The Child of England
Alastair Forbes
Princes of Wales Alan Palmer (Weidenfeld £8.50) The Court of St James's Christopher Hibbert (Weidenfeld £7.50) Charles, Prince of Wales Anthony Holden (Weidenfeld g6.95) Class Jilly Cooper (Eyre Methuen £4.95) 'Before he began his sermon this morning Mr Venables read from the pulpit the latest telegram from Sandringham . . . "The Prince has passed a tranquil day and the symptoms continue to be favourable." What a blessed happy contrast to the suspense and fear of last Sunday. How thankful we all are. I love that man now, and always will love him. I will never say a word against him again. God bless him. God bless him and keep him, the Child of England.' So noted that dear man and delightful diarist, the Reverend Francis Kilvert one December Sunday in 1871, as Albert Edward of Wales extricated his foot from where it had been too long lingering in Death's wide ajar door. Like his greatgreat-grandson Charles today, the Prince was 30, but he had already fathered five children on his lovely Danish wife whom, despite his chronic and all too often scandalous infidelity, he had deeply loved for the ten years of their marriage and was to continue to cherish until the last day of his life 40 years later. Our present bachelor Child of England is so far only a physical ringer for Bertie at the same age (uncannily so with naval beard fully grown), though if he has read, as one hopes hehas, his friend Giles St Aubyn's fascinating Edward VII: Prince and King published earlier this year, or Sir Philip Magnus's first-class biography of a decade and a half ago, he will not be in the least ashamed to recognise in how many respects he would do well to revere his admirable ancestor as an exemplar.
Antonia Fraser has just reminded us that the last Charles to occupy the throne was still unmarried at 30, while John Grigg, ever assiduous in proffering well-meant if not always well-received advice to the Court and still determinedly dreaming of a black (or brown) Christmas around a Windsor Castle crib, has pointed out that, with the succession already amply assured, there is really no reason why the future Charles HI should feel himself obliged to marry at all, able as he is to turn down the acquisition of a first wife as George II had the suggestion of a second, with a: 'Non, j'aurai des maltresses', However, HRH having shown himself hitherto to be in all respects a man of his word and having long ago let fall with an altogether uncharacteristic lack of caution a remark to the effect that 30 was in his view the right age for a chap to get spliced, the rapacious Press and publishing world were squared up to the prospect of his wedding bells loudly ringing up their tills this year. For, as his biographer Anthony Holden observes, Charles of Wales 'sells newspapers' even if 'a great deal of the press acreage devoted to the Prince is quite simply fabricated . . . leaving royal reputations at the hands of fantasists'; not just newspapers, either, but magazines and the serial rights of the books to go in them, like Holden's present volume, a Woman's Own Editor's dream come true for the readers of Woman's Own where it is currently being printed in weekly instalments enlivened by dashing artist's impressions of Royal home life. Lord Weidenfeld, whose acquaintance with his Sovereign has, so far as it is known, been confined to an Investiture one-liner and a bout-de-table appearance at the 10 Downing Street Farewell Banquet at which he was Harold Wilson's guest of honour, has now simultaneously produced three separate strings for his courtly bow. Of these by far the most distinguished are Christopher Hibbert's faultlessly readable and scholarly study of the Royal Household since Queen Victoria's day and Alan Palmer's equally thoroughly researched and readable Princes of Wales, both confidently recommendable works of history, neither of which bother to make gratuitous downmarket concessions to any lectrices moyennes sensuelles.
The last Prince of Wales could gratefully reflect that he 'grew up before the age of the flash camera' and television; when 'because our likenesses seldom appeared in the Press, we were not recognised in the street'. Of the present Prince. Holden writes that he 'for his part has tired of the trivia which co-operation with the press invariably produced', and I rather doubt if he will have much changed his view after reading the result of his patient 18 months' on-and-off landsea-air co-operation with an author who just happened to be a depressingly bright coeval, with probably more Greek and Latin than the flies on the palace walls had heard since the death of the Prince Consort, an award-winning Sunday Times columnist since transferred to commenting agreeably on the American scene for the Observer. (vile Prince spots a familiar journalist, "Liked your piece on Sunday!" he calls out.' In this way Holden modestly and obliquely awards himself in passing a patronising Royal puff.) His reference, on only his second page, to 'a bachelor still living with his parents in his thirties' seems a peculiar way of describing the tied-cottage apartment near his offices which the Prince occupies — and pays for — when he is in London and which is a good street-block's length away from his parents' quarters.
On the same page we read that he has few friends and can arrive nowhere unannounced', whereas a dozen pages further on we find that he has been known to turn up unannounced in the middle of a dinnerparty.' Holden also has relations and friends of the Queen and her family bowing before kissing when any fool can see that it is the other way round. That sort of reporting may have been good enough for Evans's Sunday Times and may still be for Trelford's Observer but it must strike some of us poor commoners as a bit slapdash in a study of so meticulous a person as the Prince. On that same page again, 'It is tempting at times to say he gets ideas above his station.' Does this perhaps mean 'It is tempting to say he at times get ideas above his station'? Probably. Yet no examples of such megalomania dr of what else may be meant are given. 'He enjoys the archaic rituals of royal ceremonial', Well, Bully for him, say 1, for he certainly gets enough of them and is not likely to get less while British and worldwide television ratings say they remain as popular attractions as Pontifical Masses. However, let him always be sure once more to emulate Edward VII of whom his faithful chauffeur Stamper said: 'Pomp out of place he could not endure.'
Holden's own highly self-conscious prejudices are too often too much in evidence. The Prince's 'vowel sounds remain his mother's. Whatever he is saying. . . those vowel sounds remain in danger of undermining it . . It is as well people read, rather than hear, most of what he says', or, in other words, all Posh is Tosh, which cannot be anything but Bosh. There are some things too serious to be played simply by ear. I have, as it happens, heard the broadcast voices of Margaret Thatcher, Jim Callaghan, Ted Heath, Jimmy Carter, Anthony Holden (oh yes, and the none too pleasing Mainstream, south Reading vowels of that nice Mother of her N U J Chapel, Jane Wellesley, too) and I find that I much prefer those of the Queen and the Prince. But the content of those others' words is not necessarily undermined for me by their vowel sounds. No wonder Holden has to note that when the Prince 'stops for a conversation, his eyes keep moving, wondering where to go next'. Can anyone blame him for wanting to get out of Holden's allergic hearing? As for the chapter entitled 'The Private Prince', it appears to have been penned by, Holden (who writes 'extreme gentility' when he means extreme gentleness) with his little finger crooked about 'the bone, china monogrammed cups' in the equerries, room where tea is 'an elegant melange silver pots and dainty sandwiches'. Most 0' his London suite of rooms, we are told! 'originally decorated for him by David Hicks, is standard Buckingham Palace baroque [sic] . . . The Prince's home is much like any other spacious Mayfair cir, Belgravia flat. . with the rather dati7 look so characteristic of inherited weal` [sic, and sick-making tool.' By page 13 we have been told that some months ago it had seemed 'to the other guests' at dinner in the Chelsea house of his second cousin Princess Elisabeth of Yugoslavia 'that the Prince of Wales was jealous' of Jimmy Goldsmith who, expatiating in his apparently unremarked Occidentale accent, 'saw himself as a second Beaverbrook undisguisedlyowninginewspapersforpropa ganda purposes'. Bearing in mind his great-uncle Windsor's pathetically mis placed trust in the little Canadian imp, this account, if true, might be disturbing, but it is altogether contrary to the recollection of the hostess who had neither met nor even heard of Holden when I asked her about this passage in his book. Apparently unable to tell Guelf from Ghibeline, Holden insists on calling Charles's first cousin and fellowprisoner in the Gordonstoun Gulag, Prince Guelf of Hanover, 'Welt' throughout. Odd too is his statement that the Queen 'was sequestered at royal country residences during the war' when it is on record that she never left Windsor, which still is her principal domicile of choice in England.
So much for that 'factual accuracy' to which Holden claims to have aspired. Some of his implausibilities are of course the result of his fairly frequent misuse of English. Prince Charles, he tells us for instance, 'has a vivid picture' of his greatgrandmother Queen Mary 'sitting bolt Upright, her legs culminating [sicj on a footstool', which is improbable, since 'to culminate' means `to reach the highest point in something'.
Holden chooses to credit the depucelage of the Prince to a pandering and conniving Rab Butler's Cambridge research assistant, a Chilean diplomat's well-brought 'up daughter, but this version has been treated With some public scepticism by the socially ubiquitous columnist Emma (I usually reveal my sauce) Soames, sister of his onetime equerry and friend Nicholas, and herself a great admirer of the Prince, whose almost incredible niceness quite robs her of her usually rather sharp tongue. Holden asks us to believe that the Prince is a Don Juan on the sole published evidence that in ten years he may have seen something from time to time of scarcely more than that same number of girls (about whose identity and religion he is sometimes at sea), surely avery modest score for someone who admits to a roving eye and ceaseless serial infatuations, even if, as seems improbable, the best of British luck invariably attended his shy, well-spoken wooing. Holden went to Press Without discovering if Sabrina Liffeya Plurabella Guinness had pencilled HRH into her little book of Records or if she were saving him for the new Guinness Book of Winners and Champions, shortly available on the news-stands. On the Prince's past and future marriage Prospects Holden adumbrates the curious theory that only the ill-informed indiscretions of the Daily Express prevented his eventual betrothal to Princess Marie-Astrid Of Luxembourg, a match the Queen would have favoured had it found equal favour in her son's sight and been made to fall within the scope of the two Acts of Parliament still governing these matters. (The pretty Princess herself is one of a happy family born to what I well recall began as an arranged dynastic marriage full of misgivings on both sides.) Holden adds that in similar circumstances the Prince's own parents would have been equally unable ever to marry. This seems daft even recalling the craven and blinkered insularity of the advice tendered by Labour Ministers to George VI, resulting in Prince Philip being forced against his will by a Home. Secretary nobbled by his uncle to take, on naturalisation, the Anglicised surname of his German-born mother rather than that of the dead Danish-Greek father he had so much loved. (I don't think that anybody thinks that I had a father,' he has complained. 'Most people think that Dicky's my father anyway. . . I grew up very much more with my father's family than I did with my mother's.') Like the' 'Motley crew' of lesser Lunchtime O'Boozers ever on the nosey-parker paparazzo trail of the strictly duty-bound Prince, Holden (who appears at one point to be defending a 'passionately royalist' colleague, Fleet Street hack James Whitaker, alias the freelance Jeremy Slazenger, or Scavenger, who believes Ittliisright tofmakelevery possible invasion of the Prince's privacy') leans heavily on library press-cuttings.
So his book contains rather too many received ideas about the great Partitionist Engineer recently converted, by a dreadful Irish irony, to the Federal solutions favoured by Sinn Fein and then hoist heavenward with a lesser anti-Partionist petard, and we have to read yet again the usual doubtful guff about 'the rather Ruritanian figure' of Uncle Dicky as 'closest personal friend of three British monarchs in this century' and in his old age the paramount Polonius at Court. Where Holden is quite correct is in calling him 'an inveterate matchmaker' continually 'making helpful noises' in that direction, though he fails to cotton on (though he has been desperately trying to catch up in past weeks by offering post-publication indiscretions to other gossip-columnists) to his die-hard desire to see his great-nephew Wales, like his half-Danish half-Russian Greek-born grandfather before him, marry some pretty Battenberg girl and if possible one of his own pretty Knatchbull or prettier still Hicks grand-daughters, cousinage, despite the old saw, never being held dangereux voisinage in the magic circles round the throne. There would certainly be obvious advantages for second cousins to be able to combine their Private Lives with their public appearances on the Palace balcony, 'You're looking very lovely in this damned floodlight, Amanda. There isn't a particle . . . etc'.
Reading that portion of the Holden book, tears came to my eyes at the thought of any child as sensitive and attached to his home, family and Teddy Bear as the 'Duke of Cornflakes' of happier nursery days, having to sweat out that pitiless make-or-break decade at prep. and public school and managing to emerge from it, in the proud words of his loving but forbiddingly firm father, 'a reasonable and civilised human being' and, as Lord Carrington's ancestor had said of the young Edward VII, 'a very plucky boy, with an open generous disposition and the kindest heart imaginable'. His longing to end adult loneliness by marrying is founded of course on the 'hope that I will be as lucky as my parents who have been so happy'. For this he will need to find either a bride like Tennyson's `Sea-King's daughter from over the sea, Alexandra!' (`You perhaps think that I like marrying Bertie for his position — if. he were a cowboy I should love him just the same and would marry no one else,' she wrote after their shamelessly `arranged' meeting) or someone sharing, preferably in her bones and heart as well as if possible in her genes, the sacramental view he shares with his mother of the Royal vocation in a democratic constitutional monarchy which; may anyway soon have to look to its monarch to save its democratic constitution; from totalitarian takeover. The omens' available are quite encouraging, especially. when one looks at the remarkable achievement of the only present occupant of a European throne whose father is also a non-reigning half-Battenberg Dartmoutheducated Royal Naval officer, namely King Juan Carlos of Spain.
For all the author's attempts to cut his still young and inexperienced subject down to size, Prince Charles nevertheless manages to emerge as what one of his young friends once described him to me, 'A bloody Bayard, old boy, he's your actual Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche' and as a man who, to borrow Montaigne's words 'being unable to govern events governs himself'. We learn that' he has a talent for mimicry' and that, though 'he sometimes forgets to laugh at people's jokes' (no prob lem for Holden surely who seems short on them), he is 'quick and remorseless with puns'.
So hitherto in her entertaining journalism and enjoyably amoral annual girl's own stories has ever been Jilly Cooper, whose latest book Class seems to be disappointingly lacking in just that. It purports to be an attempt by someone claiming to be 'ashamedly middle-class . . equidistant from the bottom and the top' (yet always Mrs Mittyishly dreaming of becoming Lady Egliston, that being the name of the street in Putney where she lives) to survey a 'Class System' which is 'alive and well and living in peoples' minds in England', quite a promising theme for satire and one certainly borne out by the chips showing through the Hol den prose. But it needs more than disarming admissions by Mrs Cooper (a Clairol blonde who, like novelist Ada Leverson before her, 'only darkens her hair a little at the roots') of her `commonness and polyester cleav ages' to bring it off, though Mrs Cooper claims to have consulted inter alios a Sloane Street bank manager, that déclassé Wessex loon Alexander Weymouth (whose ghastly Longleat murals she actually finds 'splendidly colourful') and someone she refers to as her 'resident major domo' — apparently not her husband, military publisher Leo Cooper. The Prince of Wales, who may find her book in his Xmas stocking, will certainly throw up his breakfast ugh i fruit when he reads such jolly ghastly bloomers as that 'the Royal Family have over the centuries been consistently resistant to the arts . . their jaws absolutely dislocated with trying not to yawn at Covent Garden'. As something of a serious social worker himself he must be alarmed to see as many hours wasted in Britain over class differentials as by strikes over the other sort. In the part of Europe where I mostly live we get round this by saying Bonjour Monsieur, Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Mademoiselle to everybody and shaking hands with each other umpteen times a day which seems to work a treat.
Mrs Cooper does pertinently quote that charming nobleman and scholarly historian, Henry Paget, the present Lord Anglesey as saying 'One doesn't care what the press says. One's friends know what one's like and that's all that matters.' Prince Charles may not know that an earlier Hanoverian once successfully reduced the classes of Britain to just three, "Men, women and Pagets", but he might do worse in life than to pursue a similar simplication. Trouble is, Lady Jane Wellesley and her Monstrous Regiment of fellow Shop Stewards would soon put a stop to it.
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