Charles: Victim or villain?

Charles would take girlfriends to watch him play polo at Smiths Lawn, or he would take them to the opera or the ballet and bring them home to his apartment at Buckingham Palace for supper afterwards. But there was little room for spontaneity, and certainly none for privacy. He couldn’t even be alone with them in his car. Ever since a gunman ambushed Princess Anne as she was being driven down the Mall in 1974, security for all the family has been tight – and on any journey there will be a detective in the car and a backup car behind. The Prince’s staff would make the arrangements and girls were usually brought to wherever he happened to be, which understandably made encounters awkward and forced. And if the formality didn’t kill a burgeoning relationship, then the other hazard of dating the Prince of Wales – being splashed all over the gossip columns – usually did.

Lord Mountbatten had encouraged Charles to take girlfriends to his Hampshire estate – he was a great believer that the Prince should ‘sow his wild oats’ before settling down – and Broadlands afforded greater privacy (as well as the chance for Mountbatten to vet the latest conquest), but it was still an unhappy situation, and one from which most suitable girls ran a mile. Far more relaxing, Charles discovered, was the company of married women. There was no pressure on him, no expectation from them, and best of all the press left him alone. This was how he became so friendly with Camilla Parker Bowles, although she was only one of several he was close to.

He had first got to know Camilla Shand, as she then was, in 1972, when he was in the Navy. She was single at the time, but she had been going out with Andrew Parker Bowles for six years. He was a cavalry officer, nine years older than her, and hugely attractive, but hopelessly faithless. He had swept her off her feet when she was just eighteen – as he swept many girls before and since, including Princess Anne – and she hoped he would marry her, but he took her for granted, and treated her badly, knowing that she would always be there to take him back.

It was while he was stationed in Germany and their relationship was going through an off patch that Camilla and the Prince of Wales had a brief affair in the autumn of 1972. The Prince fell in love with Camilla. She was the most wonderful girl he had ever met. She was pretty and bubbly and laughed easily, and at the same sort of puerile dirty jokes he enjoyed. She loved the Goons and silly voices and put on accents that made him laugh, and she had no pretensions or guile of any sort. She loved horses and hunting, loved watching polo, loved the countryside, and was relaxed and exciting to be with.

He saw a lot of her at the end of that year and fell ever more deeply in love. He even began to think that he might have found someone he could share his life with. To his great joy she seemed to feel the same way about him, but he was only just twenty-four and too reticent to say anything to her – and certainly too reticent to discuss the possibility of any future together. Three weeks before Christmas their time together came to an enforced end. Duty called, and he went off to join the frigate HMS Minerva, as Acting Sub Lieutenant, which was due to set sail for the Caribbean in the New Year, and would keep him away for eight months. Before he left, Camilla came down to have lunch on the ship, once with Lord Mountbatten, with whom she had stayed with Charles at Broadlands, and on another weekend on her own.

By the time Charles came back Camilla had married Andrew Parker Bowles. They had become engaged in March, two months after he set sail, and were married at the Guards Chapel in London in July. This was what she had been waiting seven years for. He was one of the most attractive and desirable men in England and she adored him. When Charles heard of the engagement he was deeply upset. As he wrote to a friend, it seemed particularly cruel that after ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ fate had decreed that it should last no more than six months. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’

Despite the bitter disappointment, he and Camilla remained friends, and during the next seven years, when he was dating other girls with enthusiasm, she was someone he could talk to. When the Parker Bowles’s first child, Tom, was born in 1975, Camilla asked Charles to be his godfather. For many years there was nothing sexual in their relationship, but because they had had such a happy and intimate affair during those six months, there remained a closeness and trust and friendship that was special. He confided in Camilla and spent a lot of time on the telephone to her. They also met at polo, parties and royal gatherings – Andrew Parker Bowles’s mother had been a friend of the Queen and he was distantly related to the Queen Mother. Camilla and her family had also been on the periphery of royalty. Her father, Bruce Shand, was a wealthy wine merchant and businessman, and her mother, Rosalind, a member of the hugely rich Cubitt family – her father was Baron Ashcombe. Camilla’s great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been mistress to King Edward VII, who was the Prince’s great-great-grandfather, and Camilla enjoyed the idea of history repeating itself. She and Andrew were frequently invited to stay at Sandringham, Windsor and Balmoral, and Charles went to spend weekends with Camilla and Andrew and the children in Wiltshire. Their daughter Laura was born in 1979.

The friendship only became physical again after Laura’s birth, long after Camilla realised that the philanderer she had pursued for seven years before their marriage had continued in much the same way after marriage. What was so hurtful was that as often as not the women Andrew bedded were friends of hers. As time passed, she spent a lot of time on her own in the country, looking after the children and horses, while Andrew lived in London, where he escorted other women quite openly. Under those circumstances, who was to mind if she had a fling with the Prince of Wales? It was not serious, it couldn’t go anywhere, it was just a bit of fun, and although there were occasional references to Camilla in the satirical magazine Private Eye, and the odd gossip column, it was the Prince’s single starlets that attracted the headlines.

The Duke of Edinburgh disapproved of the playboy image that the Prince was acquiring, and when he passed his thirtieth birthday, and still showed no signs of settling down, told him what he thought. Charles knew it was his duty to provide an heir for the future security and stability of the monarchy, but he wanted to find the right wife and had repeatedly spoken about choosing someone who would know what she was letting herself in for.

‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married,’ he once said. ‘[Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.

‘Whatever your place in life, when you marry you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life – a job. She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, otherwise she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years – well, that’s the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.’

Despite the girlfriends, the Prince was fundamentally lonely and longed to find someone to share his life with. He wanted to settle down, be domestic, have a garden and dogs and children, and all the things that his friends had. He had spent his life in search of love and reassurance and was dogged by a sense of worthlessness, which his parents had done nothing to help him overcome. They are not demonstrative people, and praise for one another’s achievements is not something that comes naturally in the Royal Family.

Those who have known the family since Charles was a child say that the Queen adores her eldest son, as she adores all her children – there is no doubting the affection – but sadly it is not in her nature to be overtly affectionate. Some remember her sitting him on her knee at afternoon tea when he was small, and playing games with him, but that physical closeness disappeared as he grew older. The Queen inherited the throne when he was three years old on the death of her father, George VI, and her duties as monarch inevitably competed with motherhood, taking her away more than she would have chosen. She made it a rule to be with her children at bath and bedtime, whenever possible, and to be at home during the school holidays, but day to day care was left to much-loved nannies, which was normal in upper-class families of that period. The one time she was away for a sustained period was for the Coronation tour in 1953–54, when she and the Duke of Edinburgh were gone for six months, including Christmas. It was then that Charles saw so much of the Queen Mother and, although the Prince adores his mother, the relationship never developed the real warmth or intimacy that he shares with his grandmother.

Even on the night Diana died, when his mother was on the other side of a thin partition wall, he sat and talked and worried not with her, but with his friends and his advisers. When he thought Diana was injured and was undecided about whether to get on a plane and go to Paris, he didn’t ask his mother’s advice, he asked his private secretary; and in the arranging of the plane, his advisers spoke to her advisers. This is no ordinary mother–son relationship: Charles has been in awe of her all his life and, even at fifty, is still delighted beyond reason when she compliments him on something she has noticed he has done well.

His father is equally loving and proud of his eldest son, but no less sparing in showing it. He was rough with Charles as a child and witnesses say he frequently reduced the boy to tears. Charles was a sensitive, shy and uncertain little boy, in contrast to his sister Anne, who was tough and sure of herself and could do no wrong. The Duke probably thought this kind of treatment would make a man of Charles, but it only served to undermine his confidence still further. Charles was frightened of his father, and desperate for his approval, but try as he might to please him, he seldom could.

There are not many men of fifty, with independent means, who are still trying so hard to please their parents – certainly not men with the kind of physical courage that the Prince of Wales indisputably has. But the family that Charles was born into is not like any other family in Britain and he was conditioned to accept, without question, a way of life that normal people would find quite intolerable. Duty to Queen and country comes before any other consideration. Charles is never entirely alone: a detective is within earshot twenty-four hours a day. He never goes anywhere without someone knowing. He has no privacy, therefore, and is dependent upon the discretion of the men who shadow him.

There is no heart to the family: it is a business, an institution, and participation is not an option, it is duty. There is very little communication between members of the family. When there is, it is often by memo, or via private secretaries. And, except for holidays and ceremonial fixtures, there is very little contact between them. Their lives are run to a formula, from which there is no deviation or spontaneity, and the formality with which the Queen runs her household is from another age.

Apart from the companionship, which he craved, Charles had no need for a wife. His life was ordered: his meals were cooked; his clothes bought, laundered and laid out for him; his every whim catered for; his friends numerous, understanding and sufficiently fawning; his office compliant; his love life exciting; and his sporting activities and holidays strategically organised from one year to the next to fit in around official fixtures, functions and the call of duty. He had houses in the country and convenient apartments at Buckingham Palace; he had horses, dogs and cars, and a fleet of royal helicopters, planes and trains, not to mention the royal yacht at his disposal, plus holiday homes in all the places he most liked to be. He only had to click his fingers and what he wanted arrived or was fixed. The only benefit a wife could bring, which he could get nowhere else, was an heir.

By an accident of birth the Prince of Wales was cursed with a life in which his waking hours are mapped out six months in advance, and there are fixtures in his diary which will be there on the same day every year for the rest of his life. He is surrounded by people who tell him what they think he wants to hear; he is paraded like a performing poodle on high days and holidays, and his every twitch and grunt recorded and analysed by the tabloid press. His right to exist is debated regularly, as though he had some say in the matter, and his character and physique considered fair game for whoever fancies taking a passing punch. This is how it has been since he was three years old, when his mother became Queen.

He is an uneasy mix of old and new, half expecting the deference, service and lifestyle of another era, and half wanting to be a modern man of the people in an egalitarian age. But he is hampered by being kept at one remove from the life modern man leads. Diana had one huge advantage over the Prince: she did understand how the other half lived, because she had grown up in the real world. The Prince, try as he might, has never been given a chance. He has wanted to meet people in their own environment, but he is always cushioned. Try as he might to empathise, he will never know what it is like to queue for hours in a hospital casualty department or have petty bureaucrats be rude to him. He will never be elbowed out of the way in the rush for the first bus to appear in twenty minutes, know the frustrations of a train being cancelled, or have to hang around an overcrowded airport lounge. And if it starts to rain, someone will appear with an umbrella to keep him dry.

When he was forty minutes late for an Order of the Bath ceremony at Westminster Abbey with the Queen not long ago, he was incandescent with rage. The helicopter had been unable to land at Highgrove because of fog, so he was told to drive to RAF Lyneham nearby, only to discover that the fog was just as bad and the helicopter couldn’t land there either. There was no alternative but to drive all the way to London, which made him late. Some unfortunate person had got it wrong, and he hit the roof. When his staff once failed to organise his supper menu on the royal train because they had been working exceptionally hard on a very tricky weekend of engagements that had gone like clockwork, he was furious. The chef said he could do him one of three dishes: some salmon, a salad or steak and kidney pie. He petulantly said he didn’t like any of them. When a member of staff once failed to call him ‘sir’ or ‘Your Royal Highness’ – terrified by the experience of meeting the Prince for the first time – he said, ‘Do you think you could ask that chap to call me something when he meets me?’ Friends will say, ‘He only lets people know who he is when they forget,’ but it evidently depends upon what sort of mood he is in, and during the difficult times in his marriage, his moods were highly unpredictable.

Employees see this side of the Prince more than friends, which perhaps makes it all the more reprehensible.

Yet at other times he is relaxed and will laugh when things go wrong. A trip to the United World College in Trieste some years ago fell during the transition period between two private secretaries. The one who had done the recce – when the precise details are worked out of where HRH will go, who he will speak to, and how long it will all take – was not the one there on the day. Thus with great élan, but no certainty about where they were going, the Prince and accompanying entourage were led off down an alleyway, only to discover it was a dead end which led to the dustbins. Covered in confusion the party did a swift U-turn and with photographers swarming around them beat a hasty retreat. The incoming private secretary, Major-General Sir Christopher Airy, a highly efficient man, was mortified, but the Prince simply laughed.

He was also amused by an encounter with Chris Eubank, the champion boxer, who had been running a fitness workshop at a Prince’s Trust residential course in Brighton. He was standing at the end of a line-up to meet the Prince and was obviously very nervous, so the private secretary went across to try and calm him down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘the Prince is very easy to talk to, just enjoy it.’

After they had met, he went up to Eubank to see how it had gone. ‘Yes, of course it was okay,’ said Eubank. ‘I wasn’t frightened. If you’ve been in the ring with Nigel Benn you’re not frightened of the Prince of Wales. So it was absolutely fine.’

The private secretary beat a retreat. A little later Eubank called him back. ‘Anyway, I hope I did the right thing. I called him Mr Windsor. I’m Chris Eubank, so I’m Mr Eubank. He’s Charles Windsor, so he must be Mr Windsor. Right?’

‘Yes,’ said the private secretary, fearing for his profile. ‘That’s absolutely fine.’

Charles does have a sense of humour and a great sense of the absurd, but anyone who knows him well knows how important it is to judge his mood before ever presuming familiarity. His children are the exception; they can say and do what they like to him and if he starts to get testy or pompous about it, they simply tease him out of it. They are sensitive enough, though, to know who not to tease him in front of.

One other person who can stop the Prince taking himself too seriously, and get away with it, is Mrs Parker Bowles; but she too picks her moments and would never embarrass the Prince in front of anyone other than his closest friends. They all acknowledge she has a miraculous effect on him, and whenever invitations to dinner at Highgrove are issued, they desperately hope Camilla will be there. If she is, the evening will be relaxed and good fun, with a great deal of gossip, jokes and giggling. Without her, the Prince is likely to be serious and if he’s feeling down – which without her he often is – he can be fairly leaden company.

Thousands of young people whom he has helped during the course of the last twenty-one years rightly regard him as someone very special: without him they might never have had a chance in life. He has helped when no bank manager would have considered their application – even if they had known how to apply for a loan. He believed in their potential and has put time, thought, effort and money into helping through the Prince’s Trust and its various offshoots. The Prince’s Trust was just the beginning. He has spread himself over a wide range of interests and concerns, and he has done a huge amount of good in his fifty years, much of it unrecognised by the majority of the population. He has exploited his privilege and his position to very good ends, and there is no doubt that he is an extremely sensitive man, who cares desperately and sincerely. Yet he remains intrinsically very selfish and very spoilt.

The problem is that Charles has no social equal, and few people have ever been brave enough over the years to say what needed to be said. There have been a few exceptions, and whenever rebuked for behaving in an inconsiderate manner to someone, the Prince has always been deeply ashamed. On one occasion, speaking at a Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust dinner, the Prince made some rather barbed remarks about a couple of people in the room who were dragging their feet about taking up one of his ideas. At the end of the evening, Michael Colborne told the Prince he thought he had been unnecessarily harsh on the two individuals. Colborne had known the Prince during his time in the Navy and joined his staff in 1974. He felt so strongly that over the following weekend he sat down and put his feelings on paper, and sent the letter to the Prince, who was by then staying on a Duchy farm. A week later Charles was back at Highgrove, and called Colborne into his office.

‘You know that letter you wrote me?’ he said. ‘Do you know what I did with it? I read it and I screwed it up into a ball and I kicked it round the bedroom.’

‘Oh you did, did you, sir?’ said Colborne with a slight smile. ‘Why was that?’

‘Because unfortunately you were right. I wasn’t very nice to those two men that night.’

FOUR

The Discovery of Diana

‘She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

Friend of Prince Charles

When Charles first met Diana she was a nondescript schoolgirl of sixteen – his girlfriend’s little sister. He was in the midst of a lengthy and enjoyable relationship with Sarah, and they met at Althorp, where he had been invited to a shoot. Diana was nothing more than a slightly plump, noisy teenager, but he made a profound impression on this particular teenager and Diana secretly set her heart on him then and there and determined that she would become Princess of Wales.

Sarah’s romance with Charles came to an end when she spoke candidly to the press about it, saying, ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’ But they remained friends, and the Prince invited Sarah and Diana to his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace a year later, and a few months after that, in January 1979, they were both invited as guests of the Queen to a shooting weekend at Sandringham. That very weekend, their father, Earl Spencer, had come out of hospital following a brain haemorrhage that very nearly killed him.

Later that year Diana was staying with her sister, Jane Fellowes, in her house at Balmoral to help with Jane’s new baby, while the Royal Family was in residence at the castle. But the first time Charles saw her as anything more than a jolly and bouncy young girl whom he enjoyed taking out from time to time as one of a group to make up numbers was in July 1980, when they were both invited to a weekend party with mutual friends in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic and humiliating bust up with his latest passion, Anna Wallace, and he and Diana were sitting side by side on a hay bale while their hosts prepared a barbecue, when the conversation turned to Mountbatten, who had died the previous August. What Diana said touched the Prince deeply – as she knew it would.

‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, “It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.”’

It is ironic that her sensitivity about Lord Mountbatten should have triggered Charles’s interest in Diana as a future bride, for Mountbatten would not have approved of the match. In losing his beloved great-uncle, his ‘Honorary Grandfather’, the Prince had lost his mentor; also, for a considerable time, he had lost his way in life. Mountbatten would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity; but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain them through fifty years of marriage. He might also have spotted her acute vulnerability and the damage sustained by her painful start in life, and known that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, was not the right man to cope with her needs.

Mountbatten’s murder had an unimaginable impact on the Prince’s life; it knocked him entirely off-balance. As he wrote in his journal on the evening he heard the news, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …