Born to Be King: Prince Charles on Planet Windsor (13 page)

During Knatchbull’s long convalescence, the Queen invited him and one of his sisters, Amanda, to stay at Balmoral. They found her in “almost unstoppable mothering mode.”
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“The Queen is extraordinarily animated when it comes to care and detail and motherliness and economy and domestic matters and that isn’t understood,” says Knatchbull, sitting in his West London office, shrapnel scars faint but visible. “People assume she’s a lofty figure and head of state but no, actually she’s first and foremost a homemaker and therefore a caregiver to the people in the home.”
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Her youngest sons, Andrew and Edward, benefited from that well-concealed motherliness. She has easy connections with her grandchildren and other family members such as Knatchbull. Princess Anne, her father’s favorite, has always been at least as stalwart as her parents. Charles drew a shorter straw, the first child and the neediest, just three when his mother ascended the throne. He suffered another misfortune, too. Instead of growing up in the palace, tended by private tutors and shielded from curious eyes, Charles became a royal guinea pig, the first heir to the throne to attend school. The change, like most of the careful recalibrations of Elizabeth II’s reign, made perfect sense. The monarchy must evolve, stay in touch with the people. The strategy produced a Prince of Wales avid to understand his future subjects and to be understood, but only partially equipped to succeed in either endeavor.

Nor has he ever developed the thicker skin his father hoped for him, especially where Philip himself is concerned. In 2012, when the Diamond Jubilee tour brought the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to Burnley in northwest England, Charles seized the moment to lay before them some of the fruits of his labor. Six of his charities had been working to regenerate Weaver’s Triangle, a derelict area in a town that has frayed with the decline of the cotton industry. “No other group of charities could have played the same role or achieved as much as the Prince’s Charities,” enthused a 2011 evaluation report, published by the Cass Business School at City University London. As the royal trio traveled by barge to Weaver’s Triangle, Philip’s voice cut through the excitement. “I can’t think why you want to save all these terrible old places,” he said. Of all people, the Duke really should have known the answer.

CHAPTER 3

A Prince Among Men

Charles is a passionate gardener, of ideas and initiatives as well as gardens. “These things have grown like topsy over the years, as I’ve seen what I feel needs to be done,” he says of his charities. “I couldn’t do it all at once. I couldn’t at Highgrove just do the whole garden in one or two years. Bit by bit you go round.”
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The landscapes he creates, whether figurative or physical, bear marked similarities. Though he recognizes the necessity for pruning to maintain healthy plants and sustainable organizations, he shies from too stark an approach. “We ask before we cut anything,” said Suzie Graham, one of two head gardeners at Birkhall.
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Charles’s impulse is to create refuges, for other people and for himself. “All my life I have wanted to heal things, whether it’s been the soil, the landscape or the soul,” he explained in the introduction to one of seven books about Highgrove that have sprung up as a result of his green fingers.
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His gardens are full of hiding places, paths that twist unexpectedly, and rustic shelters. “The eye should be led; you want to think ‘I wonder what’s around that corner?’ Little follies are terribly important, too, as they give a focus to reach or sit in once you get there,” he ruminated.
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Most of the follies encircle seats just large enough for a prince and his cushion. At Highgrove he also installed a larger sanctuary of stone, clay, and barley straw, equipped with a wood-burning stove and built to geometric principles he considers sacred. The phrase inscribed above the wooden door in Pictish—the language of a tribe of ancient British farmers, ruled by kings—means “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, oh Lord.”

For his sixtieth birthday he took delighted possession of a new folly, a thatched summerhouse nestling on an island in the Muick, the tributary of the River Dee that cuts a path through Birkhall’s grounds. On a sparkling September day in 2013, he should really be enjoying its seclusion or indulging in another experience his youth too seldom provided, the opportunity to spend quality time with close family. He has come to Birkhall for a short break. William and Kate have brought baby George to visit. Camilla is pottering upstairs. But here is the Prince, closeted in his living room with a journalist, while aides paw the carpet outside, impatient to bend his ear ahead of a lengthy meeting scheduled the next day with the heads of his charities. He continues to respond just as Gordonstoun programmed him to do: the more stressful his own life, the more hemmed in by duties and deadlines, the more he volunteers to take on additional responsibilities. It’s a debt to Kurt Hahn—or a curse—that Charles freely acknowledges.

School taught him that sitting back wasn’t an option, he says. “I always feel that reflection and discussion should lead to practical action.” He leans forward. “I also feel more than anything else it’s my duty to worry about everybody and their lives in this country, to try to find a way of improving things if I possibly can.”
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“Plus est en vous
”—more is in you: Gordonstoun’s motto reflects the school’s abiding ambition to mold students into individuals who aren’t simply academically proficient but socially engaged. Its founder took guidance from Plato, who wrote that “the whole of education should be directed to the acquisition of such a knowledge as will teach a man to refuse the evil and choose the good,” and sketched out a map toward achieving that end that started with physical exercise or “gymnastic.”
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Pupils endured a lot of gymnastics during the Prince’s incarceration at the school, cold runs, cold baths clouded with the effluvia of previous occupants, but academic lessons didn’t look much unlike those taught at other British schools—such institutions are confusingly known as public schools—of the time. The heir to the throne studied literature and classics, wrestled with algebra, and marveled at the burst of radiance created by holding magnesium strips in the flame of a Bunsen burner. There were few other sources of brightness. “It’s such hell here, especially at night,” he scrawled in a private letter. “I don’t get any sleep practically at all nowadays.… The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness they are horrid. I don’t know how anyone could be so foul. They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can, waking up everyone else in the dormitory at the same time.”
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Many former pupils of Britain’s elite boarding schools recall similar experiences. The changes in attitude to parenting that redefined family relationships in the 1960s—the transition to a more nurturing culture that Tim Knatchbull describes—took far longer to percolate into the public school system. Children as young as seven were routinely dispatched into the care of institutions that, like the parents who sent them, believed that a little adversity built character. By daylight the teaching staff imposed discipline, but at night and in unseen corners of the schools a second layer of enforcement kicked in as fellow pupils acted out their own difficult assimilation by picking on kids yet more vulnerable than themselves.

Charles was an obvious target. “It was a point of honor to make physical contact with the Prince of Wales [during school games],” remembered one of his contemporaries at Gordonstoun. “And the more violently the better.”
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That wasn’t the sharpest source of his misery. At Charles’s first school, Hill House in London, a brief ferment of press coverage, stemmed by obliging editors at the request of Buckingham Palace, marked him as an outsider. He carried the embarrassment and discomfort to his next schools, boarding from the age of eight, first at Cheam, an English preparatory school his father had briefly attended. His attempts to blend in, never entirely convincing to himself or his supposed peers, bit the dust at the end of his first year when they sat together to watch the closing ceremony of the Empire and Commonwealth Games. With no prior warning to her son, the Queen announced that she had elevated him to his hereditary title: Prince of Wales. Soon afterward, paraded in his new principality for the public, he found himself mobbed by crowds who in an excess of patriotic zeal broke through barriers. The same status that threatened to overwhelm him with mass attention ensured he remained profoundly isolated. Classmates shunned his company for fear of being accused of sycophancy.

Cheam introduced its emissary from Planet Windsor to the business end of another British institution: corporal punishment. Palace officials had insisted he should be treated as other boys. The school authorities may not have been able to force other children to follow this instruction but they took it seriously enough to twice administer beatings to the heir to the throne for his part in dormitory fights. At Gordonstoun, the regime of punishment reflected Hahn’s unusual educational vision. The cane was part of the headmaster’s arsenal—by the time Charles arrived in 1962, Hahn had retired, leaving a man called Robert Chew at the helm—but symbolic and ritual sanctions played a larger role. Boys earned promotion through stages defined by uniforms and so-called training plans detailing their nonacademic tasks and activities. After the Prince’s infamous cherry brandy incident, Chew demoted his royal charge to “new boy,” stripping him of the rank he had painstakingly earned and adding to Charles’s anguish.

The school aimed to instill a sense of personal responsibility in each student. Pupils filled in forms every night to assess themselves against a series of goals they helped to identify. Hahn had devised his teaching methods to counteract social ills he feared risked squandering the promise of younger generations in listless self-indulgence. He listed these “diseases” in a treatise written the year Charles came to Gordonstoun: “decline of fitness and physical health: in particular due to the modern methods of motion, e.g., car, train, and elevator; decline of initiative and the spirit of adventure: easily to be recognized as ‘spectatoritis,’ an ‘illness’ brought about by the new media, e.g., radio, film, and television; decline of imagination and recollection: especially fostered by the restlessness of modern people and their increasing fear of silence, loneliness, and seclusion; decline of carefulness and thoroughness: primarily caused by the dwindling importance of the crafts and by the increasing inclination to look for quick results and easy solutions; decline of self-discipline and renunciation: chiefly furthered by material affluence and the easy access to alcohol, cigarettes, and pills; decline of compassion and mercy: in particular encouraged by the diminished community life and the expanding subjectivism, individualism, and egoism.”
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Long before the rise—and slump—of the couch potato, Hahn had spotted in the Weimar Republic signs that the social and technological changes that to much of the world appeared as progress might carry downsides. Gordonstoun today is a markedly kinder institution than when Charles was a pupil, coeducational and closely attentive to student welfare, but the school still demonstrates commitment to its founding ideals by maintaining a student-run fire brigade, mountain rescue team, lifesavers, and coast guard watch that provided rare glints of enjoyment in the young royal’s gloomy days.

As the boy clutched his coverlet against the onslaught of bullies, so the adult clings to the positives retrieved from Gordonstoun. He did not send his own sons to the school—William and Harry experienced the softer climes of Eton College—but in his charitable endeavors, in the ceaseless campaigning, the relentless fund-raising, Charles continues to put into practice the central tenet of the education his parents chose for him. “At the end of the day it was very good for you. It wasn’t a holiday camp. But on the other hand it did build a character,” he says. “And I do think character-building is vital. It’s another reason I’ve been trying for years to try and ensure this is still possible within the education system and as part of the extracurricular aspect of education.”
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The Queen and Prince Philip are not infrequently discomfited by the child their genes, parenting, and educational choices produced. “He always says, ‘If they didn’t want me to do things and have ideas, they shouldn’t have sent me to a Kurt Hahn school,’” says an aide.

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There was one magnesium burst of light toward the end of his school days: six months at Timbertop, a school in the middle of the Australian bush run to Hahnian principles. Though at least as rugged as Gordonstoun, baking hot rather than icy, the culture suited Charles, and distance from many of the things that troubled him, not least his own parents, enabled him to develop a veneer of assurance. Back at Gordonstoun, to his own surprise as well as his father’s, he became head boy. Charles also was the first royal to take A-levels, school-leaver qualifications similar to SATs but roughly equivalent in standard to Advanced Placement examinations.

His B in History and C in French might not have suggested an academic bent, much less recommended that he study among the eggheads and bluestockings of Cambridge University, but in this, as in other key decisions, the Prince had no say and the Queen expressed no view. She sat silent at a Buckingham Palace dinner in 1965 as guests including the Prime Minister of the day, Harold Wilson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and senior members of the military and academia, but excluding Charles, hashed out a plan that saw him head to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, just as he threatened to settle, to University College of Wales at Aberystwyth for a term to learn Welsh ahead of his investiture as Prince of Wales. The idea was to mollify Welsh nationalists; the Prince’s own desires took a backseat.