Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (12 page)

So on November 14, 1948, baby Charles drew his first breath in Buckingham Palace without a Home Secretary present to attest to his bona fides. He often seems like a cuckoo in the royal nest—superficially more at odds with his parents than like them—but nobody has ever challenged his heritage: it’s clearly visible in his features, his expressions, his habit of clasping his hands behind his back just like his father. What he never learned to do is wear a mask, as his mother does.

If you cannot hide, you can at least hide your feelings. The impassivity that defines the Queen’s public image is not feigned, but it is assumed. Even in the compromised privacy of her family circle, she gives little away and with her husband has created a family culture that prizes restraint and approves of stoicism. Friends remember that her corgis got into a fight with Princess Anne’s dogs. A dog died. Neither the Queen nor Princess Anne mentioned the incident, to each other or the rest of the family.

Her staff learns to look for fractional signs of displeasure: is the Queen’s mouth a little more downturned, the presence a degree more glacial? From behind the mask, she misses very little. Her micromanagement is legendary. She knows things about palace life—about what members of the household have been up to—that can only come from bat-like hearing and preternatural powers of observation. She pays attention to the smallest details. A 2014 trial into allegations of bribery and phone hacking by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s
News of the World
heard that the monarch had reprimanded police on guard at Buckingham Palace for eating snacks put out for guests; a witness claimed she had drawn lines in the bowls to monitor levels.
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Praise—and her transfiguring smiles—fall like desert rain.

Her foil and consort, support and center of the most hidden of public private worlds, the Duke of Edinburgh is their most frequent recipient. He still brings out a softer side to the Queen. He has never publicly commented on rumors of his infidelity, though he once inquired of a relative, “How could I be unfaithful to the Queen? There is no way that she could possibly retaliate.”
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Whatever the royal couple’s arrangement, the marriage works, as a loving relationship and a professional partnership. “Regardless of whether my grandfather seems to be doing his own thing, sort of wandering off like a fish down a river, the fact that he’s there—personally, I don’t think [the Queen] could do it without him, especially when they’re both at this age,” said Prince Harry in 2011.
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Penniless and stateless, Philip wasn’t an obvious choice to marry the future head of a reigning royal house, though his candidacy was buoyed, or burdened, by support from his uncle Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten. “I have come to the conclusion that we are going too fast,” King George VI, father of the prospective bride, warned Mountbatten in response to the latter’s unrestrained enthusiasm for the project.
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Mountbatten’s ardor burned so bright that Philip wrote to his uncle pleading for a little space: “Please, I beg of you, not too much advice in an affair of the heart, or I shall be forced to do the wooing by proxy.”
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Elizabeth needed no encouragement. It may have been the only time in her life that she allowed heart to rule head, putting her own desires before duty. Courtiers thought she was making a mistake. Philip seemed to them uncouth, lacking in polish. Her suitor might speak the King’s English, but he lacked a filter between brain and mouth. He still does.

His gaffes have become legend. “Are you running away from something?” the Duke asked expatriate Brits in Abu Dhabi. He compared schoolgirls in red uniforms to “Dracula’s daughters” and suggested Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in national dress, looked “ready for bed.” “Damn fool question!” he told a journalist who asked if the Queen was enjoying an official trip. To another solicitous inquiry—“How was your flight?”—he responded, “Have you ever flown? It was just like that.” He has racked up as many sexist and racist comments as a rogue UKIP candidate. “You’re not wearing mink knickers, are you?” he asked a female fashion writer. He warned a British student in China, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll go home with slitty eyes.” His popularity may owe something to the misplaced notion that statements that offend against political correctness are a sign of authenticity. Yet he is authentic, in the sense that he never seeks favor by falsifying his views, though he often conceals them in public. A modernizer—at least by the standards of the family he married into—his most significant role has unfolded behind the scenes, supporting and encouraging his unflappable wife, and overseeing the raising of their children.

Philip grew up with a surfeit of surnames, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl
ü
cksburg, and a paucity of security. A year after his birth, on June 10, 1921, on Corfu, his uncle Constantine of Greece was forced for a second time to vacate his throne. Losses in a war with Turkey hardened sentiment against the royals, who had been imported from Denmark a generation earlier. Military rebels executed the general of the Greek army and came close to meting out the same punishment to the King’s brother, Prince Andrew, who had commanded troops in the disastrous conflict. Instead they dispatched him into exile with his fragile wife, Princess Alice, and their four daughters and only son, Philip. Their youngest daughter, Sophie, married first, in 1930, to a German aristocrat who died as a high-ranking SS officer in an air crash in Italy in 1943. The three elder girls wed within months of each other in 1931, all making alliances with German nobles. The matrimonial flurry coincided with a deterioration in their mother’s mental state. Consigned to a sanatorium, Princess Alice moved in and out of institutions, diagnosed at one point with schizophrenia, but eventually recovering sufficiently to found an order of nuns. Her husband washed up in the South of France, beached first by the pleasures of the region and then by the outbreak of World War II, which erected political and logistical barriers between members of a family already divided by emotional conflict.

From the age of nine, Philip commuted between far-flung relatives and schools in Paris, England, Germany, and Scotland, the last two institutions shaped by Kurt Hahn, a visionary—and eccentric—educator. Philip arrived at Salem in southern Germany just as Hahn, a Jew who spoke out against the Nazis, departed for the safety of Britain, where he swiftly found in a vacant eighteenth-century estate called Gordonstoun a more secure plantation for his ideas. Philip followed him there in 1934.

The school in the far northeast of Scotland imposed a Spartan physical regimen on pupils—a later alumnus, novelist William Boyd, wrote that “if Borstals or remand homes were maintained in similar conditions, there would be a public outcry”—but looked for its educational ethos to Athens and Plato’s
Republic
rather than to Sparta.
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“Hahn followed Plato in defining virtue in the individual as a harmony or balance between the various faculties of the psyche, more simply expressed in public-school jargon as the ideal of the ‘all-rounder,’” noted Robert Skidelsky. “‘What do you do with the extrovert?’ Hahn was asked. ‘I turn him outside in,’ was the reply. ‘And with the introvert?’ ‘I turn him inside out.’”
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Hahn’s regime failed to turn the outer-directed Philip inward but confirmed the future husband of the Queen in the belief that the best way to transform boys into men is to set them challenges. That idea underpins the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme he founded in 1956 at Hahn’s behest and informed the educational route Philip charted for all three sons.

The Duke has always relished challenges and has a record of rising to them. He became “Guardian” or head boy at Gordonstoun and captained the school cricket and rugby teams. At Dartmouth naval college, he won distinction as an outstanding cadet. Serving aboard the HMS
Valiant
as a midshipman during World War II, he earned a mention in dispatches for his part in the Battle of Matapan, a 1941 skirmish off the coast of Greece that sank five Italian vessels. By the end of the war, he had transferred to the British Pacific Fleet, participating in the landing on Iwo Jima and serving aboard one of the escort ships that accompanied the USS
Missouri
and HMS
Duke of York
to accept the Japanese surrender.

His wife’s sudden elevation scotched his promising career and landed him, like all Windsors apart from the Queen, with the predicament of prominence without predefined purpose. At Matapan he wielded the spotlight, turning it on enemy ships. As the royal consort he is caught in it, always at the edge of its circle, trailing two steps behind the woman on whom it is trained. She learned to give away nothing in its full beam. In Philip she found a mate whom experience had taught to deny his feelings even to himself.

*   *   *

Two people short on self-doubt and long on composure, the Queen and Prince Philip have always been self-sufficient, sustained largely by each other and the odd martini. (The Duke’s preferred way to mix the drink is inevitably at odds with Charles’s; Philip likes the “lemon mixed with the drink, only a little bit of vermouth, triple the gin steeped on the ice and left for 10 minutes.”)
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Their eldest son remembers his childhood as a series of tests, upsets, and discomforts. He was shaped as much by adversity as by positive example: through the absence of his parents but also friction with his father. As the Queen grappled with her new role as head of state, the Duke of Edinburgh had taken charge of child rearing, approaching the problem—and Charles in his father’s estimation has always been a problem—with his usual directness. The Duke noted that Charles was a sensitive child—so unlike his robust little sister Anne—and drew the conclusion that the best, and kindest, course of action would be to toughen him up. The toughening-up process sometimes looked like mockery. When the child flinched, it provoked the father to poke harder.

The dynamics of the relationship have barely altered. In much of what Charles does—his passionate conservationism, his commitment to helping young people, even in his hobby of painting—he emulates the Duke of Edinburgh and reflects their common heritage as products of Kurt Hahn’s schooling. Yet communications between them are congested and the approval he craves is rarely bestowed. Brickbats fly when he least expects them. In a 2008 television interview, his father took a sideswipe unprovoked by any line of questioning. “Organic,” he said. “It’s not an unmixed blessing and it’s not an absolute certainty that it’s quite as useful as it sounds.… You’ve got to be emotionally committed to it but if you stand back and try to be open-minded about it, it is quite difficult to really find where it’s been a real benefit.”
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Viewers will have known that Charles has been banging the drum for organic farming since the 1980s. Less obvious was that in the mouth of the irascible Duke, “emotionally committed” is a scathing criticism. It also describes the way his son approaches every project and cause he espouses.

After the death of Sir Christopher Soames, the Prince sent a letter of condolence to his bereaved friend Nicholas. “I have minded
so
much for you and thought so much of you during these last few days while you had to watch your father gradually slip away before your eyes,” he wrote. “I kept thinking that it might have been my father and I can imagine all the thoughts and feelings that you were probably experiencing, both before and after he died. Relationships with fathers can be such complex ones—I remember we often talked about our own relationships with our own respective fathers and how they’ve not been easy always.… So often, I supposed, one must long to have got on better or to have been able to talk freely about the things that matter deeply, but one was too inhibited to discuss.”
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That inhibition has always been two-sided, generational. The Queen and her consort are not only the products of their own demanding upbringings but of the wider spirit of the postwar period. “These professional naval officers and military officers trooped home having watched their buddies have heads blown off and limbs blown off and tried to settle back into civvy street,” says Tim Knatchbull.
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The survivors’ impulse was to put a brave face on things, whatever the cost.

Knatchbull knows the Queen not as a distant head of state but a dear and supportive cousin and friend of the family. His father, Lord Brabourne, grew close to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh after marriage to Mountbatten’s eldest daughter, Patricia, now Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Both couples produced their first children in the late 1940s, raising them, says Knatchbull, according to “a prototype of childhood and parenting from the previous generation, from the Empire and India.”
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By the time the couples turned their attention to their youngest children—Prince Edward, Timothy Nicholas Knatchbull, and his identical twin Nicholas Timothy, all born in 1964—the sensibility they applied to the process had changed. In place of the earlier parenting that Knatchbull equates with the regimented “Preobrazhensky March,” a piece of music that often accompanies displays of Russian military muscle, Knatchbull and his twin and their cousin Edward were nurtured to the more relaxed rhythms of the Beatles era. “The Queen and Prince Philip and my parents were very clever, hip, savvy, intelligent, interested, forward-looking people, interested in young people, interested in the revolutions going on across Europe, the cultural revolutions, the social revolutions, and rather in sympathy with them and regarded by their peers as being avant garde because of how quickly they adopted some of the new ideas of the Swinging Sixties, including new ideas of parenting, which is that you spend masses of time with your kid. Which is what Prince Edward got. Which is what I got.”
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Which is what Charles did not get.

In 1979, Irish republicans detonated gelignite they had concealed on the fishing boat Knatchbull’s family used when staying at Classiebawn Castle, Mountbatten’s Irish holiday home. Knatchbull was gravely injured. His parents defied doctors’ predictions to pull through but remained hospitalized for months. Everyone else aboard died: Knatchbull’s grandfather Mountbatten, his grandmother Lady Brabourne, a fifteen-year-old local boy called Paul Maxwell, and Nicholas, Knatchbull’s twin.