The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  Philip liked the idea. It sounded to him like the clerical equivalent of the staff colleges that pepped up serving officers in the armed forces, and he immediately identified a physical home for Woods’ proposed study centre. Less than 20 years after the Second World War, there were still dilapidated corners of the Windsor compound with rundown houses dating back to the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the long disused residences of royal retainers and minor canons. Few causes could be better calculated to inspire the hands-on Duke of Edinburgh than repair and renovation, and he soon put together a restoration plan to create 15 modernised bedrooms in these old buildings, with new bathrooms and an adequate kitchen, along with study and meeting rooms – a modern conference centre behind Windsor’s Georgian façades, with space for further extension into the nearby Canons’ Cloister.

  It was an expensive project – £350,000 in 1960s prices, the equivalent of some £6,000,000 today – and Philip responded to that challenge as well. He shamelessly exploited his status to raise the money via Knights of the Garter drawn to the idea of rebuilding Windsor in the name of their own – and England’s – patron saint. They brought in banks, international companies and such philanthropists as Lord Iveagh of the Guinness family, the property developer Max Rayne and Edward Lewis, the chairman of Decca, the hot UK record company of the moment, who had famously turned down The Beatles, but had managed to sign up The Rolling Stones.

  Fully funded, St George’s House opened on time on Sunday 23 October 1966 – two days, by sad happenstance, after the tragedy of Aberfan. Regular updates from the Welsh mining village disaster were fed into the gathering over the weekend, injecting sadness into the deliberations of the 35 ‘diverse and distinguished’ guests invited to the centre’s first residential consultation. But Prince Philip matched the gravity of the moment with the speech with which he opened the Saturday evening discussion, ‘What does the Nation expect of the Churches?’520

  Robin Woods later said that the Duke spoke ‘quite brilliantly’ on his theme for 40 minutes,521 stimulating a provocative debate which the Prince himself moderated. St George’s House clearly provided the long-needed dimension for which Philip had been searching in his spiritual life. We have seen how Elizabeth II was helped to find her spiritual path through the evangelistic teachings of the American Dr Billy Graham (in Chapter Six, ‘Vergangenheit’). Now Philip found guidance via a practically based strand of the Anglican faith.

  The Prince had found the challenge he had been seeking, coaxing him out from behind his hard-built psychological defences. In the months that followed, he gave further talks and led St George’s House discussions on topics that ranged from human conflict to ‘Truth’, moving onwards over the years into his ecological interests and his campaigning for the conservation of nature. In 1982 the Prince published a collection of his lectures in a book, A Question of Balance, and two more volumes would follow.522 In 1986 he invited religious representatives of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism to come to Assisi, northern Italy, to discuss faith and the environment – in the footsteps of St Francis.523

  It was Peter Morgan’s inspiration to set Prince Philip’s relatively late-life religious awakening – sometime in his mid-to-late forties – into the context of men landing on the Moon. In Episode 307, ‘Moondust’, we watch the Prince eagerly tracing every detail of the US Apollo 11 mission – displaying a fascination with space travel that followed a family tradition. Back in February 1962 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had arrived at Buckingham Palace for his regular Tuesday night audience to find the Queen engrossed in the BBC radio commentary of US astronaut John Glenn’s historic first circling of the Earth. The retro-rockets had just been fired and, after a perfunctory greeting, Elizabeth turned her attention back to the radio. Macmillan made an attempt to revert to business, but soon realised that the cause was hopeless. ‘I think we might as well listen, Ma’am,’ said the Prime Minister – and his Sovereign smiled. They happily agreed to skip the audience.524

  Peter Morgan depicts Prince Philip making heroes of the US astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins – until he meets the trio and discovers that they are, in reality, quite ordinary, stolidly Earth-bound human beings. There was nothing wrong with them, but they had no particularly profound or dazzling vision to offer on life’s mysteries. So, in Morgan’s dramatic narrative, this inspires the Duke to move on to the spiritual insights available on his doorstep through Robin Woods and St George’s House.

  This scenario actually reverses the true chronology of events – St George’s House opened three years before man landed on the Moon. But the invented truth remains – that Prince Philip spent many years searching for fulfilment in secular and especially scientific directions, only to locate his spirit in the old-fashioned Church that he had spurned. And when it comes to the history of the astronauts – Neil Armstrong (commander), Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin Jr (lunar module pilot), and Michael Collins (command module pilot) – it turns out that they did, in fact, inject a religious dimension into the great lunar achievement that some people considered to have heralded the death of religion.

  1969 – Astronaut Neil Armstrong, 39, meets Prince Edward, 5

  Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, who stepped down from the lunar module in the wake of Neil Armstrong, was a fervently practising Christian. He served as an elder at the Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, which packed him up a ‘Holy Communion kit’ to take on his adventure – miniature plastic containers of bread and wine. He intended to open these in the Sea of Tranquility, planning to take his holy communion while reading aloud words on a card from the Bible, and broadcasting the service back to Earth: ‘When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars that You have established; what are human beings that You are mindful of them, mortals that You care for them?’ (Psalms 8:3–4).525

  At the last moment NASA asked Aldrin not to broadcast. The Agency was embroiled in a tricky legal battle with Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the celebrated atheist and campaigner for the separation of Church and state, who had already lodged a complaint against the Apollo 8 crew who had read from the Book of Genesis while circling the Moon the previous Christmas.526 So Aldrin agreed not to broadcast – ‘reluctantly’, as he later wrote – but he did make his personal sacrament just the same, sitting inside the lunar module on the surface of the Moon.

  ‘Eagle’s metal body creaked,’ he recalled. ‘I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.’527

  Before the radio blackout ended, and with the wine still curling languidly in the cup in the one-sixth gravity of the Moon, Aldrin concluded with the New Testament words from the Gospel of St John used in the traditional communion ceremony: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit’ (John 15:5). Every year since 1969, Webster Presbyterian has held a Lunar Communion service in Houston to commemorate Buzz Aldrin’s celebration on the Moon.528

  His companion Neil Armstrong, meanwhile, was a believer of another stripe – in the late 1950s Armstrong had inscribed ‘Deist’ as his personal ‘Belief’ definition on an application form when seeking to lead a local Boy Scout troop in Southern California.529 Founding his personal credo on the precepts of reason rather than revelation, Armstrong was in the great American tradition of ‘Deist’ Founding Fathers and Mothers like Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who believed that God had created the world, but had since declined to get involved with humankind – and was certainly not to be discovered inside the sectarian belief systems of any of the Earth-bound Christian churches.530

  In 1994 the celebrated astronaut, by then 64, was on a visit to Israel touring the Old City of Jerusalem, when he asked Meir Ben-Dov, his host and noted archae
ologist, if Jesus himself might actually have walked on the spot where they were walking.

  ‘I told him,’ recalled Ben-Dov, ‘“Look, Jesus was a Jew. These are the steps that lead to the Temple, so he must have walked here many times”.’

  Armstrong asked Ben-Dov if these particular old stone steps were the original steps dating back through all the centuries to the very time of Christ, and his guide informed him that they were.

  ‘So Jesus stepped right here?’ asked Armstrong.

  ‘That’s right,’ answered Ben-Dov.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Armstrong then replied to the Israeli archaeologist, ‘I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the Moon.’531

  So, like Prince Philip, the great astronaut put all his science, deism and rationality aside when he came face to face with the appeal of old-time religion and the basic Christian message.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘DANGLING MAN’

  JUNE 1970–MAY 1972

  DANGLING MAN WAS THE FIRST NOVEL PUBLISHED BY THE Pulitzer Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, in which he imagined the daily journal of Joseph, an unemployed history graduate in Chicago in 1941. Joseph patriotically enlists for the American war effort – only to be told that his services will not be required for another 12 months. So what does Joseph do for a year? He ‘dangles’ …

  Joseph’s dilemma struck writers David Hancock and Peter Morgan as neatly expressing the quandary of Prince Charles throughout his life. ‘Prince of Wales?’ he complains in Episode 308 of The Crown. ‘It’s not so much an existence as a predicament. I am both free and imprisoned, utterly superfluous and quite indispensable. One can never fully invest in one thing or another, because at any moment it could all change …’

  The Prince is confiding these thoughts to Camilla Parker Bowles – Camilla Shand before her marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles in 1973 – whom Charles has just met and has invited to Buckingham Palace for dinner.

  ‘Until she dies,’ he remarks morosely of his mother the Queen, ‘I am not fully alive. Nor can I be the thing for which I have been born. So one is condemned to this frightful business of waiting … existing in a timeless, slightly ridiculous abyss.’532

  Camilla cheerfully admits she has no idea who Saul Bellow is or was, but when Charles explains Joseph’s 1941 conundrum she gets the point immediately. So this Joseph character wants to go to war, she muses, because it would give his life meaning? But then he could easily be killed …

  ‘Yes,’ responds Charles gravely. ‘That’s how much humans need meaning.’

  ‘Golly,’ says Camilla gloomily, catching his mood. ‘People just see the prince in the palace. But all that weight … It’s crushing you.’

  ‘It is quite a lot to bear,’ agrees Charles mournfully – at which point a footman arrives bearing a tray on which is an envelope addressed to ‘CAMILLA’.

  ‘Oh!’ says Camilla with some surprise and pleasure. ‘For me? …’ eagerly taking the envelope and turning it over to open it. ‘TWANG!’ A rubber band flies out of the envelope to hit her directly in the face – and Charles shrieks with delight: ‘Ha! Gotcha!’

  Camilla is roaring with laughter as well. ‘I wasn’t expecting THAT, sir! You GOT me!’

  The couple – who are on their very first dinner date – collapse into giggles. ‘All that dreadful waffle about “dangling”?’ laughs Charles. ‘And “the abyss”? … Mummy kicking the bucket at long last? … then GOTCHA!’

  ‘Brilliant!’ agrees Camilla. The couple have tears running down their cheeks.533

  This scene, entirely invented, typifies the dramatic technique of The Crown. Prince Charles never once ‘twanged’ a girlfriend with a rubber band so far as anyone can discover. This whole imagined scenario springs from the vision of screenwriters Hancock and Morgan – and some critics might judge their fabricated jape to be over-lengthy and less than funny.

  But those very shortcomings are part of the objective – to illustrate the clowning and the sheer daft sense of silliness that has proved such a powerful element (some would say the crucial and enduring glue) in the 48-year-long relationship between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. Their perplexing love affair would consume and, in some senses, traumatise the British monarchy for more than a quarter of a century – and the trauma starts in this episode. Love it or loathe it, the complex drama between Camilla and the ‘dangling man’ now becomes central to the storyline of The Crown.

  There are two versions of how this historic and much written about relationship began. Prince Charles has always insisted that they were first introduced by the beautiful and brainy Lucia Santa Cruz, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat who had been his first serious girlfriend at Cambridge. Lucia had come up to London after graduating and moved into the Cundy Street flats near Victoria Station where Camilla happened to have a flat on another floor. The two women became friends, so when Charles came for a drink with Lucia one evening in 1970/71 she told him she had found ‘just the girl’ for him and invited Camilla to join them.534

  Santa Cruz has confirmed this story, but the more widespread version centres on a rainy afternoon at Smith’s Lawn, Windsor Great Park, in the summer of 1971, after Charles has finished playing polo. As he strokes one of his ponies, Camilla approaches him to praise the beast. ‘That’s a fine animal, sir,’ she says. ‘I’m Camilla Shand.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ responds Charles – to which Camilla, in a reference to her ancestor, King Edward VII’s mistress, Alice Keppel, then opens up: ‘You know, sir, my great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather – so how about it?’ The couple then talk animatedly for more than an hour …535

  One of the several well-informed chroniclers of the romance, Gyles Brandreth, considers it highly unlikely that Camilla would have marched up to Prince Charles and introduced herself out of the blue.536 But another, Caroline Graham, quotes an onlooker as saying that Camilla ‘saw the Prince standing alone on the other side of the field. Cool as you like, she walked across and started talking to him. To be honest, no-one thought it surprising or strange. She was part of the inner circle. She’d been at social functions with the royal family before.’537

  Camilla’s father, Major Bruce Shand, was certainly a close friend of the Queen Mother, and the striking portrait of Alice Keppel hanging in Cundy Street bore witness to Camilla’s keen interest in her great-grandmother. Like Alice, Camilla had bright blue eyes, was humorous, kindly and vivacious – and she had no objection at all to becoming a royal mistress.

  ‘It took no more than a glance,’ reported another chronicler, ‘to see that something was going to happen. There was an electric magnetism between them … You could tell from the intensity of their conversation and the way they looked at each other what the upshot would be.’538

  Camilla was in no way conventionally attractive – earthy-looking, with apple-red cheeks. She was not into designer clothes, she bit her nails and her hair was consistently unkempt. But she had presence. As Lady Annabel Goldsmith described Camilla’s magnetism: ‘You could see what a man could see: an intensely warm, maternal, laughing creature, with enormous sex-appeal.’539 Camilla was awash with energy, along with a bright and easy sense of fun. Lord Patrick Beresford, a close friend, described the feeling of Camilla walking into a room: ‘Your spirits rise, because you know you are going to have a laugh.’540

  1975 – Prince Charles and the married Camilla Parker Bowles

  A laugh was just what Prince Charles needed at the start of the 1970s. His emotional life remained complicated by the approval he vainly sought from his father and the lack of overt affection expressed by his mother. Searching for love and reassurance, he was dogged by a sense of worthlessness – his romantic liaisons seemed to be leading him nowhere. He felt both energised and relaxed in Camilla’s company, with their shared love of hunting, horses and country pursuits – along with their zany sense of humour which extended to Bluebottle (Peter Sellers), Eccles (Spike Milligan) an
d their greatest hero of all, Neddie Seagoon (Harry Secombe). The couple were dedicated fans of The Goon Show, BBC radio’s 1950s predecessor to – and, indeed, the original inspiration of – Monty Python’s Flying Circus.541 The couple gave each other Goon nicknames, ‘Fred’ and ‘Gladys’ – which, say friends, the future King and his Consort cheerfully call each other to this day.542

  The problem was that Camilla already had a boyfriend with whom she was obsessed – the dashing Household Cavalry officer Major Andrew Parker Bowles. Parker Bowles treated Camilla with abominable infidelity, picking her up and dropping her as he pleased, and running her against his other on-off consort, Lady Caroline Percy – who later described how Camilla eventually struck back by bedding the banking heir Rupert Hambro.

  ‘Rupert knew the affair was futile because of Camilla’s obsession with Andrew,’ Lady Caroline told the writer Christopher Wilson. ‘But he liked her and knew they would always be friends … He still remembers the masochistic glee she took in telling him about tricky situations Andrew’s unfaithfulness caused.’543

  Parker Bowles’s adventuring rose to fresh heights in the summer of 1970, when the 30-year-old set his cap at the 19-year-old Princess Anne whom he encountered at Windsor, where his father Derek was staying as a guest of the Queen Mother. The Princess and the galloping major were said to have enjoyed a full-blown affair during Ascot week that year – and there is one school of thought that believes Camilla was only driven to seduce Charles because Andrew had previously seduced Anne.