Patel

Charles

Charles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the start—unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood. It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line.In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan that had been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two months, until she contracted measles and was forced to stop. Yet she was often away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy, who was posted to Malta in October 1949. She managed to celebrate her son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her son, for long intervalsPrince Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years of the boy’s life, though on his return from overseas duty he did take the time to teach Charles to shoot and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace pool. When Prince Charles hit bottom after his separation from Diana, in 1992, he unburdened himself about the miseries of his youth to Jonathan Dimbleby, who was writing an authorized biography. Dimbleby noted that, as a little boy, Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father,” whose rebukes for “a deficiency in behaviour or attitude . . . easily drew tears.” While brusque, Philip was “well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke with Charles’s permission described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying” his son. Charles was less harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a bitter edge. She was “not indifferent so much as detached.”Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make amends in a TV documentary tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Home movies depicted an idyllic childhood at the family’s country estates at Sandringham, in Norfolk, and Balmoral, in Scotland. Footage of Prince Philip teetering on a tricycle and zooming down a slide on the Royal Yacht Britannia contradicted his reputation as a tetchy martinet, and scenes of the Queen romping with her children were meant to dispel the notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.Charles was sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned antennae were susceptible to slights and rebukes. During one luncheon at Broadlands, the home of Philip’s uncle Louis Mountbatten, the guests were served wild strawberries. Charles, aged eight, methodically began removing the stems from the berries on his plate. “Don’t take the little stems out,” Edwina Mountbatten said. “Look, you can pick them up by the stems and dip them in sugar.” Moments later, his cousin Pamela Hicks noticed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad, and so typical of how sensitive he was.”

As Philip watched these traits emerging, he worried that Charles could become weak and vulnerable, so he set about toughening him up. Asked in an interview when he was 20 years old whether his father had been a “tough disciplinarian” and whether he had been told “to sit down and shut up,” Charles answered without hesitation: “The whole time, yes.”

More often than not, the duke was a blunt instrument, unable to resist personal remarks. He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well. But Charles’s younger sister, a confident extrovert, could push back, while the young prince wilted, retreating farther into his shell.

When Elizabeth became Queen, her dedication to her duties meant even less time for her children. She relied increasingly on her husband to make the major family decisions. Neither parent was physically demonstrative. That lack of tactile connection was achingly apparent in May 1954, when the Queen and Prince Philip greeted five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Anne with handshakes after an absence of nearly six months on a tour of Commonwealth nations. Martin Charteris, Elizabeth’s onetime private secretary, observed that Charles “must have been baffled by what a natural mother-son relationship was meant to be like.”

Charles was indulged by his maternal grandmother, the Queen Mother, and visited her frequently at Royal Lodge, her pale-pink home in Windsor Great Park, when his parents were away. As early as age two, he would sit on her bed playing with her lipsticks, rattling the tops, marveling at the colors. When he was five, she let him explore Shaw Farm, in the Windsor Home Park. She also opened up a world of music and art that Charles felt his parents didn’t adequately appreciate. “My grandmother was the person who taught me to look at things,” he recalled.

As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears.

She never hesitated to give her grandson the hugs he craved. She encouraged his kind and gentle nature—the eagerness to share his candy with other children, and, when choosing sides for games, to select the weakest first for his team. “Her protective side clocked in on his behalf,” said her longtime lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. At the same time, with the best intentions, she fueled the young prince’s tendency to self-pity, which fed one of his strongest traits, known as “whinging”—the more pointed British word for whining.

Charles’s early home-schooling was supervised by Catherine Peebles, his sensible Glaswegian governess, nicknamed “Mispy,” who felt compassion for his insecurities and his tendency to “draw back” at the hint of a raised voice. Eager to please, he plodded diligently through his lessons but was easily distracted and dreamy. “He is young to think so much,” Winston Churchill remarked after observing Charles shortly before his fourth birthday.

One book that caught the prince’s eye and helped hone his sense of humor was Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a volume of poetry about the consequences of bad behavior. It brimmed with quirkiness and bizarre characters—a precursor to the sketches by the Goons and Monty Python comedy troupes, two happily subversive influences in his life. But by the time he was eight, the Queen and Prince Philip had decided that he needed the company of children in a classroom, making him the first heir to Early in 1957, he arrived in a royal limousine at Hill House School, in Knightsbridge, London. For all his parents’ efforts to put Charles in a normal environment—taking the bus to the playing fields and sweeping the classroom floors—he had difficulty mixing with the other boys. A newsreel of the school’s “field day” of sports competitions that spring showed a solemn prince introducing his parents to his classmates, who obediently bowed.

Charles had ability in reading and writing, although he struggled with mathematics. His first-term report noted that “he simply loves drawing and painting” and showed musical aptitude as well. But after a mere six months, his father transferred him to Cheam School, in Hampshire, where Philip himself had been sent at the age of eight. Although it was founded in 1645, the school had a progressive tilt, avoiding the exclusive atmosphere of other preparatory boarding schools.

Charles was just shy of his ninth birthday but considerably more vulnerable than his father. He suffered from acute homesickness, clutching his teddy bear and weeping frequently in private. “I’ve always preferred my own company or just a one to one,” he has said. As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears and called the pudgy prince “fatty.” He fell into a routine that included weekly letters home—the beginning of his passion for written correspondence. In the tradition of the time, he braved beatings from two different headmasters for flouting the rules. “I am one of those for whom corporal punishment actually worked,” he grimly recalled.

Charles lacked his father’s resilient temperament, and he lacked the physical prowess to command respect.

Charles had a fragile constitution. He suffered from chronic sinus infections and was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in May 1957. Later that year, when he was bed-ridden at school with Asian flu, his parents didn’t visit him. (Both had been inoculated, so there was no fear of contagion.) Instead, before leaving for a royal tour of Canada, in October, the Queen sent him a farewell letter. The Queen and Prince Philip were again on tour, in India, when Charles came down with measles, at age 12.the throne to be educated outside the palace.Physically uncoordinated and slow as well as overweight, Charles had no talent for Rugby, cricket, or soccer—the prestige schoolboy sports. During vacations he joined local boys who lived near Balmoral for cricket matches. “I would invariably walk boldly out to the crease,” he recalled, “only to return, ignominiously, a few minutes later when I was out for a duck”—that is, having failed to score any runs. Elizabeth had taught Charles to ride, starting at age four. He was timorous on horseback, while his sister, Anne, was bold. Mostly he feared jumping. Anne’s equine prowess pleased her mother, and Philip saw a kindred spirit in her confidence and fearlessness.

Charles’s loneliness and unhappiness at Cheam were painfully obvious to his family. In a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the beginning of 1958, the Queen wrote, “Charles is just beginning to dread the return to school next week—so much worse for the second term.” She knew that Cheam was “a misery” to her son, according to a biography of Charles by Dermot Morrah, which was sanctioned by the royal family. Morrah observed that the Queen thought her son was “a slow developer.”

Asked as he was approaching his 21st birthday to describe the moment he first realized as a little boy that he was heir to the throne, Charles replied, “I think it’s something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense . . . and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.” He did, however, experience an unanticipated jolt in the summer of 1958 while watching the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales, on television with some school-mates in the headmaster’s study at Cheam. Suddenly he heard his mother declare in a recorded speech that she was naming him the Prince of Wales—a mortifying moment for a shy nine-year-old boy who wanted desperately to be seen as normal and already carried the burden of his six other titles. Even as a very young boy, he was marked out as different.

The most important experience at Cheam was Charles’s discovery that he felt at home on a stage—a helpful skill for a public figure. For his role in a play about King Richard III, called The Last Baron, he spent hours listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was November 1961, and once again his parents were abroad, this time in Ghana. In their place, the Queen Mother and Princess Anne watched the heir to the throne perform as Richard, the 15th-century monarch famous for his deformity.After a few minutes on to the stage shambled a most horrible looking creature,” the Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, “a leering vulgarian, with a dreadful expression on his twisted mouth; & to my horror I began to realize that this was my dear grandson!” She added that “he acted his part very well” and that “in fact he made the part quite revolting!”

Charles formed no lasting friendships during his five years at Cheam. The Queen Mother made a strong pitch to his parents for him to continue his education at Eton College, the ancient boarding school near Windsor Castle. She knew that Philip had been pushing for his own alma mater, Gordonstoun, located in an isolated part of northeastern Scotland. In a letter to the Queen in May 1961, the Queen Mother described Eton as “ideal . . . for one of his character & temperament.” If he went to Gordonstoun, “he might as well be at school abroad.” She pointed out, quite reasonably, that the children of the Queen’s friends were at Eton.

But Philip doubled down on the value of a rough-and-tumble education, arguing that Gordonstoun would be the best place for his timorous son. The Queen sided with Philip, sealing Charles’s fate.

III. The Prison of Privilege

The Queen did not accompany her husband in May 1962, when he delivered Charles to Gordonstoun. A certified pilot, Philip flew Charles to a Royal Air Force base in Scotland and drove him the rest of the way. With a 17th-century gray stone building at its center (built in a circular design, according to legend, by Sir Robert Gordon so that no devils could fly into corners), the campus had an undistinguished collection of seven pre-fabricated wooden residences that had previously been used as R.A.F. barracks. The prince was assigned to Windmill Lodge with 13 other boys, the start of an ordeal that he viewed as nothing less than a “prison sentence.”

The school’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a progressive educator who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and ran a school in southern Germany called Salem. Hahn, who was Jewish, fled to Britain after Hitler came to power. He established Gordonstoun in 1934, with Prince Philip among the first students. The school’s motto: “There is more in you.”

Hahn sought to develop character along with intellect. He promoted Plato’s idealistic vision in The Republic of a world where “philosophers become kings . . . , or till those we now call kings and rulers truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” Contemplating his future reign, Charles would identify with the philosopher king, a notion later encouraged by well-meaning advisers who championed the idea of an “activist” monarch who would impose his wide-ranging worldview on his subjects.

Physical challenges at Gordonstoun were at the heart of building character. The testing began with the boys’ attire (short trousers throughout the year) and the living conditions (open windows at all times in the grim dormitories). The day began with a run before breakfast, followed by a frigid shower. “It was a memorable experience, especially during the winter,” recalled Somerset Waters, a school-mate of Charles’s. The prince nevertheless became so accustomed to the morning ritual that as an adult he continued to take a cold shower each day, in addition to the hot bath drawn by his valet.Hahn aimed to create an egalitarian society where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege,” an ethos that suited Philip when he was there. His assertive personality and Teutonic sensibility helped him adjust to the school’s demands. He was also a natural athlete who served as captain of both the cricket and hockey teams. Charles had neither his father’s resilient temperament nor his relative anonymity, and he lacked the physical prowess to command respect. Encumbered by his titles and his status as heir to the throne, he was singled out as a victim from his first day. “Bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough,” said John Stonborough, a classmate of Charles’s.The housemaster at Charles’s dorm was Robert Whitby, “a truly nasty piece of work,” recalled Stonborough. “He was vicious, a classic bully, a weak man. If he didn’t like you, he took it out on you. He was wrong for Charles.” Whitby, like the other housemasters, handed over the running of the houses to senior boys, who imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized psychological and physical abuse that included tying boys up in laundry baskets under a cold shower. Few students would walk with Charles to meals or class. Those boys who tried to befriend the prince were derided with “slurping” noises. Many years later Charles complained, with evident anguish, that since his schooldays people were always “moving away from me, because they don’t want to be seen as sucking up.”

As at Cheam, he was taunted for his jug ears, which his great-uncle Earl Mountbatten unavailingly urged his parents to have surgically pinned back. During intra-house Rugby matches, teammates and opponents alike pummeled Charles in the scrum. “I never saw him react at all,” recalled Stonborough. “He was very stoic. He never fought back.” At night in the dormitory, the bullies tormented Charles, who detailed the abuse in anguished letters to friends and relatives.

Charles found one escape at the nearby home of Captain Iain Tennant and his wife, Lady Margaret. She was the sister of a childhood friend of the Queen’s, David Airlie (the 13th earl). Tennant was chairman of Gordonstoun, so he could extend the privilege of weekend visits, when Charles would “cry his eyes out,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served as one of the Queen’s longtime senior advisers. “Iain and Margy really saved him from complete misery,” said David Airlie’s wife, Virginia.A crucial day-to-day support for Charles was Donald Green, the royal bodyguard who, in time, became a father figure. Green stood six feet five, dressed well, drove a Land Rover, and seemed “slightly James Bond-ish” to the other boys. Green was Charles’s one constant friend, although there was little he could do about the abuse that occurred within the dormitories. This friendship, more readily made than with Charles’s peers, set the prince’s lifelong pattern of seeking company with his elders.

In June 1963, during Charles’s second year, he was sailing on the school ketch, the Pinta, to the Isle of Lewis. The boys were taken to a pub in the village at Stornoway Harbor, where the 14-year-old prince ordered a cherry brandy. “I said the first drink that came into my head,” he recalled, “because I’d drunk it before, when it was cold, out shooting.” Unbeknownst to Charles, a tabloid reporter was present, and his foray into under-age drinking became banner headlines in the tabloids as “the whole world exploded around my ears.” Afterward, the Metropolitan Police fired Don Green, robbing Charles of an ally and confidant. Charles was devastated, saying later that “I have never been able to forgive them for doing that. . . . I thought it was the end of the world.”