New insights into the future King
A biography of Prince Charles reveals his passion for Monty Python and his decade-long therapy to deal with Diana.
Visiting the White House in 1970, Prince Charles met with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. Nixon’s advice to wait watchfully in the wings before becoming king didn’t sit well with the 21-year-old heir apparent. “To be just a presence would be fatal,” Charles wrote in his diary, railing at the notion of “saying meaningless niceties.”
The account, from a biography published this week, reveals a young man “who didn’t want to spend his life cutting ribbons,” says the author, Sally Bedell Smith. Although the Prince of Wales has devoted considerable time to fox hunting, gardening and painting watercolours, he “is absolutely driven by this sense that he has to accomplish all sorts of things,” Smith says.
In Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, Smith decodes a very private public figure whose decades of philanthropy have received less tabloid coverage than his romances and occasional gaffes.
Overshadowed by his dazzling first wife, Lady Diana Spencer, Charles ultimately was redeemed by his second, Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he wed in 2005. “The game-changer in his life was marrying Camilla,” Smith says.
Paradoxes dot the life of a man who moves in rarified circles but is most at ease in the countryside, where he spends hours weeding and tending to hedges. If he hadn’t been born into the royal family, “he would have been a farmer,” Smith says.
In the early 1990s, Charles advocated to “radically modernise” the monarchy, in part by slimming down the royal payroll. But the fervent moderniser also is an unapologetic luddite, who bought property in Romania’s Transylvania in part to experience life in conditions before the Industrial Revolution. Charles doesn’t like computers and replies to emails with fountain-penned energetic scrawls known in England as his “black spider” memos.
The 68-year-old prince does know how to use a smart phone and to text, Smith says, a concession largely to communicate with his staff. There has been churn among employees because the energetic royal “wears people out,” she says, citing one person who served Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, for almost 20 years before going to work for the Prince of Wales. The employee found the shift “a total shock to the system,” according to Smith. “He said, ‘In the whole time I worked for the Queen, she never called me on the weekend. And the first weekend I worked for Prince Charles, he called me five times.’ ”
The exacting prince can seem paralysed by indecision — and impervious to advice. “Probably one flaw is his unwillingness to listen to other points of view,” Smith says. “He’s very stubborn when it comes to pushing his point of view.”
Smith first crossed paths with Prince Charles in 1991 at a polo match in England. Among the seven biographies she has written are lives of Queen Elizabeth II, as well as Diana, the Princess of Wales, who died in 1997.
She took on her latest subject, she says, at a turning point in the succession: When the Prince of Wales stood in for his mother at the Commonwealth leaders’ summit in 2013. Smith realised that the man in line for the throne hadn’t spent his life hovering in the wings but rather building up “a body of work that’s really pretty impressive,” primarily in charitable entrepreneurship.
Smith’s earlier biographies helped her gain some access to Charles’s circle. “You sort of become accustomed to having doors gently shut when you make your first overtures,” she says. “You keep tapping ... and eventually it’s like some Chinese puzzle and one opens up and then you find yourself walking across the forecourt at Buckingham Palace.”
Charles’s life is improbable, Smith says, because it follows a jagged arc compared with his mother’s smooth grooming for the throne. Charles “was caught between the modern world and the world of his parents, his mother in particular,” she says. With his parents preoccupied by their duties, Charles turned to his grandmother for affection. “The first part of his life was completely dictated by” Charles’s father, Prince Philip, Smith says. “He went to schools that he hated and went into the Navy as he was commanded to do.” Prince Philip also urged his son, in a letter that Charles is said to have perceived as a directive to marry Diana, to propose to her or part ways.
It was not to be a happy marriage — Smith says it was already in deep trouble as they honeymooned at Balmoral. In an extract published in The Daily Mail, Smith writes: “Suffering from insomnia and growing thinner by the day, the Princess wept for hours on end — when she wasn’t berating her new husband about his former mistress or complaining about the oppressive atmosphere of the royal court.
“Again and again, he reassured her that his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles was in the past.
He tried soothing Diana, but felt powerless to contain her emotional storms, which shocked him in their intensity and suddenness. At his wits’ end, he began seeking refuge in the Balmoral countryside with his paintbox, books, fishing rod and guns, but that only made his young wife even more aggrieved.
“Finally, in desperation, Charles invited his guru — the 74-year-old philosopher Laurens van der Post — to Scotland. But Van der Post could make no headway with the weeping Princess, suggesting only that she should urgently seek psychiatric help. Unsurprisingly, Diana was prescribed Valium. She refused to take it, however, convinced in her growing paranoia that the Royal Family was trying to sedate her.’’
Smith writes there seemed at least a glimmer of hope when she agreed to have therapy with Dr Alan McGlashan, a friend of Van der Post’s. “But she saw him only eight times,’’ Smith says.
“Instead, it was her distressed and bewildered husband who began having therapy with Dr McGlashan, and continued to do so regularly for the next 14 years.’’
Although a stickler for protocol with a sharp temper, Charles has mellowed over time, Smith says. A Monty Python fan, he has a self-deprecating sense of humour and sustains a good-natured rivalry with his sister Anne, the Princess Royal, to tally the most appearances every year.
The heir apparent since the age of three, Charles has waited a record stretch of time to become king. Queen Elizabeth, who will be 91 this month, is Britain’s longest-reigning sovereign. Smith describes how as a boy, Charles watched his 27-year-old mother practice for her coronation, walking around the nursery wearing a bejewelled crown.
In recent years, the Prince of Wales has been taking on some duties delegated by the Queen. Charles is unlikely to step aside in favour of Prince William, the older of his sons, Smith says, and his reign would depart in some respects from his mother’s. “He speaks differently, he’s more comfortable speaking off the cuff and he’s more inclined to show his emotions obviously publicly than the Queen is,” she says. He also is willing to reveal an informal streak and “wear silly hats that the Queen would never have worn, or virtual-reality glasses.”
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