Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (33 page)

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Always look on the bright side of life. The Prince of Wails has proven himself conspicuously bad at following this advice, but twice cameras have captured him intoning it. In Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 documentary, a tentative Charles affects to join in as the rock musician Phil Collins leads a chorus of young jobless. “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle / Don’t grumble, give a whistle / And this’ll help things turn out for the best / And always look on the bright side of life!” The lyrics gained an unexpected poignancy in the mouths of Prince’s Trust clients and a Prince at a low ebb.

Written by Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle, the song originally garnished the final sequence of
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
in which the hero, a reluctant Jewish messiah in Roman-occupied Judea, is crucified. As Brian hangs amid rows of prisoners condemned to die in the same way, Idle, splayed on an adjacent cross, begins to sing and soon everybody takes up the refrain. Protestors accused the film of blasphemy at its 1979 release and launched pickets. Other jurisdictions banned the movie altogether. Aberystwyth—the town in Wales where Charles spent a lonely university term—took thirty years to lift its prohibition.

On November 12, 2008, during the final year of Aberystwyth’s ban, Idle again performed the ditty, clad in a white tutu and feathered headdress, emerging from a gaggle of ballerinas during an excerpt from
Swan Lake
. His appearance marked the finale to “We Are Most Amused,” a London gala in aid of the Prince’s Trust and celebrating its founder’s imminent sixtieth birthday. Once again the cameras sought out Charles in the audience and this time found him cantillating with gusto.

Much had changed since his last sing-along with the Prince’s Trust fourteen years earlier. The song had gained a new audience and some additional lyrics as part of
Spamalot
, a hit musical loosely based on another movie by the Pythons,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index had registered an increase of as much as 30 percent. Humans had reproduced in unprecedented volumes, adding 1.1 billion to the global population. Britain alone had provided Her Majesty with 4 million new subjects, swelling to a population of 61 million. Digital technology had taken hold throughout Her Realms and far beyond, laying waste some industries and creating others, changing how people communicated and the nature of their communications. World wealth had risen but some of it was illusory. The once mighty Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy less than two months before the gala. Trust in most institutions was failing. The monarchy and its heir, by contrast, were undergoing something of a renaissance. Flanked on one side by Camilla, now HRH the Duchess of Cornwall and his dearest wife, and on the other by his younger son, Harry, Charles radiated cheer, convulsing with laughter at words Idle unexpectedly inserted into this special rendition. “If ‘
Spamalot
’ is hot and you like it or p’raps not / A bunch of knights in search of holy grails / When you’re sixty years of age and your mum won’t leave the stage / It’s good to know that you’re still Prince of Wales!”

In his seventh decade, Charles still pursues his grails. His mum remains on the stage, but he knows that the moment of her exit is drawing inexorably closer. That is not a prospect he relishes, since any coronation must follow a funeral. “Always look on the bright side of death,” Idle continued. “Just before you draw your terminal breath / For life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it / Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke it’s true / You’ll see it’s all a show. Leave ’em laughing as you go / Just remember that the last laugh is on you.”

The Prince will never be able to treat mortality with such insouciance—his mother’s, his own, anybody’s. It’s tricky enough to look on the bright side of life. But with Camilla at his right hand and Harry at his left, William happily married and with a son and heir of his own, Charles’s world is more benign than he has ever known it.

CHAPTER 10

Kings to Come

When Charles leads a tour of his psyche, it’s best to bring Wellingtons or borrow a pair from the storeroom at the side entrance to Dumfries House. Even on clement days—and in this neck of Scotland the weather systems cycle as suddenly as the princely moods—the going can get boggy. In other respects a considerate host, the Prince waits for no man and no woman in Louboutins either. One of his guests realizes her spindly heels won’t survive the terrain and returns to the Palladian mansion. The rest of the party sloshes on, at the clip set by the royal mountain goat. Most are younger than he is, but only his estate manager, Oliver Middlemiss, easily keeps pace. At his back, Charles hears time’s winged chariot. Before him lie deserted fields, crumbling outbuildings, vast eternities of potential to change lives, in practical, measurable ways and also in a less tangible sense, by reconnecting people to Nature and the past. If
Harmony
is Charles’s manifesto, the Dumfries estate has become its physical manifestation, a map of his soul complete with funny little gazebos.

Among the guests exploring these twisting pathways is the group of “Bond villains”—wealthy donors and potential donors to the Prince’s charities—who on the previous evening joined the Prince at Dumfries House for a meal of Walled Garden Pea and Broad Bean Risotto with a Soft Poached Hen’s Egg, Pan-Seared Wild Sea Bass, Pommes
É
cras
és
and Hand-Picked Dumfries House Vegetables (exactly the sort of dish Camilla enjoys), and Autumn Plum Crumble with Vanilla Custard (more Charles’s thing), served with Puligny-Montrachet Les Meix Olivier Leflaive 2010, Sarget de Gruaud Larose Saint-Julien 2006, and Laurent Perrier Ros
é
. At the end of this repast, a piper, in full ceremonial uniform—kilt, tunic, sporran, full plaid, and a feather hat—marched twice around the long oval table, playing a medley of traditional Scottish music that included the “Skye Boat Song,” the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie, “the lad that’s born to be king.”

Conversations ranged widely during the meal, at predinner drinks in the Tapestry Room and over digestifs and coffee in the North Drawing Room. Should anyone have asked about the concept behind the ongoing project to renovate the stately home and transform its grounds, Charles, Camilla, and Fiona Lees, Chief Executive of the local East Ayrshire council, were on hand to explain, along with key members of the Dumfries House Trust including its Chief Executive, Michael Fawcett. The plan—inevitably—is to establish a virtuous circle, by saving the timeless—if period-specific—glories of Dumfries House, luring tourists to the estate and the wider area, and in so doing helping to fund the restoration and maintenance of the one and the revival of the other.

The most important surviving early work of architect Robert Adam, Dumfries House was built between 1754 and 1759 for the widower William Crighton-Dalrymple, the 5th Earl of Dumfries, who hoped it would persuade a particularly nubile young woman to marry him. She spurned his advances even though the Earl kitted out his love nest with a stupendous four-poster bed and matching furniture made by a fashionable cabinetmaker of the day, Thomas Chippendale. The lovelorn aristocrat married a cousin instead, dying without an heir eight years after moving in. The house went on to witness further sore disappointments as well as heady excitements. Successive owners splurged care and money, in the nineteenth century installing the first generation of the fully flushable mod-cons Britons like to call “thrones” (pioneered by another famous Thomas C., Thomas Crapper) and adding a wing to the building. The resources to pay for such luxuries eventually became stretched, and in April 2007 Dumfries House and estate came on the market, its collection of Chippendales shrouded in bubble wrap for the journey to Christie’s salesrooms in London. Then Charles intervened.

This was a characteristic intervention, triggered by passion and instinct, an idea in search of a practicable framework, unfunded, unformulated, seemingly unfeasible, controversial, and also visionary. His starting point was the conviction that the house and furniture must not be separated but should be preserved intact and ensemble for the nation. Without having visited the property, he swiftly convened a consortium that lodged the winning bid of $71.5 million, including a $31.8 million loan secured against his charitable foundation and based on the assumed development value of a corner of the estate earmarked for a Poundbury-style housing enclave called Knockroon.

At the opening of the newly restored Walled Garden in July 2014, Charles gave a brief speech. “As anyone who saw this garden before work started will know, the challenge posed in restoring the site has been considerable. It’s always nice to have statistics, so, since 2011, the project has required 47,000 handmade bricks, 37,000 concrete blocks, 9,500 tonnes of hardcore for paths, 5,000 tonnes of soil, one mile of coping stones and four miles of vine wire,” he said.
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He omitted sharper statistics: five zones of Auchinleck and Cumnock are among the poorest in the whole of Scotland; 18 percent of people in the area are officially rated as deprived; soaring unemployment is slowed only by shrinking populations.
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Against these figures, he might have invoked the fifty full-time and twenty part-time seasonal jobs created in the house and grounds or the courses in trades and crafts, free to participants, run on the Dumfries estate that are designed to help the long-term unemployed into work, such as Get Into Hospitality, five weeks of intensive training in the Dumfries House kitchens. Some 70 percent of alumni head straight into paid work. Sarah-Jane Clark, twenty-three, from nearby Kilmarnock, had been jobless for almost eighteen months before she enrolled. “I wasn’t too sure about the cooking side. Once I got a shot in the kitchen I knew.… It was the first time I felt confident in a job,” she says.
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She’s now employed as an apprentice chef and planning a career in catering.

The Prince—who switches to another of his many titles, Duke of Rothesay, when in Scotland—has summoned several of his charities to see what they can do in and for the surrounding area. One of the first schemes involves the renovation of the town hall in New Cumnock, a conurbation even harder hit by the downturn than its older namesake. The revamped building will offer meeting spaces, IT suites, a stage, arts and crafts rooms, nothing lavish in some contexts but a significant bonus for a place far more used to closures than openings. Gette Fulton, a local resident and one of the directors of New Cumnock’s most unexpected facility, an outdoor public swimming pool (it operates for just three months a year), says Charles’s arrival in the area has lifted spirits. She is impressed by the Knockroon development. “Have you been in the houses there? It just shows what can be done.… People are going to say the area is up-and-coming.” Fulton first visited the Dumfries estate recently; previous lairds built walls to keep out commoners. “We were discouraged from going,” she says.
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Charles is building to attract visitors, not to repel them, and to establish outposts of benign influence in the community.

This is the strange, compelling geography he lays out for his Bond villains: a work in progress he doesn’t expect to see completed in his lifetime; an arboretum that at this muddy early stage of its existence looks like a slough of despond but actually represents his optimism; capsules of many of his charities and initiatives; a mini Poundbury; an outdoor center imparting Gordonstounian principles of rugged communal problem solving; workshops where young men and women learn crafts that have already been deployed on the estate to build rustic follies. School parties roam the kitchen garden, children too urban to have ever seen a vegetable in its natural state encouraged to get their hands dirty. At the center of everything sits a perfect exemplar of eighteenth-century architecture and a unique collection of furniture, cherished again.

These are small groins set against prevailing tides, but they make a difference to people watching helpless as livelihoods and communities are swept away. None of this would be possible without donations from people like David Brownlow, one of the dinner guests, as impeccable as any Bond villain but, like Charles, keen to talk about good works rather than plotting the downfall of the planet. Brownlow, who is British and a self-made recruitment tycoon, reckons he has contributed around $5.5 million and given an additional three or four days a month of his time to secure Dumfries House since the Prince first met and wooed him into supporting his charities in 2005. His largesse helped to dig the Dumfries project out of an early crisis, when land prices, and confidence, dropped as the banking crisis unfolded. Knockroon appeared stillborn and has been slow to disprove doubters, though the families living in its white-rendered homes seem as contented as Poundbury’s residents. Critics accused the Prince of endangering his charitable empire through his recklessness. Yet by the autumn of 2011, the loan had been paid off and soon caf
é
s, a restaurant, and a bed-and-breakfast on the estate had added fresh revenue streams. Still, these are small beer against the costs of the project and of Charles’s wider and deeper ambitions.

So Charles continues to tap wealthy individuals and potential corporate donors, aiming not only to entice funds for individual facilities but also to create an endowment that will generate regular income in years to come. Similar efforts are under way in relation to any of the Prince’s charities and initiatives likely to struggle in a future that will deprive them of their founder’s attention by elevating him to a higher place, be it the throne or the afterlife that his faith—his Anglican faith—reassures him he will find. In the financial year ending 2014, his charities raised $208 million in private and corporate donations in addition to their income from public sources and endowments.

“He’s on a constant fundraiser, constant,” says Ben Elliot, who has gained an appreciation of what such efforts involve since setting up his own charity, the Quintessentially Foundation. Elliot came to the September 2013 Dumfries House dinner bringing a member of the Polish aristocracy who was curious to see whether the model the Prince is pioneering might translate to his family’s own estates. “[The Prince] has got so many things he cares about that this machine, whether it’s Dumfries House or any one of his other projects, takes enormous energy to feed.”
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