Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (34 page)

But the machine also feeds Charles and in July 2014 brought him emotional sustenance from a rare quarter indeed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh traveled to the Dumfries estate to attend the opening of the Walled Garden. Throughout Charles’s life, his mother has conferred on him medals, orders, and titles with a generosity that she would never think appropriate to match in sappy sentiment. This time, he was able to return the favor, naming the garden in her honor. Moreover, if the Duke has previously seemed unimpressed by some of his son’s achievements, on this occasion he mirrored the weather system that settled over East Ayrshire for the key hours of the visit: dry, a little gusty, but warm.

Fiona Lees accompanied the royals as they toured the estate. “Thousands of people are benefiting from HRH’s work … we could not ask for a better hand up for regeneration and there cannot be a better example of heritage led regeneration,” she e-mailed later. “A light has been shone on our communities and they are bursting with pride.”
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So, on that day, was the Prince.

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Asbestos. GM foods. A question about whether he sees echoes in Tony Blair’s “Stakeholder Society” or in David Cameron’s minor reworking, the elusive “Big Society,” of the kind of community involvement he has championed for years sets Charles on a different tack, listing technologies developed to provide solutions that have created problems instead. As is often the case, at least half of his assertions are incontrovertibly right; the other half could easily be debated until the genetically modified dairy cows come home. “What I’m saying is you have to look at things, each one, and not imagine it’s the quick fix these things appear to be,” he says.
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The left corner of his mouth veers downward.

The time frames of a prince—especially one who has spent more than sixty years in constitutional limbo—are not those of ordinary humanity and certainly not of politicians. He commits to projects such as Dumfries that stretch into the unforeseeable long term and believes in formulae that have proven their worth over centuries, even millennia: the golden mean in architecture, natural designs observed and reverse-engineered by biomimeticists, traditional breeds of cattle and, of course, sheep. He trusts to the value of painstaking group problem solving, the benefits of convening different constellations of people to reason slowly through options, try out ideas, and sometimes fail, gaining from the process as well as from its ultimate success. This is a technique he learned at Gordonstoun and has incorporated in many of the programs run by the Prince’s Trust and his other charities. Participants in team-building exercises at the Tamar Manoukian Outdoor Centre on the Dumfries estate work together to fill with water a pipe riddled with thirteen holes in order to float a rubber duck to the top and retrieve a message attached to it. Sometimes it’s a note of congratulations. Often, it’s just a clue about what to tackle next.

In April 2013 William and Kate attended the opening of the center, named after a member of the prominent Armenian family that funded it. “Make it brief,” William told his father as Charles cleared his throat to give a speech. He spoke in jest but with Kate carrying the weight of their unborn child and a sharp bite to the spring air, this wouldn’t have been the best moment for one of Charles’s more discursive efforts.

William anyway tends to be as clipped as his father is expansive. He has given a few interviews in which his emotions break through; answering questions about his mother and once visibly choking as he watched footage of a rhino injured by poachers and bleeding to death. The segment was filmed soon after George’s birth, for a documentary aimed at raising awareness of the plight of endangered wildlife. “The last few weeks for me have been a very different emotional experience—something I never thought I would feel for myself,” said the new father. “I find, even though it’s only been a short period, that a lot of things affect me now—when I see a clip like that there’s so much emotion and so much feeling wrapped up into conservation and environment. It’s just so powerful. You’d think something that big and that’s been around so long, would have worked out a way to avoid being caught and persecuted, but they really don’t. I do feel anger, but I also feel really great hope that we will overcome this as a human race. The more we raise the issue and the more education there is … I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t think there was a chance it could be successful. Poaching is now probably the worst I’ve ever known it, but I am not the kind of guy to give up.”
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In that moment he sounded like his father, albeit without the same level of verbal dexterity or leavening humor. For the most part William reveals little to journalists, radiating a contempt for the increasingly endangered species at least as heartfelt as his concern for rhinos. The royal rat pack assumes this must be because William blames the press for his mother’s death, forgetting that he surely remembers enough of his boyhood to blame the press for what it did to her life. Yet William’s terseness is also a function of a process Charles himself went through. In defining himself against his parents, Charles became the man he is. In defining himself against his father, William has become more like his royal grandmother, closed and cautious, comfortable with actions rather than words.

William has also become his own man. Until comparatively recently, Clarence House advisers clung to a vision of transition that would see Charles pass his charitable empire to his sons when he assumed the Crown. The Prince’s Trust would simply move its apostrophe one space to the right. “It would be nice to see the continuum,” says a palace insider. But neither of “the boys,” as the thirtysomething William and Harry are still known among palace staff, shows an inclination to get involved with the Trust or to take on the rest of the sprawl. They dutifully turn up for Prince’s Trust events or occasions such as the opening of the outdoors center at Dumfries House and joined their father at a February 2014 conservation conference, but otherwise they are focused on their own careers, establishing their own organizations, and demonstrating their independence in other ways too.

This sometimes means they make their own mistakes. The conservation conference was overshadowed by revelations that the boys were newly returned from a hunting trip in Spain. They hadn’t slaughtered endangered creatures, just wild boar and stag, but the juxtaposition of killing and conference wasn’t ideal. Kensington Palace aides were caught on the hop. The boys had not informed them of their plans and if they had, says a source, “we’d have advised them not to go and they’d have ignored us.” The Princes’ determination to plow their own furrows recalls the young Charles. The furrows, however, are distinct.

From the spring of this year, William embarks on an experiment that will see the second in line to the throne trying to hold down a civilian job, as an air ambulance pilot, albeit with more flexibility in his schedule than his colleagues so that he can continue to carry out royal duties. He plans to donate his salary to charity, illustrating the larger anomaly of a royal seeking a slice of normal life. Kate, meanwhile, has started flying solo in her own way, representing the Queen. She was supposed to undertake her first overseas engagement without William in September 2014, a trip to Malta, but William stood in for his wife after severe morning sickness temporarily clipped her wings.

That same month Harry celebrated his thirtieth birthday in the afterglow of the Invictus Games, a sporting competition for injured service personnel from thirteen nations that he staged at London’s former Olympic Park. Newspaper coverage was benign. The British tabloids like Harry—for now. “He’s the
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readers’ favorite royal,” says the newspaper’s royal photographer Arthur Edwards. “They think he’s like them and that’s the highest compliment. He’s a larrikin.”
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A celebrity wheelchair rugby match at the Invictus Games featured Harry, his first cousin Zara, and her husband, Mike Tindall, a recently retired professional rugby player, raising the specter of “The Grand Knockout Tournament” and a previous generation’s pratfalls only to banish it again. The Games provided a platform for the disabled competitors rather than the cavortings of royals. Yet the event’s success doesn’t solve Harry’s larger existential conundrum any more than his current tabloid popularity will shield him against a future narrative of redundancy, as one of the spares, not the heir. (Since the birth of his nephew George, Harry stands fourth in line to the throne.)

Nor has Harry yet solved the problem of how to find a partner who is grounded and sane, yet not so sane that the prospect of life on Planet Windsor sends her in retreat. It took his brother almost a decade and a public rupture with Kate before he felt secure in taking the decision to marry. It took his father far longer to find contentment. Diana never did.

That history still shapes her sons’ decisions. “William seems to have chosen to live up in Norfolk [as his country retreat], and yet his father has spent so long building [Highgrove] that I’m sure he would love one of his sons to inherit. It’s a father’s expression of immortality,” says an insider. “It embraces his commitment to sustainable farming and to the world of the botanical, the natural world, and then he’s got his Islamic garden there so it’s an expression of his interests.”

Highgrove also carries echoes of a difficult past. This is the place the boys spent some of their best times and the most confusing. Ill-equipped as Charles was to cope with his first marriage or its collapse or the sudden challenge of parenting children whose resentment at his rejection of their mother had now been layered with grief and more anger at her death, he made a good job of the last of these. At Diana’s funeral, her brother delivered a eulogy that included a barely disguised swipe at royal parenting. “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned,” said Earl Spencer. The Prince’s biographer Anthony Holden judged that Diana’s influence had already been erased when, less than three months after her death, Harry stood alongside his father at a charity concert in South Africa attended by Nelson Mandela and featuring the Spice Girls. In balmy temperatures, listening to pop, Harry, aged thirteen, wore a suit and tie.

There is no question that Charles raised his sons to an awareness of duty and tradition—and an appreciation for a well-cut suit, though the boys tend to prefer single- to double-breasted—but he nurtured them too. He has always been keen to give them, in place of the tough love favored by his own parents, something more enveloping; he determined with Diana that they should be as protected from the public gaze as possible and spend as much time with their parents as possible, and when the time came they would not attend Gordonstoun but the softer Eton, right on the doorstep of Windsor. He resisted the temptation to denigrate Diana while she lived and afterward encouraged the boys to think and talk about her and maintain contact with her friends. The relationships between father and sons are not without stresses and complexities, but they are stronger as a result. Unsurprisingly, these bonds are most easily visible in a shared sense of humor, says Ben Elliot, “them ridiculing him, him ridiculing them, that joshing that often goes with good relationships. Not just about a lack of hair or those kinds of things. I’ve seen with his younger son them almost just like frolicking with one another in a really lovely way.”
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“They are so, so loving,” says Emma Thompson.
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When he married and started a family, William shifted the dynamic, presenting the idealized family unit that used to be monarchy’s specialty. Yet in appearing to secure the future of the Windsor dynasty, a potential future King happily married to his future Queen and already blessed with an heir (and a spare on the way), unblemished by scandals, unburdened by failures, the Cambridges have attained a popularity that threatens to undermine the first in line to the throne. “People admire the Queen so much because she’s impeccable—she shows no emotion—and they also say Prince William is a modern royal, but somehow Prince Charles is in the middle and gets criticized from both sides,” says Patrick Holden. “But in his own way he’s also defining the new role of the monarchy and, in my opinion, doing it brilliantly well.”
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Holden says the media narrative of princely jealousies is overdone. He has heard Charles comment ruefully on his sons’ and daughter-in-law’s ability to draw crowds and headlines but has witnessed far more often the Prince’s boundless pride in the younger generation. He is always learning from his children, the Prince remarks during predinner conversation at Dumfries House. He is constantly amazed by what they know about the world—and what he doesn’t. In return, he has tried to do as the Queen Mother did for him, introducing them to arts and culture, at any rate those corners of art and culture that resonate for him.

He also takes an obvious pleasure in instructing his boys in the stagecraft necessary to carry off royal ceremonial. “The role is a role and it’s something that has to be played to the hilt all the time,” says Emma Thompson.
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The metaphor is apt, if somewhat alarming. In September 2013, Charles and his elder son spent hours closeted at Birkhall practicing how to conduct investitures ahead of William’s debut doing it for real. For the rehearsal they used a sword dispatched from London to ensure William got the hang of the tricky maneuver that involves touching the blade on the shoulders of those receiving knighthoods without inflicting injury.

As father and son rehearsed, Camilla and Kate enjoyed the tranquility of the Balmoral estate, at least during the periods George left it unpunctuated. His birth has drawn a close family closer. The boys not only accept Camilla but are affectionate toward her, seeing how much she lifts their father’s spirits. Diana has not been forgotten but she no longer divides and conquers. “HRH said something in connection with his grandson the other day which I thought was incredibly revealing, about how the most important thing is to have a heart that’s open,” says Patrick Holden.
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