The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  It might have seemed sensible in 1969 to ask the Duke if he could hand back his ‘preposterous rig’ for the benefit of his successor. But since no one dared ask, an entirely new outfit had to be devised for Charles – with mixed results. Under the influence of Lord Snowdon who, as the only Welsh member of the family and a designer to boot, had been placed in charge of the general decor of the castle, Charles wore the elegant black and red uniform of the Colonel-in-Chief of the newly formed Royal Regiment of Wales, with a blue sash, his Order of the Garter and his Coronation Medal.

  But the College of Arms vetoed Tony Snowdon’s suggestion of a simple coronet for Charles along the lines of the elegant gold circlet worn by Laurence Olivier in the 1944 film Henry V. They insisted that the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths should commission an elaborate Charles II-style coronet, with ermine and a cap of purple velvet. This complicated concoction featured 75 diamonds and 12 emeralds, topped off by a golden orb that resembled a painted ping-pong ball – inspiring newspapers to describe Charles’s headgear as the ‘Sputnik Crown’ for the ‘Space Age’ Prince.

  When it came to learning Welsh in 1911, the future Edward VIII had gone for lessons at 11 Downing Street, where he was instructed by the Welsh Chancellor of the Exchequer himself. This gave the Prince a smattering of Welsh expressions and the ability to stumble his way through the reading of a brief speech that Lloyd George composed for him. With Prince Charles it was decided to aim significantly higher – hence his eight weeks in Aberystwyth and his course of personal tuition with the university’s top Welsh language lecturer, Edward ‘Tedi’ Millward.

  Tedi Millward, 38 years old in the spring of 1969, who features as a major character in Episode 306, was a fervent Welsh Nationalist who had stood for Plaid Cymru in Montgomeryshire in the 1966 general election. He was vice-president of the independence party and a co-founder of the Welsh Language Society,486 and he had no doubt at all that the investiture ceremony was a sordid political fix intended to shore up the Labour Party in Wales and knock back the movement for independence. When he heard that four Aberystwyth students were planning a week-long hunger strike in protest at Charles’s imminent arrival at Aberystwyth, Millward congratulated them.487 He was also married to a fellow nationalist, Silvia, who shared his fervour and felt strongly that Tedi should not get involved in teaching Charles.

  ‘Many of my friends thought that I shouldn’t teach him,’ Millward later said. ‘People’s opinions were divided, for and against at that time. And one did feel that one was walking a knife’s edge.’488

  In the event, Millward accepted the university’s challenge to become Charles’s language tutor. This was partly for political reasons. ‘Millward believed,’ said Welsh Professor John Ellis, ‘that direct access to the Prince gave Plaid an unprecedented opportunity to influence the thinking of Prince Charles and to turn the ceremony to the party’s advantage.’489

  Still more important, perhaps, Millward was passionate about the teaching of Welsh and especially the conversational style of instruction that he himself had developed in the Aberystwyth Language Laboratory. He had a lifelong dedication to arresting the language’s decline and hoped that teaching the Prince of Wales would give Welsh a major popularity boost – which was precisely what happened. Then there was also an element of romance. How could a Welsh Nationalist, no matter how sceptical, turn his back on the chance to teach Welsh to a Prince of Wales?

  So Charles and Millward started their lessons together, with Charles donning his headphones in the language laboratory’s distinctive yellow booths. ‘He had a one-on-one tutorial with me once a week,’ Millward later recalled. ‘He was eager, and did a lot of talking. By the end, his accent was quite good’.490 Millward’s daughter Llio later related how, towards the end of the term, Charles greeted one of the middle-aged Welsh ladies who stood outside the college every morning to cheer him on and keep protesters at bay: ‘Bore da, shwd y’ch chi?’ [‘Good morning, how are you?]’. To which she blushed and replied shyly, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t speak Welsh!’491

  This was hardly surprising. A modern study by the Languageline translation service shows that barely a tenth of modern Wales’s population of three million or so inhabitants speak fluent Welsh – some 310,600 people – and that the language is roughly twice as hard to learn as French or Portuguese, generally regarded as Europe’s two ‘easiest’ languages. Welsh requires 1,040 hours of full-time tuition as compared to 550 hours for French.492 Setting Charles’s eight weekly sessions in the Aberystwyth language laboratory in this context, and assuming that the Prince allocated as many as five hours per working day to his linguistics, it seems likely that his Welsh language studies added up to 200 hours or more. Millward had pre-recorded language tapes for his royal student to practise, and residents in Charles’s Neuadd Pantycelyn hall of residence later complained they became ‘sick and tired’ of hearing the tapes ‘resounding through the darkness late at night’ as the Prince rehearsed the latest phrases for his big speech.493

  Going beyond linguistics, Tedi Millward engaged in fierce debates with Charles on Welsh issues. ‘Not only did Millward get Charles’s Welsh up to a standard which sounded brilliant,’ wrote Charles’s biographer Tim Heald, ‘he also argued with him articulately and forcefully, never giving ground.’494 In January 1969, Millward told The Times: ‘There is an awakening in Wales and inevitably one would have to talk about this. The history of the language is an important facet and much of our life has been expressed through our language. It would be greatly to the Prince’s benefit to hear all these things.’495

  By the end of their eight weeks together Millward and Charles had grown genuinely fond and respectful of each other. While Millward had started by addressing Charles formally as ‘Mr Windsor’, which was how Charles had signed himself in at the university, they ended on mutually friendly, first name terms, with Millward judging the Prince to be ‘sensitive, emotional, responsive and deeply thoughtful’.496 When it came to the pay-off – how Charles delivered himself at the investiture on 1 July 1969 – the verdict was almost unanimously favourable. Charles had a Welsh accent to match that of many lifelong Welsh speakers, and the efforts that the Prince would make in later years to live up to his title have certainly borne Welsh fruit.

  It cannot be confirmed whether Charles wrote the original version of his investiture speech, or if it was written for him. But, given the significance of the event, it is likely that a combination of individuals had a hand in crafting his remarks: possibly Charles himself, along with his private secretary David Checketts with Elizabeth’s private secretaries, and possibly the Palace press office as well.

  Tedi Millward felt personally that his nationalist principles precluded him from accepting an invitation to the investiture ceremony itself, or to Charles’s wedding in 1981. He was also disappointed, according to his family, that Charles did not keep up the Welsh language at which he had worked so hard, complaining that the Prince could have done more for Wales after he left Aberystwyth.497 But in 1999, 30 years after the ceremony, a BBC Wales poll of Welsh speakers found that 73 per cent wanted the position of Prince of Wales to continue.498 In July 2018 another poll showed a majority of Welsh people supporting the passing on of the title when the current Prince of Wales, Charles, becomes King, with only 27 per cent objecting to another investiture ceremony.499

  So it would seem that Charles’s son and heir, William (who went to university in Scotland), should be preparing himself for a good few months of language tuition and practice in Wales when the royal succession moves on. But whether he will then be required to dress himself in another ‘preposterous rig’ of white silk breeches and purple velvet remains to be seen.

  In the aftermath of Charles’s investiture, government documents show that the Labour Cabinet developed considerable anxieties about the free-thinking opinions on Welsh Nationalism that the Prince had brought back from Aberystwyth – and Welsh Secretary George Thomas passed on his worries to Buckingham Palace. ‘I am conce
rned by the speeches made by the Prince of Wales,’ wrote Thomas to Harold Wilson on 22 July 1969, just three weeks after the investiture. ‘I have no information about who his advisors are, but a dangerous situation is developing … In my presence in Cardiff he referred to the “cultural and political awakening in Wales”. This is most useful for the Nationalists … The enthusiasm of youth is a marvellous spur, but it may lead to speeches that cause real difficulty… It has become quite evident to me that the Aberystwyth experience has influenced the Prince to a considerable extent.’500

  Thomas requested that the Prime Minister should have ‘a discreet word with the Queen’501 on the subject, and this seems to have chimed with Palace anxieties – shared by both the Queen and Prince Philip – that the newly invested Prince was starting to develop a free-wheeling tendency to stray too far from the official script.

  In the event, the political dividends to the Labour government from its initiative in sending Prince Charles to Wales could only be described as ‘mixed’. In the 1970 election Labour regained the Carmarthen seat it had lost to Plaid Cymru – the original prompt for Charles being sent to Aberystwyth. On the other hand, the nationalists almost tripled their vote across Wales as a whole, from 61,000 in 1966 to 175,000 in 1970, and established themselves solidly as a permanent part of the Welsh political landscape. Plaid won two seats in the February 1974 election, and increased that to three in October 1974.

  So it was arguable that the Welsh Nationalist cause was actually strengthened by the investiture pageant that was intended to reduce it. Analysts differ on the issue, with some suggesting that the much-publicised ceremony did indeed take the edge off extreme separatist sentiments, as Harold Wilson had hoped. Others see the investiture as simply reflecting the general nationalist tendencies in these years – in both Wales and Scotland – that put devolution on the table. Labour’s October 1974 manifesto seemed to acknowledge this by pledging the creation of elected assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

  Under James Callaghan’s premiership of 1976–9 and the notorious ‘Winter of Discontent’, Labour by-election losses effectively destroyed Callaghan’s Commons’ majority – leaving the Labour Party dependent on the votes of Parliament’s three Welsh Nationalist MPs to keep them in office. So, one way or another, Prince Charles’s bravura acting performance in Caernarfon Castle helped keep socialist hands on the British helm as Harold Wilson had intended.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘MOONDUST’

  JULY–DECEMBER 1969

  AT THE END OF APRIL 1930 THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PRINCE Philip of Greece was invited to join his maternal grandmother, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (1863–1950), for a family holiday in Germany at the Neue Palais in Darmstadt, just south of Frankfurt. It was a wonderful chance for the boy to be reunited with his sisters and cousins, along with his fragile and deaf mother Princess Alice – especially since his father Andrew had, by this date, effectively deserted the family.502

  But Grandmother Victoria had other plans. Deeply concerned about the mental wanderings of her daughter Alice, she had been consulting Professor Karl Wilmanns, a local expert on insanity,503 and he had recommended some intensive, long-term treatment in a sanatorium. On 2 May 1930 Victoria arranged a day out for Philip and his sisters Cecilie and Theodora – who got back home to discover that their mother had vanished. In their absence, Professor Wilmanns had paid a visit, had restrained and sedated Alice with an injection of morphine and scopolamine, a nerve-paralysing agent,504 and had then bundled her into a car to drive her down to the Bellevue sanitorium on the shores of Lake Constance over 200 miles away.505 Philip would not see his mother again for years – and with his father moving to Monte Carlo around the same time, the boy was effectively an orphan.

  Philip had already suffered a parentally solitary childhood. A major-general in the Greek army, his father Andrew was often away, making no contact with his only son for months on end. ‘When he needed a father,’ recalled Mike Parker, Philip’s Australian naval pal who became his first private secretary, ‘there just wasn’t anybody there.’506

  Far younger than his four elder sisters, Philip had little in common with any of them, so he was pretty much an only child, with sibling relationships that were fond and loving, but inevitably remote. The boy would withdraw into himself, as Uncle ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, Alice’s younger brother, would later recall. ‘Dickie’ described how at the age of four, his nephew loved to squirrel himself away for hours under the vast bed at the Mountbattens’ London residence, quite alone and refusing to leave. The boy would scream in fury if anyone ventured to drag him out of his private refuge.507

  There was, above all, the issue of Philip’s remoteness from his mother, who was sincere and devoted but unable to listen in any real sense to anything her son wanted to tell or ask her. When these emotional gaps were compounded by the trauma of his mother’s dramatic disappearance in May 1930 – Darmstadt was the last occasion on which the ‘family’ could be said to have been together in any meaningful sense – it was hardly surprising that Philip should start to exhibit signs of what psychologists describe as ‘avoidant behaviour’. The ‘avoidant’ child declines to reveal their personal feelings to those close to them in later life, according to this diagnosis, in order to avoid triggering further rejection.508

  In Philip’s case, this ‘avoidance’ came to manifest itself in a ‘toughness’ that was amplified by his boarding school education. Weeks after the disappearance of his mother, the nine-year-old was packed off for three years to the austere surroundings of Cheam, a religiously-based boarding school near Sutton in Surrey that dated back to the 1640s.509 He was then sent to Germany to board for two terms at Schule Schloss Salem – to ‘save on the school fees’, as he later put it dismissively, because the school was owned by the family of his brother-in-law510 – followed by Gordonstoun, whose Highland harshness we tasted in Chapter Nine (Episode 209). In all these formative years, Philip had minimal contact with either his father or his mother – and it is known that he neither saw nor heard anything at all from Alice in particular between the ages of 11 and 16 (1932–7), while she was suffering the worst horrors of her manic depression.511

  Kurt Hahn, who never married, saw no need to instruct his Gordonstoun boys on the importance and functioning of emotional relationships. All discussion of sex was forbidden.512 One Gordonstoun schoolmaster recalls sixth-form boys coming to him as they were leaving school to ask him about the facts of life. ‘I suppose the truth is,’ he said, ‘[that] Hahn was a repressed homosexual. Certainly, we all thought so.’513

  Hahn himself suffered from mental problems which he both hid from the world and bizarrely revealed in the floppy straw hat that he wore so frequently – the hat concealed a large metal plate that was the consequence of an operation to relieve blinding headaches from the pressure of cerebro-spinal fluid on the brain. He was also hospitalised twice in his life for manic depression – in the late 1930s as he was getting the school established (while Philip was a pupil), and then again in the 1950s.514 The second hospitalisation led to his retirement as headmaster in 1953.

  Philip left Gordonstoun in 1939 to train as an officer at Dartmouth Naval College – where, as we saw in Episode 1 (Chapter One of The Crown, Volume 1), the Prince was introduced to the young Elizabeth on her visit with her father George VI that July.515 Apart from occasional visits by 13-year-old princesses, Dartmouth was another exclusively masculine environment, so after all his years of high-pressure training it was hardly surprising that Philip should confess in an early interview that he would be ashamed of admitting to crying. As we noted in Chapter Nine, the Prince’s upbringing endowed him with highly defended ‘survival’ mechanisms.516 Asked in an early interview what language he had spoken at home, he replied sharply with a question of his own: ‘What do you mean, “at home”?’517

  Philip’s aggressive ‘survival’ mechanisms were defiantly on display over Easter 1964 in the Chapel Royal at Windsor during Prince Charles’
s service of confirmation into the Church of England. Philip had been strongly opposed to his son receiving confirmation at such an early age. Charles was only 16 – too young, in his father’s opinion, to make such a serious personal commitment. But his objections had been overruled by the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, and by Prince Charles himself, and Philip showed his feelings by ostentatiously reading a book throughout the service, holding the volume noticeably high during the Archbishop’s sermon.

  ‘Bloody rude!’ complained Ramsey afterwards to the Dean of Windsor, Robin Woods, who was a friend of Philip’s but had to agree. In mitigation of Philip’s behaviour, some said that the book he was reading had been the Bible, but if anything that made it worse. Philip had not only been rude to the Archbishop and to the Anglican Church as a whole – but most of all to his own son, whose special day it was, and who had approached the occasion with genuine religious feeling.518

  The dynamic Robin Woods – a major character in this episode – had been brought in to shake up the royal parish, or ‘Deanery’ of Windsor, two years earlier. Himself the son of a vicar who rose to be a bishop, Woods had served as an army chaplain during the Second World War, earning mention in dispatches for his gallantry during the Italian campaign. He had ministered in Leicester, Singapore and Sheffield, as well as serving as Secretary of SCM, Britain’s Student Christian Movement, before coming to Windsor in 1962 as Domestic Chaplain to the Queen. But the new Dean soon discovered that his spiritual services were less urgently required by Her Majesty than by her spouse, and it was fortunate that Woods had arrived in Windsor with an idea that appealed to Prince Philip’s practical turn of mind.

  ‘St George’s House’ was a long-nurtured dream of Woods that the Church needed some sort of refuge and revival centre where priests who were burned out could renew their sense of mission. This would be achieved through discussion and study with each other, but also with outsiders – scientists, trades unionists, politicians, town planners, doctors, arts representatives and military folk. The secular world would be invited in, helping the ministers to get back their mojo by contact with the reality and rapidity of twentieth-century change, while also identifying new channels that could seek to mingle spiritual elements into the material life of the country.519