A Brief History of the House of Windsor

by Michael Paterson

  Naturally, the prince is highly unpopular with certain members of the architectural profession, as well as with many others. Nothing could be more calculated to infuriate those of a ‘progressive’ bent than the notion of an unelected public figure, lacking any professional training in the fields in which he voices strident views, undoing the work of others in the name of aesthetics. His preference for craftsmanship and beauty draw predictable sneers from those who think he is trying to recreate a cosy – as well as mythical – bucolic past through the building projects he encourages (the new town of Poundbury, built on land owned by him in Dorset, is an example). Architects naturally want to produce work that is original and individual, enabling them to set their own stamp on the age; pastiches of established styles allow them little scope to do so. Though of course there are members of the profession who specialize in traditional forms, many take the view that now technology enables them to build higher, more daring and innovative structures, they do not wish to be confined to the more modest scale and unadventurous design of the past, whose buildings are all around us anyway. They also resent the way in which, though their names and reputations can be made by a successful building, they can also be ruined overnight by the negative publicity following a single comment by the prince. His concern for the harmony of the built environment is seen as unacceptable interference, and even bullying. Nevertheless a surprising number of people agree with him. Architects are seen as arrogant, cocksure and uninterested in what the populace actually likes. There are many among his future subjects who applaud his views, however outspoken they may be.

  Royals are naturally expected to take up charitable patronage. They usually do it well, and can become seriously engaged with the causes they officially represent, as has been seen with Princess Anne’s work for Save the Children. Their involvement brings a considerable increase in media interest and funding to the campaigns or organizations they support, and this aspect is a very strong argument in favour of monarchy. There are enough members of the family – seventeen of them at present – undertaking this sort of work to cover a very wide range of organizations, and once connected with a charity they tend to remain its champion for a long time.

  Contrast this with the situation in the United States. The First Lady is the traditional, high-profile charitable patron, the only American with a social standing comparable to that of royalty. Once her husband is elected, she chooses a cause – or perhaps one major cause and several minor ones – that she will make her own. Barbara Bush, as is well known, selected child literacy. The trouble is that a president’s wife is only there for four years, or perhaps eight. When she leaves, all her power to raise awareness, to generate funds and attention and prestige, goes with her. Her successor, naturally wanting to make her own mark, will choose something entirely different. With the British royals the charitable connection, and the vital publicity that it brings, is there for their lifetime, and after that they may well be replaced by another family member.

  This promise of long-term commitment is seen very obviously in the case of Charles. So far, he has founded seventeen philanthropic organizations, known collectively as the Prince’s Charities. He is also patron of some 350 additional ones throughout the Commonwealth. He established the Prince’s Trust in 1976, aimed at helping young people – aged between eighteen and thirty – with backgrounds as truants or petty criminals, or who had been in care or were long-term unemployed. It is run by a council chaired by the prince, and best known for giving grants to individuals to start their own business or to develop particular ideas. It also provides business mentoring and valuable work experience for young people. It is able to do this because it raises money through events (several high-profile rock concerts have helped to fund its work) and donations from notable benefactors, including Bill Gates. While its royal origins give it prestige – the queen granted it a charter – it is the business community that provides the all-important financial backing.

  Through this and other charitable endeavours, Charles is brought into contact with a world of celebrity glitter in which he would not perhaps be expected to feel at home. In fact, he is quite comfortable in the company of film stars and rock musicians – he is on bantering terms with many of them – though perhaps not as much on their wavelength as newspaper pictures occasionally make him seem. Once, upon entering a room full of media personalities he mentioned, sotto voce, that since he never watches television he had no idea who any of them were. It is also authoritatively stated that he wears ear-plugs when attending rock concerts. Hardly surprising, perhaps, for a man whose taste is so firmly entrenched in high culture. He is patron of the Royal Opera and the English and Welsh National Operas as well as president of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  He has by no means confined his interests to his own country or the Commonwealth. As a representative of the British monarchy, his presence can be valuable elsewhere in the world. When, in 1986, Harvard University celebrated its 350th anniversary, it sought a guest speaker who would be suited to the dignity of the occasion. The obvious choice, President Ronald Reagan, apparently could not be asked because his presence would be viewed as ‘political’. Prince Charles was invited instead – as an articulate, interested member of a revered institution – proving perhaps the power of the monarchy to meet all situations and smooth over all differences.

  His interest often lies deeper than mere speech-making, however. His Trust has made possible the saving of damaged and endangered literary manuscripts in St Petersburg. His architecture students, as a summer school project, planned the restoration and re-design of Potsdam in Germany, a town – it is the Prussian equivalent of Windsor – that was destroyed by RAF bombers in 1945 and then badly rebuilt by communist planners. He has taken an interest in the heritage of Romania ever since the reign of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, whose megalomania was responsible for the wholesale destruction of monasteries and churches there. Charles, a member of whose family (Queen Marie) is buried in a Romanian church, has visited the country and become patron of a conservation project there. As if this is not enough, he has bought two houses there, one of them (it seems extraordinary!) in Transylvania. Small wonder that he has been, according to rumour, invited to become king of the country by local monarchists.

  That offer may be the nearest he gets to a throne for some time to come. If his mother lives as long as her mother did, he will be seventy-nine when he succeeds. There was a notion, during Australia’s bicentennial year in 1988, that he might become Governor-General of the country. He would have been delighted, and would have done the job very well. As we have seen, however, it was made clear as early as the 1920s that Dominions would not have such officials foisted on them by London, and Australian prime ministers have been adamant that not even the country’s future ruler can be given a post that is intended only for one of its own citizens.

  Nevertheless, the prince has found a multitude of ways to make himself useful. It would have been very easy to lead a life of mild duty and predominant personal pleasure, as did his predecessor in the twenties and thirties. He could have been a nondescript figure whose opinions no one would have bothered to read in newspapers. Instead he has taken up a host of issues, often stirring a hornet’s nest of controversy in doing so. He has created debate, forced people to think, focused attention on unpopular causes, and often proved himself to be ahead of the trend in doing so. Whether or not people agree with his views or hate them, he is doing valuable work for the country, the Commonwealth and the world. In the popular parlance, giving ‘value for money’ in terms of hard work and dedication.

  A paragon among previous Princes of Wales was Prince Henry, the son of King James I, who may be considered the perfect pattern of an heir to the throne: a Renaissance figure, wise beyond his years, an athlete, a would-be military hero, and – more importantly – the founder of the national and royal collections that have graced the country ever since. Henry died in 1612 as a result of a typhoid fever, all his glorious potential laid waste
by his early death. Given a much longer life in which to be useful, has Charles done better than Henry, or any other of his princely predecessors in terms of his commitment, industry, breadth and depth of vision, devotion to duty, imagination, care for the people of the realms over which the British monarch rules? Is he, therefore, the best Prince of Wales there has ever been?

  Yes.

  7

  PRINCE WILLIAM, DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE, ‘WILLS’

  ‘I don’t deliberately select my friends because of their background. If I enjoy someone’s company, then that’s all that counts. I have many different friends who aren’t from the same background as me and we get on really well . . . it’s brilliant.’

  Prince William, in interview

  Prince William is, naturally, the prospect for the future that monarchists most cherish. Not only does he offer the physical guarantee that the House of Windsor will continue through another generation, but the hope that a line will eventually be drawn under the unfortunate matter of his parents’ broken marriage. Descended both from Charles and the sainted Diana, he unites both sides of a quarrel that still reverberates.

  He was born on 21 June 1982, and has naturally been the subject of close public interest ever since. Just as he is the product of a home in which two such different people tried to live together, so his background and nature represent a blend of the two cultures – the traditional and the modern, the old and the new – to which he was exposed. Shortly after his parents divorced, an American magazine commented that a glance at the clothes worn by the two boys would indicate which of their parents had had custody of them that day. With their father they wore tweeds, or blazers, and ties, while with Diana they were dressed in baseball caps and sweatshirts. While with him they went to shoots and to the Guards Polo Club; she took them to have hamburgers at Ed’s Diner in the King’s Road and on funfair rides at Alton Towers. However much this may cause traditionalists to shake their heads, it looks as if she succeeded in giving them a hefty dose of normal childhood experiences. In addition she ensured that they learned about the other side of life by, for instance, having them accompany her on night-time visits to the rough sleepers on the Embankment. She gave both her sons a sense of duty toward the less fortunate that has later been manifested in the charity work they undertake.

  She also enabled them to suffer the occasional frustrations of ordinary life. To cite one example out of many, she took the boys on an unscheduled visit to the Imperial War Museum in London. One of the attractions there is The Blitz Experience, a simulated Second World War air raid. Visitors sit crammed into a shelter while appropriate sound effects can be heard outside. The ground shakes, and there is the smell of cordite and of burning. It is realistic and popular. When Diana and the boys arrived, museum staff explained that there was a lengthy queue for the shelter but offered to take them straight in. Diana refused to inconvenience people who had waited their turn, and the boys went home without seeing it. This too can have done them nothing but good.

  In the ‘culture war’ between tradition and modernity it was always going to be the former that won. William had from the beginning a strong sense of duty and this was nurtured by the influence of the queen (who regularly invited him to tea at Windsor while he was at school across the river), Prince Philip, Prince Charles and the Queen Mother. His own mother, whatever her views on the rest of her husband’s family, also wanted him to be a good king. He has, all his life, had access to good advice and good example. The surroundings in which he has grown up are the kind that stir the imagination and impart a sense of history and duty and of privilege that must be earned. He has responded to this, as has his brother, by choosing a career of service, and in both cases this has won the approval of the public. If, instead, he had wanted to be a craftsman and furniture designer like Viscount Linley, would it have made much difference? Probably not. The important thing is that he is a decent young man seeking to earn his way, and to achieve a sense of personal worth through what he does before his future catches up with him.

  William is nothing like his father was at a similar age, but he is comfortable in a world of tradition and ceremonial and conservative, guards-officer values. He pursues hobbies – the polo and shooting to which he was introduced by Charles have become his passions too – that are typical of the class to which his mother belonged. He looks relaxed in tweeds and suits and uniforms. He loves the armed forces and, having been in all three of them, has had intensive experience in two. It has always been obvious, too, that his involvement is more than merely cosmetic. He relishes the chance to know and to work with members of other classes. Significantly the Service in which William feels most at home is the most relatively democratic of them – the Royal Air Force. He is genuinely interested in his job and in continuing with it for as long as he can. He sees it as a career, though it is very likely it will come to an end as soon as his father succeeds and he himself becomes Prince of Wales, if not before.

  His upbringing has been entirely different from his father’s. While Charles was the son of an affectionate but preoccupied reigning sovereign, William’s parents were both affectionate and available. He had from the beginning – and without any debate in the media – the opportunity to go to normal, if private, schools, attending a nearby day school then a boarding prep school followed by a major public school. He does not appear to have suffered in the way that Charles did from bullying or from others’ fear of being seen to toady. He has a circle of friends who seem entirely average and more varied than one might think, although he could be expected to be most comfortable within the social class in which his background and interests lie.

  In the case of William and Harry there was no formal committee to decide the course their education would take, regardless of their natural inclinations or abilities. Rather the priority was to give them an experience that was conventional and as sheltered as possible from both the media and the responsibilities of public life. There was, for instance, some talk of William attending with his father the handover of Hong Kong in June 1997. This was one of the major public events of the decade, but he said he did not yet feel ready for such duties, and it was left at that.

  The choice of Eton for both boys’ secondary education was surprising – and disappointing – to some who might have hoped for a less predictable, or conventional path. Though Gordonstoun has naturally featured in recent royal history, Charles’s memories of his own time there are likely to have been decisive when it came to choosing his sons’ school even though William, a more robust and less thoughtful young man than his father was, might ironically have fitted in better there. Eton, however, is not only a royal foundation but the school which some of his relatives – James Ogilvy, and Lord Frederick Windsor – had recently attended. It was particularly favoured by the Queen Mother, and Diana’s father and brother had also been there. There was never, as far as is known, any serious suggestion that they should go to a local comprehensive school. The populist gestures made by the monarchy tend to be rather smaller and more subtle than that.

  William managed the Common Entrance exam successfully; Harry found it more of a struggle. The school, whatever its historical associations with aristocracy, is academically very hard to get into and perhaps even harder to stay in. It requires its pupils, who have to learn to organize their time for themselves, to work according to personal motivation and not the demands of staff. There is such a heavy workload to get through that there is no time for idleness, and to keep up requires constant, sustained effort. It had been thought that Harry might be happier at Radley College, which is nearby, but he enrolled in the same house at the same school as William.

  It cannot have helped either boy that during this formative time of their lives their parents divorced, the newspapers were filled with highly personal – and deeply embarrassing – revelations, and that many members of the public took sides with either their father or mother. After that, in the late summer of 1997, their mother suddenly died just as they were about t
o return to school, and they were required to attend their first official funeral. Though they naturally garnered immense public sympathy their father was vilified and they must have been aware of it too. At least their mother’s death had ended a protracted and upsetting feud between their parents that would surely otherwise have carried on for many years to come.

  Both of them spent happy years at Eton. Set in water meadows in the shadow of Windsor Castle, a cluster of venerable ancient buildings that represent probably the most historic few acres of English ground apart from Westminster, it would be a difficult place to dislike. William kept up with his academic work and excelled at sports, becoming ‘Keeper’, or Captain, of the water polo team. He ended his career as Captain of his house and a member of ‘Pop’, the gorgeously dressed prefectorial society. He did well enough in his A-levels (C in biology, B in history of art and A in geography) to go on to university.

  Harry too found his forte, in the school’s Combined Cadet Force. Destined by inclination to be a soldier, he followed this path and won the Sword of Honour for best cadet. Both princes played polo. Both grew up to be ordinary, pleasant young men.

  William’s education may have been ‘elitist’, but the process of applying to university and spending a gap year put him through the same experiences as thousands of other young men and women, and his life was at least comparable with theirs. His spent time doing military training in Belize, went to East Africa, and spent weeks in Chile with Raleigh International, sleeping in a communal room and carrying out chores that included cleaning the lavatory. He never complained about discomfort or hard work. People are now so accustomed to the notion that royalty are just like the rest of us that no one expected him to do other than ‘muck in’.

  It was similarly taken for granted, given the furore that had erupted when Prince Edward sought to go to Cambridge, that the notion of waving royalty through the gate without the need for proper qualifications was now over. Any member of the family who arrived at university under such circumstances would never have achieved credibility or respect. William had, in any case, another opportunity here to step outside the gilded world in which he had lived and try something new.