All the time, he looked as though he were dying not just of boredom but ennui. He wore his heart on his face. His pellucid blue eyes brimmed with nameless sorrows and disappointments.
“Never feel sorry,” a millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins in the great bear-chase movie The Edge, “for a man who owns a plane.” King Charles owns an air force. He lives like, you know, a King. There he is, relaxing in the splendid rooms of his London home at Clarence House, parking his royal bum on a 1773 Chippendale sofa, staring up at intricate designs set in the ceiling mouldings which have a recognisable crown at either end of the room. And there is the scandal of his royal breakfast.
We are unreliably informed that the King likes seven boiled eggs served to him at breakfast. “If the Prince felt that number four was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven,” Jeremy Paxman claimed in his book On Royalty.
The Royal household dismissed the eggman story as fiction but did not dispute that he likes a side of nuts. Tina Brown’s eminently dispensable book The Palace Papers revealed his appetite for nuts and seeds in the morning. She writes of a time when a guest was inspecting the breakfast buffet at Highgrove “when he lifted a tureen that offered Charles’ preferred heap of Linseed”. Prince William said to the guest, “Oh no, don’t go near the bird table. That’s only for Pa.”
Yes, real edge-of-the-seat stuff, high drama at Highgrove House, his countryside retreat; but for all the lovely trappings, the attentive pamperings, the royal tithes, the King is only human, and he has lived so much of his life as a man of constant sorrow. He did not have a happy childhood. He did not have a happy first marriage.
He probably thought he was out of the woods when he finally married Camilla but the past 10 years have been trying to cope with the continual wretchedness of his awful younger bother, the Duke of Pork, and his awful youngest son, that ginger ingrate who is “no longer a working royal, but a rich person”, as Marina Hyde describes him in The Guardian. “His Rich Highness.”
No wonder Charles refuses to pay for police protection when Harry and Meghan visit the UK. It’s the best way of avoiding him.
BBC headline, earlier this month: “Prince Harry tells BBC he wants ‘reconciliation’ with Royal Family”. You can imagine Charles reading that and groaning. The Duke of Sussex told the BBC that the King “won’t speak to me because of this security stuff”, but that he did not want to fight any more and did “not know how much longer my father has”.
Who talks like that about their living parent? Julie Burchill has always had a special place in her black heart for Charles (“The fact that Charles only married the love of his life while in his dotage proves what a weak character he is”) but she has surprised herself to find that she detests Harry and Meghan even more. She wrote in The Spectator earlier this year, “Although I nurse a profound and lifelong loathing for Charles, I found myself repeatedly taking his side against Harry and Meghan of Montecito.”
As for the problem called Prince Andrew, Charles has cut him off financially, and encouraged him to vacate Royal Lodge. Andrew does not seem to have taken the hint. A royal source told The Mirror that Andrew has dug himself in, literally, through a new-found love for gardening: “He’s been asking about different kinds of trees and shrubs and whether it would be possible to move or relocate certain trees.” You suspect the King wonders whether it would be possible to dig a hole, and bury the cretin.
Sensual and lascivious intent
I remember that there was something furtive about his mouth as we crossed the Australian continent. It hinted at sensual and lascivious intent. It ached to have fun. Martin Amis wrote of Charles, “He has a pretty extraordinary laugh, like the snore of a pig”.
After praising the quality of beetroots and olives at the Yarra River markets, he was ushered into a very ugly building to sip San Pellegrino mineral water and launch a business and community project which aims to address Melbourne’s social ills. He referred to a similar scheme that he had once supported. “Until gradually,” he added, his mouth twitching with an irresistible impulse, “as the actress said to the bishop, it became too big for me.”
It went down somewhere in the order of a lead balloon. But there was no time for bad reviews. He was thrown in the back seat of a white Ford Fairlane, at the head of a five-car convoy en route to a primary school. He watched with a quizzical eye as children competed in an egg and spoon race. “Well done,” he said. He watched a sack race. “Good luck,” he said. He watched a child water a box of herbs. “Parsley is jolly good stuff,” he said.
The day, and Melbourne’s raging heat, wore on. By the time the tour ended that evening at Geelong Grammar, a stately, red-brick private school an hour south-west of Melbourne, the temperatures had dropped. It was freezing. A stiff breeze blew off the waters of Port Philip; a murder of crows got up to no squawking good in the plane trees.
He looked around with nostalgia: he had studied at Geelong for two terms, as a 17-year-old in 1966. His reverie was interrupted by a demand to plant a gum tree. He languidly shovelled three piles of dirt, and then waved his spade in the air to the cheering crowd. He said to students: “It was very good to see you.” And: “Good luck.”
Each platitude was greeted with something like awe. It’s nice to be spoken to by a royal. I enjoyed a relatively long conversation with him earlier that day. I had torn off my media ID, stood in line with the crowd at the organic market, and soon found myself being approached by the Prince. He stopped and gave a handshake to a man beside me, who said in a guttural voice, “Welcome to Australia!”
Charles replied, “How kind of you. Where are you from, originally?”
“Turkey.”
“Ah, so you’re Turkish.”
That superb dialogue concluded, Charles then met my eye, and pressed his dry, firm palm in my anxious paw. Having just learned his tremendous interest in geography, I blurted: “New Zealand!”
He said, “I’m coming there quite soon.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Well done,” he said.
He looked like the loneliest man alive. What a weird existence, those 73 years essentially waiting for his mother to die so he could ascend to the throne, every day of it in public. “All my life, people have been telling me what to do,” he once said. “I’m tired of it. My private life has become an industry.”
At his age, and with his recent experience with cancer, he probably doesn’t have much of a private life worth investigating. Nice to think of him as a gentle old boy of 76, mooching around Clarence House or Highbury House or whichever of his des res’s, happy to see William, Kate and the kids, hiding behind the furniture in case Harry sneaks past the staff in heavy disguise, holding hands with Camilla and calling her Gladys, his pet name for her, and snoring with laughter at her jokes. It’s his actual birthday in November. King’s Birthday Weekend is purely in his name. Three cheers for the Defender of the Faith; he’s scarcely jolly but he’s a good fellow.