Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (27 page)

The polarized ecosystem of the health care debate maintains a balance of extremes, pitting the conventional against the alternative, the power of pharmaceutical giants against the profiteers of the snake oil industry, rationalists against advocates for a spiritual dimension. There is too little room for healthy skepticism, too little research that isn’t directed to creating new, marketable products. One result is that alternative therapies that Ernst concedes have benefits, such as yoga and Pilates, remain ill-regulated in many countries, with no single body ensuring that practitioners are qualified to set standards. Patients are most often the losers.

The Prince, as he usually does, has used back channels to try to promote his ideas. In Peter Hain, who served in the cabinets of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he found a rare ally. As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Hain introduced a trial for complementary medicine in Britain’s state-funded health system. “It had spectacularly good results,” Hain told an interviewer in 2014. “And when [Charles] learnt about this he was really enthusiastic and tried to persuade the Welsh government to do the same thing and the government in Whitehall to do the same thing for England.”
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Ernst responded to Hain’s interview with a splenetic blog post questioning the legitimacy of the trial. “So, is the whole ‘trial’ story an utterly irrelevant old hat?” Ernst asks. “Certainly not! Its true significance does not lie in the fact that a few amateurs are trying to push bogus treatments into the NHS via the flimsiest pseudo-research of the century. The true significance, I think, is that it shows how Prince Charles, once again, oversteps the boundaries of his constitutional role.”
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Such criticisms are unlikely to deflect Charles, and not only because the concept of his constitutional role is as dynamic as the natural world and its ecosystems. The Prince is implacable because he is a believer, not just in alternative and complementary medicines and the potential of biomimetics but in a larger picture that includes the unseen and the unknown. He is Prince Hamlet proclaiming more things on heaven and earth than we might dream. “We live in a culture which doesn’t really believe in the soul,” says Ian Skelly. “You are seen as a bit of a crank if you talk in that way, yet actually if you talk to people individually they speak in a very spiritual way about love and about feelings for things. Culturally we’ve put that in a corner, and it has no part to play in the mainstream economic approach to life.”
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This is not only something Charles is determined to change; it fits with the role he is expected to take on as king, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Yet the strength of his beliefs, far from making this future role a better fit, means that some traditionalists worry about his suitability.

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Anglicanism is most likely to get itself in a tizzy when it cares too visibly, in an un-English sort of way. The deepest schisms of recent times emerged in the gulf between the emotional supporters of Gene Robinson, a proudly gay man ordained in 2003 as Bishop of New Hampshire by the liberal, North American Episcopal Church, and the emotional opponents of gay clergy, noisily represented in the congregations of Africa and Asia. The General Synod is the Church of England’s parliament; the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference sets wider Anglican policy. The Archbishop of Canterbury attempts, and often fails, to steer the debate rather than handing down doctrine like the Pope.

Such differences to Roman Catholicism are literally defining. The Church of England formed in opposition to the Vatican after Henry VIII broke with Pope Clement VII over the latter’s inclement refusal to annul the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Laws passed once the Glorious Revolution had deposed Britain’s last Catholic ruler, James II, simultaneously enshrined and interlocked the dominions of the Church of England and Britain’s—exclusively and explicitly Anglican—sovereigns to come, while British colonialism expanded the sway of Anglicanism and the monarchy. The Church of England is the established—state—church; its Bishops help to make the country’s laws. The Coronation Oath requires the monarch to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England” and to “preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them.” The Queen serves as Defender of the Faith that defends her against interlopers and incense-wavers. This mantle was never likely to fall comfortably on her son.

The biggest revelation of Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 documentary portrait of Charles almost got lost in the pandemonium surrounding the Prince’s disclosure of infidelity. The more startling declaration came earlier in Dimbleby’s film, during a discussion about the Prince’s exploration of world religions and his assertion that there are “common threads that link us all in one great and important tapestry.” “Does that mean that spiritually and intellectually you feel at home walking between and within all those religions and don’t feel tied to the Church of England, the Protestant Church?” Dimbleby wonders. “Yes,” the Prince replies. “I feel there is an enormous amount, once you begin to understand where we are linked, in common that can be immensely helpful. I’m one of those people who searches. I’m interested in pursuing a path, if I can find it, through the thickets.” So saying, Charles apparently swerves straight into a clump of thornbushes.

“I personally would rather see [the role of the monarch] as Defender of Faith, not
the
Faith, because [the Faith] means just one particular interpretation of the Faith, which I think is sometimes something that causes a deal of a problem,” he declares. “It has done for hundreds of years. People have fought each other to the death over these things, which seems to me a peculiar waste of people’s energy, when we’re all actually aiming for the same ultimate goal, I think.” The future coauthor of
Harmony
begins to sketch out his nascent philosophy, mooting the idea that a monarch might be “Defender of the Divine in existence, the pattern of the divine which is, I think, in all of us, but which because we are human beings can be expressed in so many different ways.” Lest there be any doubt about his message, he name-checks some of the other religions he envisages that he, as King, would be inclined to defend. “I’ve always felt the Catholic subjects of the sovereign are equally as important as the Anglican ones or the Protestant ones. Likewise I think that the Islamic subjects or the Hindu subjects or the Zoroastrian subjects are of equal and vital importance.” In Charles’s theology, all believers are equal to each other, if not necessarily to the sovereign.
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These musings may not have roused as much tabloid excitement as his confession of adultery, but they created consternation in Lambeth Palace. “As heir, [the Prince] has to be concerned with every citizen, regardless of creed or color,” then Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey told an interviewer. “I believe that is what he intended to say.”
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Carey suggested that tweaks to the coronation service—but not to the coronation oath—would fulfill the Prince’s desire to see all faiths given the same prominence. In his biography of the Prince, published later the same year, Dimbleby rejected Carey’s “minimalist interpretation” and produced the transcript of a segment of the interview with the Prince that had been cut from the broadcast. In it, the Prince returns to his theme of the shared ground among religions. “The great Middle Eastern religions—Judaism, Islam, Christianity, all stemming from the same geographical area—all have a great deal in common.… There are aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism … which are attached by very profound threads to Islam, Christianity and Judaism.” Carey’s attempt at fire-fighting had fanned the flames. Charles hadn’t stumbled into the briars. He had made his points deliberately and with his usual determination to kindle debate. He was backed in this endeavor by his biographer. “I was really furious,” says Dimbleby. “I knew what [the Prince] meant; we’d talked about it a lot. A great deal.”
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Carey’s predecessor will also have known what the Prince meant, though never could grasp quite what the Prince
meant
. Robert Runcie served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1980 to 1991, conducting Charles’s marriage to Diana and a few years later asked by the Prince to lunch with him and his unhappy wife “on the basis of ‘It’s been rather a lot for Diana, because religion hasn’t stuck much with her. And we feel we ought to mention it to you, because you married us,’” as Runcie told his own biographer. Of Charles, Runcie said: “It would quite help if he loved the Church of England a bit more.”

To Runcie, the Prince’s views lacked consistency. The cleric couldn’t reconcile Charles’s apparent liberalism on issues such as urban poverty with his impulse to align himself with the sorts of conservatives who opposed moves to broaden the appeal of the Church by modernizing its language. Nor could Runcie understand how the Prince’s mystic bent fitted into the picture. “I think he was deeply into the Laurens van der Post spirituality,” said Runcie, concluding, “I don’t think he took the Church of England very seriously.”
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The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, understands his old university friend far better. “If people can’t extract from [the Prince] what they want, they invent it and with immense confidence people are saying well of course he’s not going to want a Christian coronation because he is a Defender of Faith. Now he’s an intelligent guy. And he is totally aware of the philosophical and spiritual incoherence of being a Defender of Faith as if you didn’t have one for yourself but were looking down from some other more elevated level on the whole scene. Of course, like sensible people he recognizes that faith communities have a role in social cohesion and spreading the practice of virtue and in their local manifestation they’re often very central to most volunteering in local society. He’s been trying to make absolutely clear that he has immense sympathy with the world of religion, the world of faith, because he sees very clearly how it relates to a view of the world in which human beings do not play the role of oppressive dominance but understand their connectedness with the health of the whole planet and the whole human race. But the idea that he doesn’t really have a faith of his own is untrue. He is a convinced Christian.”
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Far from being inconsistent or contradictory, the Prince is true to his complex belief system. “You can be a loyal member of the Church of England and you can appreciate the extraordinary quality of the spiritual life that other people have in their traditions,” says Chartres, adding that the Prince’s book
Harmony
“is a very important contribution at the present moment when we are looking for a global conversation among the wisdom traditions and anybody who’s involved in a religious body, as I am, ought to feel very humble indeed as we look at the comparative success of economists and scientists in developing the kind of global conversations that we need in order to confront series of promises and perils which are not to be confined to one continent or one nation.”
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There are philosophical points of disagreement—Chartres does not elaborate—but in a broad sense he and the heir to the throne are in concert, traditionalists and radicals, of the establishment and just as liable to challenge the establishment view. They mirror each other because, longtime friends that they are, they have influenced each other’s thinking over many years and collaborated on interfaith initiatives and recently on the Prince’s campaign to protect Orthodox Christians in the Middle East. The Bishop praises the Prince’s “energy, the hard work—we’re not talking about going around occasional discourses of an anodyne kind—we’re talking about the shaping of institutions to make a long-term difference in areas which when he started on them were not very obvious to the majority of opinion.” Chartres cites Business in the Community and the Prince’s Trust as examples. “These are institutional responses to a series of problems very profoundly understood and sustained over the long term by his commitment to them and his determination to make sure they have the funds and the wherewithal to make a difference.… He doesn’t flit. There is a coherence about all of his interests that runs through the Temenos Academy and
Harmony
and the Prince’s Trust. There is a coherent view and it is fundamentally spiritual.”
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For all that, Chartres did not attend the April 2005 wedding of his old friend. Charles and Camilla got officially hitched in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, exchanging wedding rings of Welsh gold, in front of their children and other family members before heading to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle for a service of prayer and dedication. The Church of England maintains an interdict on marrying divorc
é
es with living spouses if the marriage might be “tantamount to consecrating an old infidelity.” The two consecutive ceremonies got round that problem but some potential guests spared themselves the sight of the future Supreme Governor of the Church of England entering matrimony outside the Church. The Queen and Prince Philip also stayed away from Windsor Guildhall, though they did join the happy couple afterward.

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Frequently accused of arrogance by the professions he riles, Charles has always wrestled with insecurity. His diffidence is not assumed. He sounds most vehement when masking his fears—and that of course means when making interventions that are likely to be controversial, sometimes in self-fulfilling prophesy. He confesses to getting knots in his stomach before speeches. “I’ve had conversations with him—and he probably won’t remember me saying so—but ‘You’re an elder now, you’re no longer the student, you’re the one who knows this stuff,’” says Ian Skelly. “I think he’s always seen himself as a student at the feet of the great and wise and rather like the ugly duckling and the swan, he doesn’t realize how fully fledged he is.”
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