In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte recounts some of the anti-Carolean gossip from the early years of King Charles:
My library of royalist literature is thin, but I did find Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers on the shelf. Published last spring, it chronicles the recent history of the House of Windsor and while it treats the whole cast of characters — Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William, Kate, Harry, Meghan — much is revealed about the new king.
Charles, writes Brown, the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, was never a happy fellow. She calls him “Prince Eeyore”. He “felt bruised by his childhood and miserable school days, misunderstood by his domineering father, and deprived of an emotional connection with his mother”. Among the “brutalities” he endured in his youth: his schoolmates at Gordonstoun beat him with pillow because he snored.
Although an indifferent student, he attended Cambridge where he read anthropology and archaeology. In 1969, a year before graduating, his mother crowned him Prince of Wales. He spent his early twenties in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, distinguishing himself in the latter service by lowering an anchor without noticing on his chart the presence of a telecommunications cable linking Ireland and Britain. “It was snagged,” writes Brown, “and the two divers send down to dislodge it nearly drowned.” Charles earned a “stern rebuke”.
Having done his military duty, he devoted himself to polo, windsurfing, and test-driving prospective wives. Charles’s royal status made him an obvious catch, writes Brown, who judges that his “Dumbo ears were offset by his excellent tailoring and debonair polo prowess.”
Finding a wife proved difficult, not least because of his affinity for married women. At one point he was sleeping with both Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, and Dale “Kanga” Harper, wife of his buddy, Lord Tyron. “In the mid-seventies,” says Brown, “both married women were on call for the Prince while their husbands looked the other way.”
That’s not exactly true. Both men seemed pleased to lay down their wives for their country, as the joke went at the time. Charles was godfather to Tom Parker Bowles, son of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles, and also to a middle child of the Tyron’s who, naturally, was named Charles.
What Camilla and Kanga had in common were game personalities and maternal instincts that accommodated the Prince’s “sentimentality and tantrums, and needs to be soothed and amused”.
It wasn’t until 1981, at the age of 32, that the Prince of Wales made his choice of a bride. It was famously awful for all concerned. He married twenty-year-old Diana Spencer who bore him an heir, William, in 1982, and a spare, Harry, in 1984. Brown reports that Charles behaved properly in the marriage until the birth of Harry who, to his disappointment, was not a girl. “Oh God,” he said, “it’s a boy … and he’s even got red hair.”
He was back with Camilla in no time. Diana ratted him out to the author Andrew Morton in 1992 and Charles unwittingly confirmed his infidelity the next year in a notorious telephone conversation with Camilla in which he said that he wanted to “live inside your trousers or something”. You know the rest.
