Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

‘I don’t know how you remain looking so cool,’ I admitted.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said with a smile.

  His secret, I was told later by one of his household, was always being rapidly hydrated with still water between engagements inside the air-conditioned vehicles or rooms he occupied usually.

  Chapter Two

  ICH DIEN – ‘I SERVE’

  ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea

  Can wash the balm from an anointed king’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD II

  Lurking in the shadows throughout time, but just markedly below the rank of a monarch, is the male heir to the throne, sometimes known as the Crown Prince. In the British hereditary monarchal system, he is often, but not always, given the title ‘His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales’. Just twenty-one men have held that coveted rank. History has shown the majority of them who bore the title to be great supporters of, and impeccable servants to, their sovereign. In a few cases, the skulking heirs have been more trouble than they were worth. Among the unscrupulous few are those who secretly plotted to overthrow the reigning monarch in a bloody power grab. In other cases, such unfitting behaviour has gone so far as to undermine seriously the sitting monarch.

  The title ‘Prince of Wales’ is one of the great continuities of English and Welsh and, latterly, British, history. The incumbent has no formal public role or responsibility legislated by Parliament, but the bearer of the title is usually the next in line to the throne or heir apparent. The title, which is within the gift of the reigning sovereign, is granted to the heir apparent as a personal dignity and the title Earl of Chester has always been bestowed upon the recipient in conjunction with it. It is not automatically given, and the title not heritable, either. It is seen as a great honour. But it can be, as history has shown, a poisoned chalice too, a role immersed in bloody intrigue, peril and even murder.

  What links all these men, other than the title of Prince of Wales, is that each of them at the time of being given the title was heir to the throne of England (prior to 1707, that is, and the implementation of the Act of Union with Scotland, and of Great Britain ever since). There is, however, little affiliation other than that. Ten of the twenty-one were created Prince of Wales as adults or youths and eight as children. Only a select few have held the title for more than a decade with a couple holding it for barely a year. Nor has being given the title guaranteed reaching the throne. Of the eighteen English Princes of Wales, only ten lived to be king; seven failed to get there. The current incumbent, Prince Charles, the man who has held the title longer than any of those before him, is still waiting for the top job having long passed the accepted retirement age.

  The title ‘Prince of Wales’ (Tywysog Cymru) was originally granted to princes born in Wales itself from the twelfth century onwards; the term replaced the use of the word ‘king’. One of the last Welsh princes, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was killed in battle in 1282 against English King Edward I, dubbed Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, who was the tyrannical monarch from 1272 to 1307. He may have been lauded for hammering the Scots, but he did a pretty effective job at pulverising the warring Welsh too and keeping them at bay. To further stamp his authority, he made his son, Edward of Caernarfon – born at the castle bearing his name in Wales – the first English Prince of Wales in 1301 at the age of sixteen. He held the title for six years before ascending the throne as Edward II.

  Edward III’s son, Edward of Woodstock, was created Prince of Wales at just twelve in 1343. Known as the Black Prince, the feared soldier held the title for thirty-three years until his death in 1376, just a year prior to his father’s passing, not having ascended the throne. The Black Prince’s own son held the title for less than a year. Richard married twice but produced no children and was deposed by Henry IV, who moved quickly to make his son, Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales at the age of thirteen. Henry V died in 1422 and his son, another Henry, succeeded to the Crown aged nine months. When Henry VI took control of the monarchal system, it had lost its shine and much of its power. His son, Edward of Westminster, was created Prince of Wales five months after his birth and held the title for seventeen years. The Duke of York’s son, however, took the title Edward IV and deposed the king in 1461, and the Prince of Wales, rather than inheriting the throne, became a fugitive for a decade. He was finally killed in the bloody Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 following his father briefly reclaiming the throne the previous year.

  Edward IV’s son, known as ‘Edward of the Sanctuary’, was created Prince of Wales immediately on the death of his predecessor. On his father’s death in 1883, he was created Edward V, but weeks later was denounced as a bastard by his uncle, Richard of Gloucester, who seized the Crown as Richard III and imprisoned him and his younger brother Richard in the Tower of London. In one of the great royal mysteries, ‘the princes in the Tower’ disappeared and were presumed murdered. Richard III then made his son, Edward of Middleham, Prince of Wales.

  When Richard was overthrown and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485, Henry Tudor became Henry VII and his eldest son, Arthur, just three, took the title Prince of Wales. A frail youth, Arthur died at Ludlow in April 1502, leaving Catherine of Aragon, the devout Roman Catholic Spanish princess to whom he was betrothed, free to marry his younger brother, Henry, Duke of York, who also inherited his brother’s title once it was clear Catherine was not pregnant with his brother’s child. The whole Tudor dynasty ended in 1603 with no further claimant of the title, as Henry VIII didn’t ever make his legitimate son, Edward VI, the Prince of Wales. In fact, there was a hiatus for the title until James I – the first Stuart king – gave the title to his son, ‘Renaissance man’ Henry Stuart, in 1610.

  Since 1714, the title of Prince of Wales has carried no formal responsibilities in the principality and has only an honorary association with Wales. When the future George II was created Prince of Wales after a lapse of some years, a special Parliamentary Act was needed to ensure he received the revenues that went with the title. Frederick, his son, was given the title in 1729 and his son George, later ‘mad’ king George III, in 1751. From 1727 onwards, all Princes of Wales relied on the Civil List for their income except when they have also been Dukes of Cornwall. (‘In the United Kingdom, the Civil List was, until 2011, the annual grant that covered some expenses associated with the sovereign performing their official duties, including those for staff salaries, state visits, public engagements, ceremonial functions and the upkeep of the royal households.’ – Wikipedia) King George III found it difficult to run his household within the limits of the Civil List and went cap in hand to Parliament for more money to clear his debts.

  George’s gaudy eldest son – known popularly as ‘Prinny’, later Prince Regent and eventually King George IV – strove to fashion an idealised image of himself that increasingly bore little relation to reality. It was he who, having been made Prince of Wales in 1762, lived a life devoted to excess and seemingly found it impossible to live within his means, and ran up huge debts in his lifetime. He once bought eighty-three pairs of boots and seventy-four pairs of gloves on a single shopping expedition and lived his entire adult life in massive debt, becoming the biggest spender in Britain’s royal history by squandering a fortune. No matter how much money Parliament awarded him, George always needed more. His extravagance was legendary. When he was a teenager, his tutor had complained that the prince ‘could never be taught to understand the value of money’. Half his income disappeared in the upkeep of his horses; he also employed a private band of forty-two musicians.

  The spendthrift George collected everything from walking sticks and handkerchiefs to kangaroos for his private zoo. Also known aptly as the ‘Prince of Pleasure’, George was a dandy and a drunkard. Debauched and dissolute, selfish and self-indulgent, he had many mistresses. Rumours of illegitimate children circulated during his lifetime, and after his death, too. Debt was a recurring theme for the House of Hanover and George also needed a special Act to res
cue him. Among the many debts he owed was £947 (a sizeable sum in today’s money of more than £100,000) to a Windsor apothecary for medicines purchased for treatments for a venereal infection.

  George was a man of superhuman appetite, too. A lifelong hypochondriac who nevertheless ate and drank with gusto, he often shamelessly appeared in public befuddled with drink. Suffering from gout, arteriosclerosis and possibly the porphyria that sent his father mad, he took up to 250 drops of laudanum a day. Depressed by his evident failure to reinvent himself as monarch (1820–30), the ailing king simply withdrew into a fantasy world of laudanum and alcohol. It was a toxic cocktail and it finally took its toll on 26 June 1830, when George IV died at sixty-seven. Never in modern times has a sovereign died so unlamented and his contemporaries shed few tears for this spendthrift playboy. The Times commented, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King.’

  There was another lengthy space in time after George IV’s ascension in 1820 before the next Prince of Wales. Queen Victoria’s son, the future King Edward VII – Albert, known to the family as Bertie – held the title for more than fifty-nine years before ascending the throne, longer than anyone else until Prince Charles, who surpassed the record held by his playboy great-great-grandfather on 9 September 2017. Denied involvement in many matters of state by his ageing mother, Bertie became a devoted leader of society, gaining a louche reputation for his hedonistic lifestyle, enjoying a number of celebrated extramarital affairs. He didn’t let his marriage to Danish Princess Alexandra cramp his style. In his own way, he apparently loved her. ‘She is my brood mare,’ he used to say. ‘The others [his scores of lovers, including prostitutes, society women and professional beauties] are my hacks.’ Loving and loyal, Alix, as she was known, was totally devoted to her Bertie, indulging his public infidelities. ‘Edward the Caresser’ – another of his nicknames – clearly believed his philandering almost as his right. Several illegitimate children were attributed to him, although not proven.

  He partied, ate and gambled to excess, never read books, apart from the odd novel, and had the reputation of a complete vulgarian. His antics left his mother, Queen Victoria, exasperated. He was, in her view, the complete antithesis of her late beloved husband Albert, whom she idolised. She even blamed the unfortunate Bertie’s bawdy behaviour for his father’s premature death. (He caught a cold travelling to Cambridge to admonish his son, which speedily developed into pneumonia.)

  When the overweight, scandal-prone waster Prince of Wales finally got the top job, he was fifty-nine and, in his own view, washed up. ‘It has come too late,’ he said, in German, to his wife, as she knelt and kissed his hand beside his Empress Victoria’s deathbed after the old Queen had died. Nobody expected too much of him. The story of his reign – like the reign itself – was too little, too late. Perhaps the long waiting game and the fact that his mother refused to allow him access to government papers and responsibility belied his many talents. During his short reign (1901–10) he proved a guileful diplomat and was astute at handling his personal public relations. As king, he is best remembered for improving Anglo-French relations with the so-called ‘Entente Cordiale’. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his closeness to his son and heir, for, unlike his own relations with his parents, Edward enjoyed a loving bond with his second son George (later George V), whom he created Prince of Wales in 1901.

  Until the sudden death of his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, in 1892, aged just twenty-eight, Prince George had no expectation of inheriting the Crown. He had a second-rate home education before entering the Royal Navy when still a child. He was, at best, conscientious but, at worst, tense when forced to make important decisions. Early in his reign he faced the most testing domestic challenges of any monarch in recent history.

  First, in 1910–11, there was the constitutional crisis caused by the veto pronounced by the Tory-dominated House of Lords over the Liberal government’s legislation. Then in 1913–14, there was the furious controversy over Irish home rule, which many observers expected to end in civil war. Like his father, George V believed he had to be seen by the people to be loved by them. His provincial tours, and visits to hospitals and factories, unprecedented in number, started early in his reign in a bid to bring the Crown closer to its people.

  In his reign, the UK became, for the first time, united. As king after 1918 he presided over the transition to full adult suffrage, and reconciled the Labour Party to constitutionalism. Although he favoured the Tories, Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald became his favourite prime minister.

  As a devout Anglican, he read the Bible every day without fail. He was an authoritative yet mollifying public speaker. His first Christmas radio broadcast in 1932 – written by the brilliant Indian-born writer of the empire, Rudyard Kipling (author of The Jungle Book [1894], Kim [1901] and many short stories, including ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ [1888] – was greeted as a great triumph by the public and commentators alike. In his Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1935, his people turned out in their thousands to cheer him and praise him for his dutifulness and paternalism.

  The first monarch since 1714 not to speak fluent German, George preferred the English-speaking Empire to the ‘foreigners’ of Europe and mistrusted what he dubbed ‘abroad’. After the Great War (1914–18), which saw the end of the reigns of five emperors, eight kings and eighteen minor royal dynasties, the old ‘cousinhood’ monarchy of Victorian times became imbued with a narrower sense of national identity. George disliked foreign travel and, apart from the celebrated Imperial Indian Durbar of 1911, which became known as the ‘Delhi Durbar’, he made only three state visits during his reign: to Paris in 1914 and to the kingdoms of Belgium and Italy in 1922–3. His pet hates included: trendy new or foreign music fashions and new dances such as the slow waltz or more gaucho-style tango; girls who used nail varnish or did not ride horses side-saddle; Communists, Fascists, submarines and chemical warfare. He would find fault in them all. He shook his stick at a Cézanne in the National Gallery, to whose director he declared, ‘Turner was mad. My grandmother always said so.’

  As a father, George was an authoritarian, browbeating bully and was both physically and orally abusive to all of his sons. George made his eldest son, the hugely popular and charismatic David, Prince of Wales in 1911, when he was sixteen. He held the title for fifteen years and did a first-class job in the role, becoming the Royal Family’s first truly global superstar. His charm, however, did not compensate for the lack of steadfastness and moral fibre that his father possessed. The latter is reported to have told his then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, ‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’

  David ascended the throne in 1936 as Edward VIII, but his reign soon collapsed, ostensibly over a damaging constitutional battle concerning his desire to wed twice-divorced American socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson, with the same Baldwin playing a central role. Since the monarch was also head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith, a conflict of interests was obvious and imminent. The king decided he should abdicate rather than create a constitutional crisis.

  On 10 December 1936, Edward signed the Instrument of Abdication at Windsor, which was witnessed by his three brothers. On the evening of 11 December, Prince Edward made a radio broadcast to the nation, stating, ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.’ Edward was never crowned and reigned for just 325 days.

  He was succeeded by his brother, Albert, Duke of York, who chose to reign as George VI, to mark the continuity with his father’s reign. One of his first actions was to create his brother Duke of Windsor. He eventually did marry Mrs Simpson in a civil ceremony at the Château de Candé, near Tours in France on 3 June 1937 and remained in exile in France, regarded as a virtual outcast by the rest of the Royal Family. The ma
rriage produced no children and his brother, the new King George VI, continually refused to grant the Duchess of Windsor the style of Royal Highness, which became a lasting source of friction between the brothers.

  Years later the current Prince of Wales’s mentor and great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who was a lifelong close friend of the ex-king, pleaded his friend’s cause with the young and impressionable Charles. He tried to explain the complexities of his case and the abdication from another perspective to the new Prince of Wales. The wily aristocrat hoped to persuade Charles to lobby his family, particularly the Queen and the Queen Mother, to secure an invitation for the exiled duke and his wife to return to Britain and to live out the rest of their lives peacefully and reconciled with the royal family.

  Charles, perhaps fuelled by the naïveté of youth and blinded by his devotion to the wily Mountbatten, was essentially on side. ‘I, personally, feel it would be wonderful if Uncle David and his wife could come over and spend a weekend. Now that he is getting old he must long to come back and it would seem pointless to continue the feud,’ he noted. The prince boldly even took the case to his other champion, the Queen Mother, but received an ice-cold response. He soon realised she was not about to do a volte-face on the matter under any circumstance. Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) bluntly stopped her grandson in his tracks and made it clear that the idea was a nonstarter. She made it transparent that she regarded her brother-in-law as a weak man who had been led astray by ‘that woman’ – she wouldn’t even use Wallis’s name – and was always convinced that her beloved George’s life was shortened by the stress caused by stepping in for his older brother and becoming king. The idea was shelved and Charles never even put it to his mother.

  Charles did, however, make a private visit to France and arranged to meet his great-uncle, David – and the previous holder of his title the Prince of Wales – for the first time. ‘Upon entering the house I found footmen and pages wearing identical scarlet and black uniforms to the ones ours wear at home. It was rather pathetic seeing that,’ he wrote. ‘The eye then wandered to a table in the hall on which lay a red box with “The King” on it,’ he wrote in is diary. He found that the old Duke was on good form, although bent and using a stick, Charles noted. He had one eye shut most of the time due to his cataract operation and used ‘expansive gestures’ while clutching an enormous cigar. ‘We got onto the subject of his relationship with his father,’ Charles wrote,