The Times: The real King Charles is self-pitying, selfish, charming & a hoarder
If you have twenty minutes this weekend, you should absolutely read Hilary Rose’s piece in the Times of London: “Why the real King Charles is complicated — by royal insiders.” Subhead: “The coronation is less than two months away. But how is Charles going to shape up as monarch? Kind, dutiful and happily married (second time around)? Or irascible, insecure and easily frustrated by malfunctioning fountain pens?” It reads like a somewhat exhaustive history of King Charles’s failings and triumphs as well as his fundamentally dysfunctional nature. I’ve read a lot of royal books and I’ve never heard some of the details and stories in this piece. Some highlights:
Camilla manages Charles: Some of the King’s friends compare him to Eeyore, prone to melancholy and self-pity, not to mention the petulance briefly on display during the accession when a fountain pen didn’t work. Many agree that what the Queen, Camilla, excels at — as she did with the pen, stepping in with another — is managing him: cheering him up when he’s glum, indulging him when he needs it, geeing him up when he doesn’t and knowing how and when to persuade him of a particular course of action when his staff have tried and failed. “Leave it with me,” she says to courtiers, with one press secretary describing her as “the final court of appeal”.
Generational trauma: “If the Queen had taken half as much trouble about the rearing of her children as she did about the breeding of her horses,” a private secretary remarked drily to Robert Lacey, “the royal family wouldn’t be in such an emotional mess.”
A typical day for King Charles: He is up before 7am, to find the day’s papers laid out for him on a tray. He sips tea from a bone china cup. In the background, the radio is tuned to the Today programme. He may take the opportunity to do a headstand in his boxer shorts, for the benefit of his spine, or he may save that for later. He dresses in a bespoke suit from his Savile Row tailor, a bespoke shirt from his Jermyn Street shirtmaker and bespoke shoes from his cobbler. He douses himself in Eau Sauvage and breakfasts on seasonal fruit, seeds and yoghurt. At 8am he starts on his paperwork. The day has begun. Engagements run from 10am-5pm, when he stops for a sandwich and a piece of cake, having once proclaimed, somewhat histrionically, “I can’t function if I have lunch.” After tea he carries on working, breaks for dinner, served at 8.30pm sharp, then works again from 10pm until midnight.
How the king’s staff describe him: “He’s a demanding boss because he’s very demanding of himself,” one of his staff told Valentine Low. He could be at turns indecisive and stubborn, with an explosive temper, a man who would kick furniture in his rage. He had no interest in hearing criticism and no intention of acting on it. He yearned to be recognised for his efforts on everything from organic farming to climate change, and sought out people who agreed with him rather than challenged him. One dinner companion realised that he became actively annoyed if challenged. He cherished the role of convener, however, bringing people together to solve whichever passion on which the lighthouse beam was shining.
How Camilla worked Charles after she married Andrew Parker Bowles: Tina Brown argues that Camilla then “deftly” wove Charles into her life with her unfaithful husband as an insurance policy, making him godfather to their first child, keeping alive the sexual chemistry and vetting potential brides for their suitability and how much of a threat they posed to her. At one ball, when Charles was dating someone Camilla didn’t consider suitable, she is said to have snogged him passionately on the dancefloor. The unsuitable girlfriend duly departed in a huff, never to be seen again. “HRH is very fond of my wife,” drawled Andrew Parker Bowles, “and she appears to be very fond of him.”
Basher Wills: The result was that, behind closed doors, William and Harry were brought up in an unhappy home by warring parents who were prone to shouting, sullen silences, vicious arguments and tears. According to one infamous story, William was seven when he pushed tissues under the bathroom door to his weeping mother and told her, “I hate to see you sad.” At school, he took it out on others and was known as Basher Wills. A nanny described the atmosphere at home as at best difficult to deal with, at worst toxic. “I hate you, Papa, I hate you so much,” William once shouted. “Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?”
No one wanted Camilla: His mother thought he would either have to renounce Camilla or the throne, and his grandmother would have nothing whatsoever to do with her. For Charles, though, she was non-negotiable. Charles was obsessed with rehabilitating his public image and in winning public acceptance of Camilla, whom Tina Brown describes as “sexual and emotional comfort food” for the king. “Camilla stops the pompous thing with Charles,” a friend told Brown, adding that she put up with his endless whingeing about how underappreciated he was and his “self-pitying paranoia”.
Diana’s death: According to Robert Lacey, Charles’s immediate reaction was self-pity — “They’re all going to blame me” – then to fret down the phone to his private secretary that the fallout could destroy the monarchy. Nothing in his temperament or upbringing had prepared him for single parenthood, so he largely outsourced the job to others, immersing himself in his work and his mistress. Although today the monarchy is riding high on the glamorous new Prince and Princess of Wales and their three small children, at the turn of the century, Tina Brown argues, a “damp melancholy” and “deep dullness” had settled over it. The Queen had been crystal clear that the monarchy must never again be outshone by any one member and, once the dust had settled over Diana’s death, solid, dependable, middle-aged Camilla could at least tick that box.
A complicated king: On the one hand, the King has enough emotional intelligence to send handwritten letters to strangers who are bereaved or bereft. On the other, he seemingly couldn’t even bring himself to hug Harry the day his mother died. He is a kind man with a terrible temper, a visionary who sometimes cannot see beyond his own navel, and a man who delights in hunting and shooting but told his future daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle, that he couldn’t bear to think of any animal suffering. He’s sufficiently engaged with the real world that he set up the Prince’s Trust, but so detached from reality that he thought Lucian Freud might be up for a painting swap: one of his for one of Charles’s watercolours. And he is so tone deaf to the feelings of friends that he turns up to dinner parties with his own martini and to house parties with his own furnishings.
Charles is not thrifty: While the Queen was famously thrifty, with one-bar electric fires and Tupperware containers, Charles models his domestic life more on that of his grandmother, who kept four homes permanently staffed, drank so much vintage pink champagne that she was Veuve Cliquot’s biggest private client, and summoned staff at mealtimes by ringing a Fabergé pearl bell. Like hers, Charles’s homes are cluttered, with one friend calling him an outright hoarder. Clarence House and Birkhall, both remodelled for Charles by Robert Kime after the Queen Mother’s death, are a riot of rugs, cushions, tassels, swags, pelmets, paintings, china, ornaments, books and serried ranks of silver-framed photos on cloth-covered tables.
[From The Times]
See, there are actually some details in here which make me almost like Charles and remind me that this is the father-in-law who charmed then-Meghan Markle when they first met. He’s eccentric, weird, a man of passions, temperamental, and an interesting conversationalist. But on the other side, he’s fundamentally selfish, self-pitying, self-indulgent and a dogsh-t father who treated Diana and her sons poorly. He’s a weak man who is led around by the nose by Camilla, of all people. I don’t know… it feels like there will be more anti-monarchy protests in the months and years to come.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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