by Kitty Kelley
The Queen Mother knew where to place the blame. “The papers continually accuse Philip of having been a harsh father,” she confided to a dinner partner. “If they only knew the truth…. It was always Lilibet who was too strict and Philip who tried to moderate her.”
Each time the Queen returned from one of her royal tours, she expressed surprise at how much her young son had grown and how noisy he had become. Unaccustomed to his energy, she felt overwhelmed around him. “He’s such a responsibility,” she said with a sigh.
Early on, she decided the children should be known in the household simply as “Charles” and “Anne” rather than “sir” and “ma’am.” She decreed that maids and footmen no longer had to bow and curtsy to the sovereign’s children, reserving that homage for herself and her mother. Like the staff, Charles, too, was required to bow to his mother before he left the room, just as he bowed to his grandmother, the Queen Mother.
“You always have to do as Granny tells you,” he told a playmate, “or else she has no sweets in her bag.”
“Why do you bow to her?” asked the playmate.
“It’s what I have to do.”
“Why?”
“Because Papa says so.”
When his nanny insisted Charles wear a pair of tartan shorts beneath his kilt at Balmoral, he refused.
“I’m not wearing those,” he said. “Papa doesn’t.”
“Papa” was the sun that shone on his childhood and warmed his days, despite occasional scoldings and spankings. “I think he has had quite a strong influence on me, particularly in my younger days,” Charles said in later years. “I had perfect confidence in his judgment.” Only when Charles was unable to live up to his father’s expectations did he turn on Philip. Then Charles said his father was a bully, who ruled his childhood like a despot. He sniped to friends that there are two types of fathers: the first instills self-confidence in his children by offering praise when merited and withholding criticism when possible. “The second is the Duke of Edinburgh,” he said. By then Charles had forgotten how he once idolized his father and imitated everything he did, right down to walking with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back.
“As a child, Charles begged to be with his father,” recalled the Queen’s footman, “and much preferred sitting on Prince Philip’s knee than on the Queen’s when we brought them for their morning visit…. He was the sort of father any kid would adore…. More so than the Queen, he has a natural, easy ability to come down to the simpler level of childhood without seeming either patronizing or condescending.”
Members of the royal household recall Philip reading Hiawatha to the children and putting on the Indian feather headdress he had brought from Canada. Whooping and hollering, he performed war dances around the nursery, to the delight of his young son. “That’s the game I love best of all,” said Charles, clapping his hands.
Others see Philip through more jaundiced eyes. “He tolerated Charles, but I don’t think he was a loving father,” said Eileen Parker, whose former husband, Michael Parker, was Philip’s best friend and equerry. “He would pick up Charles, but his manner was odd. He had more fun with Anne. I think Charles was frightened of him.”
The little boy was certainly afraid of his mother, who appeared aloof, forbidding, and too busy for him. Years later he said he could not remember one incident of maternal love from his childhood, except for an evening when his mother came to the nursery before his evening bath. She sat on a gilt chair with a footman behind her and watched his nanny bathe him. “She didn’t put her hands in the bathwater,” Charles recalled, “but at least she watched the procedure.”
He recounted for one of his biographers how his mother greeted him after her first royal tour. He had not seen her for six months, so he raced on board the Britannia to welcome her home. He ran up to join the group of dignitaries waiting to shake her hand. When the Queen saw her young son squirming in line, she said, “No, not you, dear.” She did not hug him or kiss him; she simply patted his shoulder and passed along to the next person. A photographer captured the awkward greeting between mother and son, which the Queen later justified to a friend. “I have been trained since childhood never to show emotion in public,” she said.
“Her dislike of physical contact is almost a phobia,” wrote British columnist Lynda Lee-Potter. “By her inability to demonstrate love for her children, the Queen has made it difficult for them to give affection in return. She is a stoic and, like her mother, has a ruthless streak.”
While the Queen seemed incapable of demonstrating affection, her husband appeared to be similarly aloof and reserved. “He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve,” said Michael Parker. “I always wanted to see him put his arms around the Queen and show her how much he adored her. What you’d do for any wife. But he always sort of stood to attention. I mentioned it to him a couple of times. But he just gave me a hell of a look.”
Charles did not grow up seeing much physical affection between his parents; nor does he remember his mother kissing him after the age of eight. He wistfully told a friend that his nanny meant more to him emotionally than his mother ever did. He cited research done on baby monkeys deprived of a soft, motherly touch right after birth. He said they never recovered emotionally. They became impassive and withdrawn, not unlike the fearful little boy who wandered through the carpeted corridors of Buckingham Palace. When he became aware of scientific research that shows the loving interaction between mother and child charges the youngster’s brain to be receptive to learning, Charles said he finally understood why he had been described as “a plodder.”
A sickly child, he suffered from knock-knees like his grandfather and great-grandfather. His flat feet forced him into orthopedic shoes and he developed colds, sore throats, bouts of asthma, and chronic chest congestions.
“His Royal Highness was an earnest little boy,” said a former courtier. “Correct, well mannered, but timid like his mother. He was uncertain on a horse and queasy on a boat. His sister, Anne, who was twenty-one months younger, was bold and rambunctious like her father, which is why she became his favorite child.”
Philip worried about his son’s frailties and tried to toughen him up. “I want him to be a man’s man,” he said. Fit, tough, and handsome, Philip played cricket and polo, crewed in yachting races, drove carriages, piloted planes, and shot grouse with zest. He wanted his son to do the same. Philip gave Charles a cricket bat for his first birthday and later taught him how to play. He gave him his first gun and taught him how to shoot. He taught him to swim, to ride, to sail, and to hunt. He later introduced him to painting and polo and arranged for flying lessons so he could pilot his own plane. Charles then survived strenuous naval training to take command of a coastal minesweeper, but he could not shed the image of a wimp.
A nail-biting child, afraid of the dark, Charles longed for his father’s approval and overcame his fear of horses to ride and his seasickness to sail. He was not a natural athlete like his sister, but he pushed himself hard in sports, sometimes to the edge of recklessness.
Hardly an indulgent parent, Philip spanked Charles whenever he hit his sister or pulled her hair. And that was often. “When we were children, Charles and I used to fight like cat and dog,” said Anne. Philip told Charles that he had to take his spankings “like a man.”
“Act like a man,” was his father’s constant refrain. “Be a man.” Once, after a mild scolding from his nanny, Charles ran to his father. “I’m so sick of girls, Papa,” he said. “Let’s go away and be men by ourselves.”
Sometimes Philip’s preoccupation with manliness bordered on homophobia. “I remember when the Queen and Prince Philip were shown the newly done up Porchester house,” said the British decorator Nicholas Haslam. “They brought Prince Charles with them but left him in the car when they went inside. The hostess asked, ‘Wouldn’t you like to let Prince Charles accompany us?’
“ ‘Good God, no,’ said Prince Philip. ‘We don’t want him knowing anything
pansy like decoration.’ ”
Even so, the Queen’s footman noticed a feminine effect on the young boy. “At the time he was first sent to school, Charles was already showing signs of succumbing to the cloying, introverted atmosphere that pervades the Palace,” he said. “He was the object of considerable petticoat influence.”
So many women exercising so much authority over his son annoyed Philip. “Nothing but nannies, nurses, and poofs,” he said, referring to the household staff, which was mostly homosexual.* He insisted his son be educated outside the Palace. The Queen objected, but Philip pointed to her sheltered childhood and reminded her that she rarely met a commoner who was not a servant. “Charles must learn to mix with other lads on the same level,” he said. The Queen preferred to continue her son’s education inside the Palace with the private tutor, Miss Katherine Peebles (“Mispy”), who had been teaching Charles since he was five years old. Philip argued that while the small, spry Scotswoman was a nice person, she had no formal training and no university degree. Consequently he did not think she was qualified to educate a future king. She had proved adequate at taking Charles and Anne on field trips to the zoo, the planetarium, and the museums, but now that Charles was eight, he needed to get out of the Palace and begin his formal education. “That means school—a real school,” said Philip.
The education of Charles became a matter of great debate inside and outside the Palace. Regular newspaper headlines asked “Why Can’t the Royal Children Go to School—Must It Always Come to Them?” and “Have We the Right to Cut Prince Charles Off from Normal Pleasures So Early in Life?”
The Queen reluctantly agreed to send her son to Hill House, a London day school. He arrived wearing a gray coat with a black velvet collar. The other children wore the school’s uniforms. For the next year Philip suggested his own preparatory school, the Cheam School, where Charles would board, share a dormitory with nine other boys, and sleep on wood-slatted beds. Again the Queen resisted, but Philip badgered her. Finally she agreed and allowed her son to become the first heir to the British throne to go away to school like a commoner.
“We want him to go to school with other boys of his generation and to live with other children and absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others,” said Philip. The Queen told the headmaster at Cheam to treat the future monarch like any ordinary student but to address him as Prince Charles. He could be plain Charles to the other boys, some of whom made fun of their future monarch’s soft pudginess by calling him “Fatty.”
The little boy who had been dressed in silk dresses and ribboned bonnets for the first two years of his life now faced bamboo rod canings from the headmaster. “I was warned,” Charles said years later, “that we would be beaten, and I got beaten [for dormitory horseplay]. I didn’t do it again. I was one of those people for whom corporal punishment actually worked.”
On the first day of school, Charles clutched his initial-embossed box of milk chocolates—his mother’s parting gift. He did not know how to share with the other boys and was too frightened to try. Leaving the loving arms of his nanny, his nurse, and his governess proved painful for Charles, who was shy and unaccustomed to making friends.
“He felt family separation very deeply,” said his nanny, Mabel Anderson.
“He would write Mispy every day,” said his sister, Anne. “He was heartbroken. He used to cry into his letters and say, ‘I miss you.’ ”
He wrote wistfully to his father. “Dearest Papa, I am longing to see you in the ship.” He drew a sailboat like the one Prince Philip raced at Cowes, the world’s biggest sailing regatta. He excelled in art and enjoyed drawing and painting pictures of his family. When he was six years old he drew a humorous Christmas card for his father, who was shown next to a vat labeled “Hair Restorer.” Philip had been fretting about his receding hairline and encroaching baldness.
Soon after he started school, Charles was reprimanded for saying a naughty word. “He may have picked it up from one of the workmen,” said Philip, “but I’m afraid he may equally have picked it up from me.”
After five and a half years at Cheam, where he failed mathematics and barely passed history,* Charles told his parents that he wanted to go to “Papa’s school,” which meant Gordonstoun, a Scottish citadel of cold showers and canings.
“I remember Philip discussing public [private] schools at one of our Thursday Club luncheons—those all-male get-togethers we had at Wheeler’s Tavern in Soho,” recalled harmonica player Larry Adler. “I told him I saw public schools as factories for manufacturing homosexuals. James Robertson Justice, a fine actor and a gruff Scotsman, joined the conversation.
“ ‘Oh, God, Adler, are you on that dreary hobbyhorse of yours again?’ he said. ‘I was buggered my first week at Eton. Did me no harm whatsoever.’
“ ‘Well, James,’ I said, ‘it was different with you, as everyone had to turn out to watch you being buggered because of the school motto: Justice Must Not Only Be Done, He Must Be Seen to Be Done.’ Philip howled with laughter.”
He felt that by sending his son to Gordonstoun in Scotland, he would protect him from the effete influence of the English public school system. He also said that the school in Morayshire was far enough from London so that Charles would escape the daily scrutiny of reporters. “Eton is frequently in the news, and when it is, it’s going to reflect on you,” he told his son. “If you go to the north of Scotland, you’ll be out of sight, and reporters are going to think twice about taking an airplane to get up there, so it’s got to be a major crisis before they actually turn up, and you’ll be able to get on with things.”
Charles finally consented and chose his father’s school, which he later regretted. “It was hell,” he said. “I failed my math exams three times,” he said. He also flunked German and struggled with science. He wrote sad letters every night, complaining about how his classmates treated him. “I don’t get any sleep… they throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can.” Years later he blamed his father for sending him to Gordonstoun. Yet, at the time, Philip was not entirely comfortable about leaving his soft young son in the hands of Gordonstoun’s taskmasters. After delivering Charles for his first term, Philip and the Queen returned to Balmoral, where they spent the weekend with their friends David and Myrah Butter. Philip, more than the Queen, seemed shaken by the sinking experience of leaving his firstborn at boarding school.
“Prince Philip came into the drawing room,” recalled Myrah Wernher Butter, who has known him since childhood. “He was white as a sheet. I asked him what was the matter, but he just walked across the room and poured himself a drink, which was very unusual for him. Years later Charles was telling me about what he felt when he sent his son off to school. I told him I understood. He said, ‘Oh, that’s because you always cared so much. I bet no one ever cared that much about me.’ So I told him the story about his father. He was stunned. He just couldn’t believe it.”
By the time Charles was ready to start school in 1956, his father was fed up. He was tired of fighting the Palace guard, especially for his wife’s time and attention. He disliked the courtiers—he called them “old farts”—and resented his wife’s dependence on them. She no longer consulted him on court matters, and her passivity to his suggestions infuriated him. “Come on, Lilibet. Come on,” he would snap. “Just do it. Do it.” Exasperated with Palace bureaucracy, he started spending more time with his pals from the Thursday Club. This only hardened the courtiers’ opinion of him as a crude adolescent with a predilection for lavatory humor.
“The Duke of Edinburgh is very lewd, very Germanic,” said one of the Queen’s private secretaries. The haughty courtier attributed “Philip’s vulgar German preoccupation with nudity” to his “Mountbatten origins.” He cited the photographs that Lord Mountbatten had posed for with Cary Grant in Las Vegas. In the first picture, the two men faced the camera surrounded by gorgeous showgirls swathed in feather boas. In
the second picture, the men turned their backs to the camera and so did the show girls, whose rhinestoned-thonged backsides were without feathers. Mountbatten found the picture of the bare-bottomed showgirls so amusing that he had it blown up and hung in the Queen’s passageway on the royal yacht. Philip, who roared with laughter when he saw it, enjoyed showing it off and would not remove it, even for state guests. “That’s his Germanic idea of art and entertainment—naked buttocks,” said the courtier.
Philip started sharing the London apartment of actor Richard Todd with two other married men during afternoons to entertain young actresses. The three men called themselves “the Three Cocketeers.”
“No, I can’t talk about what went on in that apartment,” said British actor Jack Hedley in 1993. “It’s too dangerous to talk about those days—even forty years later.”
Philip also used his equerry’s flat on South Street. “Mike, or Parker-from-the-Palace, as we called him—that’s how he always introduced himself on the phone—was living another life away from his wife and his family, and the parties at his flat were rousing affairs,” recalled one man who attended many of the parties. “Yes, Philip was always there and he always had women, but nothing serious. As the French say, les danseuses, which are a rich man’s indulgence. Philip usually came with Parker and Baron Nahum, the court photographer, known by his first name. One night, Aristotle Onassis brought Maria Callas to dinner, and another night Prince Bernhard, married to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, spent a riotous evening with us.”
“I remember the dinner with Prince Bernhard,” recalled Larry Adler. “That’s when we all realized how much Philip hated his job as Consort. Throughout dinner Philip kept jabbing at Bernhard: ‘Boy, I really envy you,’ he said. ‘You can go anywhere you like and not be recognized. You can have all the girlfriends you like and no one knows. I can’t go anywhere without press vultures and policemen following me.’ Bernhard had to leave early that evening to get back to Holland before the airport closed and the field lights were turned off. As he got up to go, Philip bent down and gave him an exaggerated salaam. ‘Give my regards to Her Imperial Majesty,’ he said. He spat out the last three words with withering scorn. You could tell he identified with Bernhard, who, like Philip, was tied to a short royal leash.”