Charles Windsor can scarcely be unaware of the ill omens that circle his destiny, writes MICHAEL WHITEin London
WHATEVER FOND imaginings the young Prince Charles retained that his was just another ordinary British family – as newspapers used to assure their readers – must have been unsettled on June 2nd, 1953, when he watched his mother being crowned in the splendour of Westminster Abbey.
He was four and the TV cameras caught him tugging frequently at the sleeve of his grandmother, the new Queen Mother, to ask what it all meant.
More difficult to judge is when exactly the growing boy knew enough to be told or, more likely, to grasp for himself the delicate, unmentionable fact that in a family of long-living women, his was sure to be a protracted wait to inherit the throne to which – on the death of his grandfather, George VI, 15 months earlier – he had become heir apparent.
Great-granny, Queen Mary, lived to be 85; the Queen Mum would make 101. Queen Victoria had reigned for 63 years and 216 days when she died at 81 in 1901. If she lives, the Queen will overtake her on September 10th, 2015, when 89; she is in robust health.
Her eldest son will deliver a full and personal tribute to her in an hour-long primetime BBC television documentary tonight. Over the decades officials and friends have assured the curious that Charles is perfectly content to wait, happy with his busy life, his charities and hobbies, his second marriage to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who, the longer Charles has to wait, must have a greater chance of being acceptable as queen in place of the fairytale Princess Diana.
And yet the anecdotes persist that, whenever the Queen promises to serve her people “for many years to come”, there is disquiet across the Mall in Clarence House, even though the A-for-abdication word has been taboo in Buckingham Palace since Edward VIII, the last prince of Wales, indulgently relinquished his imperial throne after 11 months in December 1936 to marry the twice-divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson.
“You are fortunate enough to have succeeded to the title when still young,” Charles is supposed to have told his then brother-in-law, Earl Spencer, in 1992. “I’m at the same age at which my grandfather died,” the melancholy prince confided to a wellwisher on his 56th birthday in 2004.
The satirical magazine Private Eye’s recent “Long Live the Queen” cover put it more bluntly. A speech bubble had her eldest son saying “Well, up to a point.” Yet heir apparent is one secure title his mother never held. As a woman, always capable, even in theory, of being superseded by a male heir (still the case until the agreed legal change is passed in 16 Commonwealth countries), the new queen, 25 on her accession in 1952, had always been heir presumptive, not princess of Wales in her own right. It is the senior title among the many traditionally granted to the English – later British – monarch’s heir since the warrior Edward I cynically promised the conquered Welsh a Welsh-born prince who spoke neither English nor French. He meant his infant son, born in his new fortress at Caernarfon.
As the first prince of Wales since Charles II (1660-85) to bear that forename, Charles Windsor can scarcely be unaware of the ill omens that circle his destiny. It is said he may even choose to be called George VII rather than Charles III when his moment finally comes, if it comes – because a republican upsurge or his own death might intervene in circumstances hard either to predict or rule out.
During Queen Victoria’s long withdrawal from public life after the early death in 1861 of her adored Prince Albert at 42, there was such a republican upsurge – far more severe than that which engulfed the Windsors in the “annus horribilis” years surrounding Diana’s divorce and death – but the national mood became more positive as the queen’s great age and fame culminated in the diamond jubilee of 1897.
Elizabeth II is already older than Victoria was in 1901 and knows how long the royal Wisden requires her to survive to reign longer. Few people are more competitive about longevity than the very old. Most royal biographers report that the Queen was a somewhat distant mother – as she has been a queen, dignified, dutiful, but shy – and that Prince Philip was a stern father who wanted his sensitive eldest son to become “a man’s man”.
It can not have been easy for any of them. In 2008 Prince Charles overtook Edward VII (1901-10) as the longest serving prince of Wales. What Buck House calls “the Edward VII problem” long exercised the Queen, although she has never offered a job-share to avert idle dissipation. Prof Robert Hazell, head of University College London’s constitution unit, argues that the most powerful case that republicans could make for abolishing the ancient British monarchy – practical rather than theoretical – is “the serious burdens it places on the royal family”.
“The queen is 86, an age when most people have retired; she’s been in the job for 60 years with no prospect of relief until she dies. She won’t ease up and she feels her coronation oath was a sacrament, so there is no question of abdication. It is a very heavy burden, for which we will be applauding her this weekend. She’s stuck on the treadmill.”
Prince Charles? “He’s 63, itself an age when most people are starting to contemplate retirement, yet he’s not actually started the job he’s spent his adult life preparing for. That is burdensome, too. There are other demands we make on them in terms of the human rights we now value. The queen has no freedom of expression or religious belief: she must be an Anglican in England and become a Presbyterian when she crosses the Scottish border. She has no freedom to travel, which the rest of us take for granted, and royal marriages need approval. It may be gilded, but it’s still a cage,” concludes Hazell.
Little wonder that Charles must enter this weekend’s celebrations with mixed feelings. He has seen how his first wife, Diana, upstaged him. He can now see his son and heir, William, and his middle class wife, Kate, doing the same. As with talk of an abdication, speculation about bypassing Charles periodically resurfaces – and fades. It won’t happen.
– (Guardian service)