Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (31 page)

The Commonwealth, in turn, has attempted to promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Its inability to bring to heel members in flagrant breach of these values raises questions about how long the association will endure. Then there’s the small matter of what happens when the Queen dies. There is no automatic guarantee that her son will be welcomed to the role. The Palace is leaving as little as possible to chance. In a piece of theater so significant that the Queen rose from her sickbed to attend, Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma used the signing of a new Commonwealth charter in March 2013 to firm up Charles’s candidacy. “You have carried forward with untiring dedication and conviction the task laid upon you of following your father as Head of the Commonwealth,” he told the Queen. “Throughout the Commonwealth’s existence, the Crown has symbolized the free association of our nations and our peoples, promoting the right and proper purpose of assembly and dialogue. The ties forged between the people and communities of the Commonwealth have been reinforced by the care which you have taken to visit and meet so many of them over more than 60 years. The support given to you in this endeavor by the Prince of Wales and other members of the Royal Family deepens the Commonwealth’s links to the Crown.”
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That support often takes the form of visits designed to project the deathless continuity of those links. Yet many of the destinations on such trips spark intimations of their mortality too, as Charles’s 2014 Canada itinerary showed. There have been forced migrations: arrivals like Ferguson’s at Pier 21 and the 187 Scots, sent in search of a new home by the Highland Clearances, who in 1773 disembarked in Pictou from the ship
Hector
, and ragged exoduses of indigenous peoples and Acadians, the descendants of French colonialists, persecuted and expelled in Britannia’s name. Europeans had made landfall on the American continent in the seventeenth century, first the French, then the British, and fought across the landmass, battling for territory and in proxy for their wider imperial conflict, deploying soldiers and corporate entities such as the Hudson’s Bay Company to secure their claims. France ceded its Canadian lands to Britain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris but then weighed in against its old foe in the American War of Independence.

Canada itself is only a century and a half old, formed by the melding of British colonies into a dominion with a significant degree of autonomy. In 1931 it gained formal independence, though for another fifty years Westminster would retain residual powers to amend the Canadian constitution. From some perspectives, the apparatus of monarchy looks like a similar piece of historical detritus, as picturesque as the replica of
Hector
that Charles and Camilla stopped to admire during their visit to Pictou—and about as seaworthy.

Supporters of the Canadian monarchy rehearse the standard arguments for the institution, starting with its unifying function in a sprawling federation of provinces and three territories that encompasses First Nations peoples, Inuit and M
é
tis, and a variety of Anglophone and Francophone populations distributed across a landmass that stretches from temperate British Columbia to the tundra of Nunavut. Then there are the constitutional functions anchored by royalty plus, of course, the overarching guarantee that a monarch provides in safeguarding democracy. The Monarchist League of Canada trots out an additional argument too, a peculiarly Canadian spin on the interplay between the monarchy and national identity—the Windsors represent a bulwark against US cultural imperialism.

Opinion polls in Canada broadly mirror trends in the other realms: a falling off in support for the monarchy during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, followed recently by a revival in interest in the younger generations and especially William and Kate and baby George. A 2013 Forum Poll for the
National Post
rated William almost three times more popular than his father and produced some confusing data on the appeal of the monarchy in general, with a majority of respondents in favor of keeping the Crown—48 percent compared to 37 percent for abolition—but 63 percent also saying the head of state should be Canadian and reside in Canada.
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The blizzards of polls and flurries of disputes between committed monarchists and ardent republicans that accompany royal visits succeed like a good Canadian dump of snow in disguising the significant features of the landscape. There’s a broad, flat plain of apathy out there—Canadians who really don’t care very much either way—and the electric fence that encircles the institution of the monarchy means they’re right not to waste too much energy on the issue. The patriation of Canada’s constitution in 1982, though symbolic of its independent nationhood, entrenched the overseas monarchy more firmly at its heart, requiring any constitutional amendment affecting the Crown to secure the unanimous support of the federal and provincial governments, about as likely as catching a tan in the Nunavut winter.

The solidity of the constitutional arrangements might be assumed to place Canada low on the priorities of the Windsors when other Realms and voting populations could far more easily mobilize the tumbrels. That would be to misunderstand the sense of duty—and destiny—shared by the Queen and her son that compels them to render the service they believe themselves born to fulfill. Both, in their own distinctive ways, believe in adding value to their roles. In return—and though the Queen disguises this impulse far better than her thin-skinned son—they want to be wanted.

Though Charles’s chief focus has been on turning his existing position to meaningful use, he has been thinking about the longer term, too, for many years and now with increasing urgency. In Canada he is developing another test bed for his ideas, a virtual Duchy Home Farm or Poundbury. In devising a new model of monarchy for the Realms, the Prince hopes to defeat their new model armies of republicanism. Canada, with small but committed forces on either side and larger phalanxes of don’t-knows and couldn’t-cares, makes a good testing ground.

CHAPTER 9

Happy and Notorious

A moment in Canada speaks to the nature of the relationship between the Prince and his Duchess. On the first full day of the trip, the royal convoy has split into two, with Charles going to Halifax Public Gardens to perform one of the standard gestures of royalty, “planting” a sapling by ceremonially dumping a scoop of soil. In 1939, King George VI carried out the same symbolic act at the base of one of the trees that now towers over his grandson. Camilla has been chauffeured to a rougher part of Halifax, to speak to women who have escaped abusive partners with the help of a charity called Alice Housing.

The schedule carefully plotted by Canadian officials and royal aides envisages the Prince making quick work of his tree planting and going on to Seaport Farmer’s Market to tour the stalls before reuniting with his wife for the first of several displays of Scottish dancing Nova Scotia lays on for them. But Charles always runs late. During a walkabout in the park, he stops and speaks to everybody, doesn’t just say hello and move down the line but is drawn into conversations, inevitably delaying his segment of the convoy. Camilla, though she engages with people—and at this stop listens intently to difficult stories of spousal violence—tends to keep to the timings she has been given. As a result, she arrives at the covered farmer’s market ahead of her husband and takes the opportunity to shelter, briefly, in a side room, recharging the batteries that in people not raised to royal life easily run low during long days of glad-handing.

After ten minutes, she feels refreshed enough to be a Duchess once again and she embarks on her own tour of the market stalls. Charles, unaware that Camilla has beaten him to this destination, makes his own royal progress along the aisles. He feels rough—he will generously share British cold germs with the peoples of Canada on this trip—but nevertheless he again becomes absorbed in the royal job, talking to stallholders, sampling their jams and cakes and cordials. He doesn’t spot his wife until their parties converge. As he catches sight of Camilla, he stops, surprised, and then another expression transfigures his pallid face: joy. “Oh,” he says, enchanted. “You.”

*   *   *

Hold on to that image. It’s not easy to do so amid a clamor of competing pictures and multiple narratives, many of them sulfurous. That is not to say the other versions of Charles and Camilla are all without merit. The Rashomon effect—the way one reality observed by different individuals may produce equally valid, yet apparently contradictory, histories—has proved especially potent in their case.

It doesn’t help that any truths about a couple whose love for each other destroyed their first marriages lie buried beneath a man-made lithosphere of nonsense. Many of the most preposterous stories emanate from sources thousands of miles from their protagonists. The First Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right of individuals to express themselves through publication and dissemination of information, ideas, and opinions without interference, constraint, or prosecution by the government. The noblest of clauses has spawned the strangest of phenomena—supermarket tabloids. These are sensationalist magazines that are even odder than the stories they purport to cover. They occasionally break real news: The
National Enquirer
ran the Squidgygate transcript before the British media dared to do so. Supermarket tabloids have also published photographs of heaven, reported alien invasions, and declared Elvis alive almost as often as they’ve announced the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy. Diana conspiracies are a perennial. Among 2014 headlines the
Globe
designed to grab attention at the checkout was this, in March: “DIANA’S KILLER HIDING IN RUSSIA—HAND HIM OVER, WILLIAM RAGES.”

A glimmer of internal logic illuminated the tall tale. Russia had refused to surrender Edward Snowden to the US authorities, so surely it would refrain from sending Diana’s assassin for trial in England—should such a person exist. There was no love lost between the Russian President and the British royals, the tabloid stated with accidental prescience. (Less than two months later, Charles’s critical commentary on Putin’s Crimea adventures would make world headlines.)

By July, the
Globe
had devised a fresh and even further-fetched angle on the conspiracy: “CAMILLA SHOCKS KATE: CHARLES MURDERED DIANA—AND I’M NEXT!” A cover flash provided a clue to the Prince’s supposed motive: “$350M DIVORCE TURNS UGLY.” This followed up on an issue earlier the same month that claimed the Queen had ordered him to divorce Camilla. The same issue revealed that “POPE FRANCIS IS DYING.”

In ages past, the majority of people fortunate enough to live in democracies retained some faith in the authorities to tell the truth. Everybody read magazines like the
Globe
understanding that this was entertainment, not news. These days consumers trust nothing and everything, getting much of their information from the Internet and sources less credible than supermarket tabloids, increasingly unable to distinguish virtual junk food from something more nourishing. So it is that an immeasurable but significant contingent of the burgeoning global population assumes Charles to be heading for the divorce courts for a second time, possibly at the bidding of the Queen, or only refraining only from doing so because Camilla holds dirt on the royals (another popular Internet meme).

Does it matter that a prince who mistrusts the legacy of the Enlightenment should suffer under an encroaching Endarkenment? Certainly not as much as the Endarkenment itself matters, but its miasma does help to obscure what Charles does and why, especially in combination with mainstream coverage, itself riven by old allegiances and half-forgotten resentments. As for Camilla, if the punishment for her double adultery in an earlier century might have seen her immobilized in stocks for passersby to scoff and spit at, her latter-day humiliation has been no less public and almost as brutal.

From the moment of her exposure as the Prince’s illicit lover, the British press held her up not just for scorn but ridicule. “Trundling a trolley round Sainsbury’s yesterday, [Camilla] hardly looked like a woman at the centre of a royal love scandal,” reported the
Daily Mirror
in 1993.
1
“But as Camilla faced the world for the first time in weeks, she did supply the answer to a frequently posed question—‘what DOES Prince Charles see in her?’ In her outsize headscarf and unfussy clothes, she was a dead ringer for HM … His Mum.” Here’s an excerpt from the
Daily Express
of the same period: “Women in particular, who tend for some extraordinary reason to be much more bitchy than men in assessing female attributes, have been astounded at the thought that Prince Charles would choose the equine-faced Camilla over the fashion plate Diana, unless it had something to do with his passion for horses.”
2
The barrage of articles reported public disapproval and reinforced it. An oft-quoted story that Camilla had been pelted with bread rolls in a supermarket car park by angry supporters of Diana seems to have been pure invention. In Clarence House there is a suspicion that a Camilla look-alike was hired to stage this and other stunts.

Camilla endured her notoriety in silence. “People say she’s tough,” says Lucia Santa Cruz. “She’s not tough. She’s amazingly strong, which is different. She is a solid person. She had a very good family background. She’s got very good parents, she’s got a sister that she’s close to. She has the strength that people from very, very solid families tend to have, and she’s very resilient. She is very dignified, which in a way made all this so much worse for her. It was the worst kind of public bullying. [There was] nothing she could do to get out of her situation. She never opened her mouth; she never defended herself.”
3

She did get some help. Mark Bolland, on the Prince’s staff from 1996 until his less-than-happy departure in 2002, worked after Diana’s death to gain acceptance for the royal mistress. One strand of the strategy saw Charles and Camilla begin to appear together instead of always sidestepping cameras. Their January 1999 unveiling, on the steps of the Ritz hotel after the fiftieth birthday party of Camilla’s sister, Annabel Elliot, attracted “up to 200 photographers and journalists … to witness the occasion, having set up 60 ladders lined three-deep in anticipation outside the hotel,” the BBC reported. “Television satellite vans were parked in side streets alongside the London hotel, and bright TV lights illuminated the scene. Alongside the media throng was a crowd of members of the public several hundred strong.”
4
Their first public kiss—a peck on the cheek—took place at another birthday party, marking the fifteenth year of the National Osteoporosis Society in June 2001.