Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (3 page)

Over cocktails he entertains his villains with tamer episodes from Harry’s youth. He speaks with obvious pride and affection, and a touch of wonderment. For all his bonhomie, his jokes, and a delight in the absurd that saw him at Harry’s thirteenth birthday party laughing uproariously while competing with Emma Thompson in a game in which players donned hats covered in Velcro and used them to try to catch felt-covered balls, Charles is fundamentally serious. His younger son lives in the moment. It’s hard enough to master that trick when the future is mapped out years ahead and in hourly increments, harder still for someone of Charles’s temperament and experiences.

There’s a revealing joke he tells so often that it has acquired a patina of use, like his two favorite pairs of day shoes, buffed and polished and trotted out over decades. His comic timing has always been good. His constricted elocution lends itself at least as easily to humor as to solemnity. (His friends and staffers can’t help themselves but mimic his voice and the rictus that pulls down the left corner of his mouth when he is at his most emphatic.) In a parallel universe he might have made a decent stand-up, the funny-looking teenager, his face too narrow a base for the Windsor beak and winglike ears, growing up to exploit the natural comedy in being a man out of joint with ordinary life and turning his bafflement into an amusing routine. Instead, the man who expects one day to reign over the United Kingdom and fifteen other Commonwealth Realms deploys wit to leaven speeches on weighty issues or simply to entertain guests at private functions. These days he’s a confident performer, easy in a skin that’s come with age to suit him—he turned sixty-six on November 14, 2014. He’s dexterous with words, quick with a riposte. He can deliver zingers. But time and again, he returns to this same tired gag.

“If ever you’re afraid of being somehow marooned on a desert island—perhaps you’re flying a light airplane over the South Seas—always make sure you have in your knapsack a cocktail shaker, one of those collapsible goblets such as they used to issue in the army, a small jar of olives, some cocktail sticks, a phial of vermouth and a hip flask of gin or vodka,” he counsels his audience. “If, by misfortune, you do find yourself stranded, like Robinson Crusoe, all alone on a desert island, have no fear. All you have to do is unpack your martini paraphernalia and start to mix the drink.”

He pauses, signaling the imminent arrival of a punch line. “I can guarantee that within a minute, someone will jump out of a tree and say, ‘That’s not the proper way to mix a martini!’”

The joke reliably earns a big laugh, bigger than its payoff would seem to deserve, but then that’s the really funny thing about royalty: its members seldom experience the world as the rest of us do because their presence changes it. The Prince knows humanity on its best behavior and at its worst—sycophantic, shallow, sharp-elbowed. He’s used to people applauding his every pronouncement and responding to his jokes with great, grating guffaws.

Yet there’s a reverse side to the coinage that carries his mother’s head. There always seems to be someone poised to leap out of the shrubbery to declare that he doesn’t know how to mix a martini. Commentary and criticism have attended him throughout his life like resentful valets. He has never enjoyed the luxury of trying and failing privately. As soon as he began to express opinions, he discovered he was speaking through a bullhorn. As the frail struts of his first marriage corroded, he found himself widely miscast. He had famously semaphored his unease after the engagement was announced, when an interviewer ventured that he and Lady Diana Spencer were “in love.” “Of course,” said Diana. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” added her fianc
é
, his face frozen.

In failing to love the “queen of people’s hearts,” as Diana would later accurately characterize her public role, Charles appeared a knave as well as a joker.
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In avoiding the pitfalls of doing little of substance during an apprenticeship to be sovereign that his mother’s longevity has stretched over more than half a century, he instead earns censure for doing too much. He’s a dabbler, straying into areas of expertise that are not his own. He’s a meddler, ignoring constitutional proprieties to intervene in the political process. If he finally accedes to the throne—which he is gnawingly impatient to do—Charles III promises to be as memorable a king as Charles I.

The last point may well prove true, if for different reasons. United with the woman he loves and fondly observing his sons establishing a Camelot of their own, with his charitable empire in full swing and a host of initiatives and campaigns under his stewardship, the Prince is probably more contented than he’s ever been. He enjoys life, sometimes. He can be excellent company, in spite, or even because of, the jokes. He has a talent for telling them. A man often mimicked, he is an expert mimic of others. “He’s a sort of Rory Bremner,” says his godson and cousin, Tim Knatchbull, drawing a comparison with a well-known British impressionist. “He’s got the thing where he’ll change his face; it’s a studied little move. He’s got the knack for imitating. You’ve either got the knack or you don’t. The Queen’s the same and he’s clearly inherited the gene from her.”
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The Prince is a multilingual polymath, a decent watercolorist, and an expert gardener. The royals are popularly assumed to be horse mad. Charles, however, has a passion for sheep. Emma Sparham, helped by his charity the Prince’s Trust to start her own business, met him at a St. James’s Palace reception and mentioned the rare breed she keeps, called Soay. “If I was to say the word ‘Soay’ to 100 people, maybe five of them might know what it is,” she said afterward. “He knew exactly what it was, what island they come from and he knows the nature of the animal. He asked if I could catch them because they are renowned for being uncatchable.”
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The Prince keeps flocks at several of his homes, devised campaigns to promote wool and mutton, and scooped the 2012 George Hedley Memorial Award presented by Britain’s National Sheep Association in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the sheep sector.

He is kind. He keeps track of the personal circumstances of the people around him, asks after their loved ones, makes an effort to attend events that are important to them. As family members gathered for the funeral of his brother-in-law Mark Shand in May 2014, it was Charles, warm and “extraordinarily tactile,” who brewed tea and dispensed sympathy, says Ben Elliot, cofounder of the Quintessentially Group and the Prince’s nephew by marriage.
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Charles organizes surprises and treats for friends and people he admires, such as a joint eightieth birthday celebration at Clarence House for the British playwright Ronald Harwood and
Downton Abbey
’s dowager countess, actor Maggie Smith. He inspires devotion, sometimes more than is good for him. He is loyal to a fault, sometimes to the point of fault. “He’s a very human person, incredibly emotionally alert. The radar is very powerful, and he picks up on things,” says Ian Skelly, a BBC broadcaster who often helps the Prince write speeches and has also collaborated with him on a startling book. “Because of his background he’s spent his entire life trying to work out who’s true and who’s full of flannel.”
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Unlike the rest of his family, when Charles asks, “And what do you do?” he’s keenly interested in hearing the answer.

A compulsive philanthropist, he has founded more than twenty-five charities. “Every one of them is a little pilot project that lights a candle in a dark space,” says Lord Sacks, Britain’s former Chief Rabbi. Sacks goes so far as to speak of the Prince’s “greatness.” “I do not go around using that world liberally, I really don’t,” Sacks adds. “You know why the world doesn’t see him for what he is? Because we have very little room for greatness. We’re interested in celebrity.”
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But after a lifetime of being found wanting—the proverbial prophet without honor in his own country—Charles rarely recognizes his own achievements. He is “a glass-half-empty man” in the words of one member of his inner circle, a Prince of Wails. Another person close to him says he has a short fuse. “The royal rage, I call it. Here comes the royal rage.” At the darkest points of his life, his despondency has been profound. Even now, in his late-blooming prime, he recites litanies of injustice and in rare on-the-record conversations can’t stop plaintive notes from sounding. “Each thing I did you had to meet another lot of people who have all sorts of views of you beforehand, all sorts of prejudices,” he confides.
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This biography aims to puncture those prejudices to close in on the far more interesting truth. As good a starting place as any must be to identify the mechanisms that occlude that truth. The Prince often blames a toxic press, and he is not wrong. But that toxicity fermented in a complex jelly: amid social change and global strains, at the intersection of republicanism and an avid celebrity culture, in a Britain facing new battles with identity and old struggles with class. Stifling deference gave way to a prevailing mistrust of institutions and public figures. Palace structures have struggled to manage a mainstream media itself in transition and, latterly, in existential crisis. As newspaper revenues have declined, the pressure to produce stories, by hook or by crookery, has increased. Legitimate inquiries must navigate a miasma of half-fact and fiction surrounding the royal households, often without reliable guides and frequently bumping up against official secrecy. The Internet promises a new age of transparency and instead adds to the miasma.

At the center of this confusion, hand in pocket, stands Charles, a man who would in any circumstances prove hard to decode. He is fascinating, flawed as we all are, yet not as we are: a product of an upbringing set apart, conditioned to be different and to believe that difference must be maintained, a native of Planet Windsor. “He identifies with other people’s precariousness. In many ways I feel that he’s a strange figure in that setup, precisely because he seems to have all of these passions and concerns about issues and people,” says Lucia Santa Cruz, his friend since university days. “I think he’s one of the most misunderstood figures in history.”
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She may well be right. Charles is hard to understand because we cannot measure him against our own experiences and expectations. He does not always understand us for the same reasons, and that can complicate communications.

He seeks intimacy yet continues with the alienating custom under which many of his friends and all of his staff call him “Sir.” (He sometimes signs personal notes “Carrick,” a name taken from one of his earldoms.) “There’s a competition at Clarence House to see how deep you can curtsy without falling over,” says a member of his household. A conspicuous beneficiary of entrenched inequality, the Prince works hard through his charities to redress inequality. He shuttles between stately homes and palaces in a swirl of retainers, yet has installed a wide range of eco-friendly, energy-saving technologies at Highgrove and his other homes. In his search for wisdom, he has sometimes done stupid things and listened to poor advice. He’s easier to criticize than to comprehend. “Quite possibly the most creative initiator of charitable projects in the world,” as Sacks describes him, he is more frequently depicted as someone without purpose or motivation.
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A thought leader on the environment, he is caricatured as a man who talks to plants. He works from early morning into the night, combining an increasing burden of royal duty with the voluminous role he has carved out for himself, but is widely assumed to be underemployed.

Born to be king, he actually aims much higher. For himself, he seeks meaning, enlightenment, happiness. For everyone else he is more zealous still. He has set his sights on nothing less than improving the human condition and fixing a battered world. “I only take on the most difficult challenges. Because I want to raise aspirations and re-create hope from hopelessness and health from deprivation,” he told me, sitting in his comfortable study at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate.
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“We talk a lot about the guilt of privilege. Sometimes I think he’s driven by guilt,” muses Emma Thompson.
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It’s easy to see why that might be. Birkhall is one of four residences listed on his website and he also has use of other homes in Scotland and Romania as well as access to the family palaces. His publicly declared income in 2013–2014 comprised $31.5 million from the Duchy of Cornwall, the landed estate founded in 1337 to fund heirs to the throne, plus a further $3.5 million from the Sovereign Grant, the money provided by the British government to support the Queen, and in some cases her family, in the execution of head-of-state duties. The Prince’s Annual Review and the accounts of the Duchy of Cornwall lack fine detail but in the same year revealed official expenditure for his own household of $19.5 million, another chunk for maintaining sons and daughter-in-law in style, expenditure on capital projects, and a tax bill of $6.8 million, leaving him with a notional $4 million to play with on top of any private investment income.

So he’s rich—maybe not as stonkingly rich as his Bond villains, but more than comfortable. Some of his critics suggest this means he should fund his own charities. “All the charities are governed and run independently. Whilst HRH is the figurehead, he does not have the funds to keep them all going and it wouldn’t be helpful for him to do so,” says an aide. “Whilst fundraising is essential to any charity, engaging with businesses, government and the public is of equal importance. If HRH were funding all of these charities privately they would lack credibility and essential buy-in from other sectors.”

Clarence House doesn’t publish information on Charles’s private wealth or the rate of tax he pays on such income. At a briefing about his 2013–2014 Annual Review, his Principal Private Secretary, William Nye, batted away a question. “Let’s be clear,” said Nye, proceeding to give an answer that fell some way short of that premise. “If [the Prince] had other private income it would be private, so I wouldn’t tell you about it. But, to be clear, any income that he has, he pays tax on. There’s certainly no income on which he doesn’t pay tax.”
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