlerman he was thanked by the country’s president) and enabled him to live a more-or-less ordinary life in North Wales. In the Service he uses the name William Wales, which has given rise to his punning nickname: ‘Billy the Fish’.