Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (9 page)

Until Queen Victoria moved to the larger, uglier Buckingham Palace just down the Mall, sovereigns resided at St. James’s Palace. These days the elegant Tudor building, commissioned by Henry VIII and once home to Anne Boleyn, is a frequent setting for conferences, meetings, and receptions. Prince Charles may not command front pages as younger family members do or bring out crowds in equivalent numbers, but what he lacks in mass appeal, he makes up in convening power. He has received a startlingly diverse range of guests, from the Australian pop star Kylie Minogue to the Dalai Lama, often shunned for fear of offending China. (Pope Francis declined to meet the exiled Tibetan leader in December 2014.) Charles’s guests have included people who are still at the top of their game and figures whose moment has since passed or shaded into notoriety. He welcomed the British DJ Jimmy Savile as a frequent visitor, unaware of his habit of inappropriately touching the palace secretarial staff (Savile turned out to be a prodigious pedophile and sex offender), and in 2002 glad-handed Bashar al Assad at St. James’s Palace.

Few people reject an invitation from a future king. If this means the Prince has sometimes kept dubious company, it also grants him extraordinary access and a platform. He used his 2013 Advent reception, attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other prominent religious leaders, to highlight the suffering of Syrian Christians in the civil conflict that Assad’s brutality helped to trigger. He holds regular powwows with business and industry, pushing his interlinked agendas of sustainability and community engagement. He recalls, with gratitude, the advice of the politician and diplomat Sir Christopher Soames—the father of one of his close friends, MP Sir Nicholas Soames—who first alerted him to the ease with which he might expect to bring high-level participants together. “That is a piece of advice I have never forgotten and I’ve developed and pursued and I’ve found over and over again,” says the Prince. “And right, there may be advantages in my case because I haven’t got a particular axe to grind and people notice that I suppose, when you get people round a table you discover that frequently it’s the first time they’ve all sat round a table. You think, this can’t be possible. They must’ve sat and talked. These are people you’d think would form a sensible integrated approach. Not a bit of it.” He takes pride in his facility at “getting business people, government and agencies to sit down with NGOs, who normally they might never have talked to, except they shout across a huge chasm.”
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In 2009, a clutch of world leaders and prominent figures pulled up gilt chairs around one of his capacious tables for a summit of his Prince’s Rainforest Project (PRP): eight elected premiers—Australia’s Kevin Rudd, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Guyana’s Samuel Hinds, Indonesia’s Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Japan’s Taro Aso, and Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg—plus then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, four British Cabinet ministers, President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, Canadian Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty, Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon, Gabonese Defense Minister Ali Bongo Ondimba, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, and World Bank President Robert Zoellick.

The Prince had established the PRP two years earlier, focusing its efforts on identifying the economic drivers of deforestation and suggesting possible alternatives. The international community was mulling a market mechanism akin to carbon credits to make trees more valuable alive than dead, but the Prince worried that the scheme would arrive too late and do too little. He used the 2009 summit to float the idea of an emergency bridge. His intervention led to the formation of a secretariat by the Norwegian and British governments that in turn kicked off an intergovernmental process. The following May in Oslo, thirty-five donor countries agreed to an investment of $4 billion over three years into projects to reduce carbon emissions.

The Prince continues to drive his environmental campaign, presiding over further summits at St. James’s Palace and taking the podium at high-level conferences. His PRP lives on, renamed the International Sustainability Unit, and entrusted with a broader remit that looks at bringing agriculture and forestry into harmony rather than competition, sustainable fishing, and resilience, particularly food and water security. Few of the summit attendees retain the same portfolios or even hold office. As of January 2015 Merkel is the only elected leader who attended the summit to remain in power. The Prince’s constancy comes at a price. He has no democratic mandate, nor is there a mechanism for voting him out. It is one of his greatest strengths as a campaigner and the reason why some people will never accept his right to campaign.

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At a pub in the market town of Llandovery, another group of people convened around a table by the Prince embark on a game without fixed end. The players include off-duty protection officers, drivers, and aides, members of the retinue that accompanies Charles on most of his travels, road-weary veterans whose devotion to the Prince can be measured in the numbers of days they spend away from home and the breadth of their knowledge of pub games. This particular contest sees each player alternately exclaim “fuzzy duck” or “ducky fuzz,” or at least try to. If someone fumbles the phrase, often producing an obscenity and a double measure of amusement, he or she takes a deep drink and the direction of the game reverses.

The entertainment earlier in the evening at nearby Llwynywermod has also provoked hilarity, if not so predictably. The Prince and his Duchess conclude their day in Wales by hosting people from the locality and further afield to an evening of Welsh folk songs and dances. The guests who take their seats in Llwynywermod’s converted barn reflect different strands of the couple’s interests: cultural figures, assorted flavors of civic worthiness, business leaders who may prove good for donations to the Prince’s charities, and a few real friends—Patrick Holden, who farms in the area, attends with his wife. At first everyone is transported by the music of the truest of voices harmonizing a cappella, sometimes accompanied by harp and fiddle—and blackbirds nesting in the eaves, late in fledging, that fill every interlude in the program with more singing. After two summer carols comes the first clog dance, then four more carols and a harp solo.

At the second clog dance,
Pedwarawd clocsio
—a clogging quartet—Camilla’s shoulders begin to shake. The royal hosts sit in the front row, backs to most guests, who perhaps assume the beauty of the music has moved her. As she struggles to conceal her tears, it becomes apparent that the dancing display, as athletic as aesthetic, has indeed made her cry, with suppressed laughter. The Prince touches her hand, restraining or comforting, and his shoulders shake, too. Her tears—and mascara—continue to flow.

It isn’t the most regal of behavior, not something you can imagine the Queen doing. For the public, this is proving a positive, and for the Prince it has undoubtedly always been part of Camilla’s attraction. Warmth, spontaneity, and humor have been scarce commodities in his life, from his earliest years.

He is at his most serene in her company, yet on this evening in Wales, as most nights, he will not follow her straight to bed, but instead sits down to his paperwork. It’s what he does. “I keep trying to get him to have more than one gin,” says Emma Thompson. “Have another, I keep screeching.”
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But there are always letters to read and more to write. The black ink scuttles across the virgin sheets, urgent and insistent.

Any understanding of the Prince must flow from an understanding of the institution that created him and which he serves. Concern about his questing extends beyond republican circles and the tea tables of staunch traditionalists. In the corridors and back rooms and private apartments of Buckingham Palace there is mounting anxiety as the Queen’s reign enters what one Clarence House insider calls “its inevitable twilight.” In defining his role as heir apparent, the Prince has signaled a redefinition of the monarchy. Some courtiers—and the sovereign herself—fear that neither the Crown nor its subjects will tolerate the shock of the new.

The Queen set the terms by which her son is judged—and so often found wanting. Yet her reign speaks to the importance not of staying still but of maintaining the illusion of unbroken tradition, perfect continuity. The next chapter examines that reign and her role and the private person so rarely glimpsed. The biggest test of her change management will come with her passing, determined by decisions beyond her control yet still bearing her stamp. How the Prince inhabits kingship—and how firmly—will owe much to the Queen, not just as a role model but as a mother, and to Prince Philip, the father he fears and whose approval he still seeks. His parents schooled Charles in duty and tried to give him a grounding in the real world, recognizing that the monarchy must mirror the experiences of its peoples. His upbringing of lonely privilege and public school privations left him flailing. The roots of his activism and awkwardness, his urgent need to make sense of the world and to improve it—the drivers for his Princely quest—lie deep in the strangest of childhoods.

CHAPTER 2

Mother Load

You know she’s near because, like a Wicked Queen in a fairy tale, she’s preceded through palace corridors by slavering hounds. There are four of them, Holly and Willow, Candy and Vulcan, two corgis and two dorgis, the offspring of a morganatic union between a corgi and a dachshund. One of the dorgis seems fond of the salt naturally secreted by human skin and sets with rough tongue to licking any ankles left uncovered, growling if interrupted. Her owner proves at least as intimidating, tiny, flinty, and near impossible to read. Elizabeth II has spent more than eight decades perfecting her poker face.

In the course of her life, the world has convulsed and shuddered like a werewolf under a full moon, pushing out a new coat and fangs, the old familiar lines disappearing under a mass of phenomena that to many of her generation seem monstrous. When Princess Elizabeth was born in 1926, the British Empire extended across a quarter of the globe. By the time she ascended the throne, the relics of empire were crumbling, leaving a difficult legacy in the former colonies and at home in a nation that no longer felt sure of its identity, place, or purpose. Britain had won a war but risked losing itself.

The new head of state handled these transitions with the inscrutability she had cultivated from the moment her uncle’s traumatic abdication pushed her to the top of the line of succession. With this same lack of expression she has presided over social and cultural revolutions harnessed to new technologies that shrank the physical world while amplifying its tumult and confusion. She watches, apparently impassive, as the peoples of her Realms adopt peregrine ways of speaking, dressing, thinking, and behaving, native to their age groups and globalized cultures or imported as populations diversify. At the time of her accession just over 4 percent of the British population was foreign born; that total now stands northward of 12 percent, a figure that does little to reflect the thrilling heterogeneity of British cities or the tensions accompanying that transformation. In 1952, most women married, like the Queen, at twenty-one and like her quickly popped out a first child. Only 35 percent of them worked, as she did (and none of those working worked as she did). Female participation in Britain’s labor force has risen to 71 percent. When she took the driving seat of the family business, just a quarter of households owned cars. Now only a fifth do not. During her reign churchgoing has sharply declined. The average age of congregations has risen heavenward, mirroring changes to the wider population as fewer people marry or stay married or raise large families or have any children at all during life spans that have lengthened by thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century. Britons, like their Queen, are becoming grizzled.

Hers are the gray hairs of unique experience. She has held weekly audiences with twelve Prime Ministers and accepted the resignations of eleven of them, starting with Winston Churchill. She discussed the Suez Crisis with Anthony Eden; the Falklands War with Margaret Thatcher; the first Gulf War with John Major; Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the War on Terror with interventionist Tony Blair; and with David Cameron Libya and the decision forced on him by a rebellious Parliament to stay plans for military action against Syria. Major, who served as Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, describes the audiences as “a hugely valuable resource … In politics you have to be careful what you say, however close the person is to you. But with the Queen there need be no such inhibition.” The weekly discussions, he says, “are like a confessional with a particularly trusted priest.”
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The Queen has twice been forced to use her prerogative to choose Prime Ministers, in 1957 and again in 1963 before the Conservative party instituted a formalized process of selecting a leader, both times passing over a prominent candidate, Richard Austin (Rab) Butler, to appoint respectively Harold Macmillan and then Alec Douglas-Home, who renounced an earldom and lesser peerages to serve as plain Sir from the benches of the House of Commons. Butler had pioneered Britain’s free school system and supported the postwar Labour government’s introduction of the welfare state; he referred to some of his own Tory colleagues as “Colonel Blimps.” In appointing Macmillan, the Queen overrode the advice of her outgoing Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, but conformed to the urgings of his predecessor Winston Churchill and other Conservative grandees. By selecting Douglas-Home, she appeared to favor a man not only of the unambiguous right but of the aristocracy over the more charismatic, left-leaning Butler. Constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor argues that she had little real choice and that the decision “cannot be said seriously to have misrepresented Conservative opinion at the time.”
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“Prime Ministers, who’ve seen the Queen at close quarters often for many years, would not be able to tell you with any certainty what her party political views are,” says John Major.