Eighteen years after Camilla’s fraught visit to New York, Charles celebrated her seventieth birthday in July 2017. The work started by Mark Bolland was nearly complete.
The climax was a party at Highgrove on Saturday, 15 July. Over two hundred guests including Camilla’s family, her closest friends and many young people invited by Tom and Laura Parker Bowles, and William and Harry, crowded into the Orchard Room to eat avocado salad followed by tarragon chicken. Charles sat between his friend Sarah Keswick and the Duchess of Wellington; Camilla was between the Duke of Wellington and Jacob Rothschild. Hovering on the side, as usual, was Michael Fawcett embarrassed by his wife’s faux pas: in the printed invitations, Debbie Fawcett had stipulated the dress code as ‘black suit’. A grovelling apology had been sent with the correct term, ‘black tie’. The mistake had cheered Fawcett’s critics.
‘Mercifully the speeches were brief,’ said one spirited guest. Charles thanked Camilla and his friends, after which Tom Parker Bowles made some tactful jokes about his mother. Once the birthday cake had been cut, the sound system exploded with rock music. The older guests held back as a hundred young people invaded the dance floor, partying until after 2 a.m. The gossip around Gloucestershire and beyond over the following days was electric. Thanks to the ‘Parker Bowles’s gang’, everyone agreed, the party was a success. The only disappointment was felt by the uninvited ‘oldies’ – quietly muttering ‘NFI’ (Not Fucking Invited) – irritated by their unexpected exclusion from Highgrove and having to make do with a drinks party at Clarence House.
Charles had good reason to feel satisfied. Twenty years earlier, after Diana’s death, his approval ratings had hit rock bottom. Since then, he had succeeded in overcoming successive crises and critics. Now his marriage to Camilla was accepted, and while there was still speculation about his likely performance as king, his succession to the throne was unopposed by a majority of Britons. All that remained was to remove the opposition to Camilla being crowned as queen. Although she herself suggested that the title was irrelevant, clues about her ambition and Charles’s stubborn determination surfaced during the birthday celebrations.
Profiles and interviews portrayed Camilla as a woman of charm and hard work, and as the champion of charities caring for the disadvantaged. The resemblance to Diana was not coincidental. To support that image, the Mail on Sunday, featuring an inconsequential but rare interview with the duchess, prominently protested that Camilla had been ‘fobbed off’ as the mere princess consort. Now was the time, urged the paper, to ‘lay the ghost of Diana to rest’ and pave the way for Camilla to be eventually crowned queen by immediately giving her the ‘rightful title of Princess of Wales’, not least because William and Harry ‘adored’ Camilla – something of a confection to those who knew the truth. To sustain the campaign, Clarence House released a photograph of Charles and Camilla by Mario Testino, Diana’s favourite photographer. Wrinkles and blemishes had been airbrushed from their glowing faces,which exuded the appearance of youth and enduring happiness. Winning public support for the couple as Britain’s next monarchs was difficult, but Charles was, as ever, undeterred. Concealed behind his and Camilla’s promotion were the final stages of a coup orchestrated by him to ease his succession.
Throughout his adult life, Charles had bridled against the efforts of Buckingham Palace, and particularly by the queen’s private secretaries, to influence his activities. Under Christopher Geidt’s steady guidance, some of the friction generated during Michael Peat’s era had diminished, although one further attempt to merge the palaces’ media operations had collapsed on Charles’s insistence some years earlier. Despite that obstacle, Geidt’s diplomacy had eased the negotiations between Charles and his mother to transfer some of her ceremonial duties to him. At the age of ninety-one, she could no longer undertake many official duties, not least walking up flights of stairs in the Palace of Westminster. Accordingly, they agreed that Charles’s destiny as the king in waiting would be publicly sealed during the year leading up to his seventieth birthday in November 2018. He would lead the nation at Trooping the Colour, on Remembrance Sunday, and on all foreign trips. Based on that understanding, Geidt was expected to serve the queen until the end of her reign. But the continuing discussions had rattled Charles.
Geidt was negotiating the queen’s role at the next Commonwealth summit, to be held in London in April 2018. Most of the fifty-two government leaders expected the queen to act as their host, but that was unacceptable to Charles. Despite the difficulties over the previous twenty years, he insisted that his supremacy should be asserted, although he still refused to commit himself, either as the heir or as the future king, to tour the Commonwealth countries he had steadfastly ignored. Once he was king he would be beyond any persuasion, and would continue to maintain his relations with the Arab world rather than develop new contacts in Africa and the Caribbean. Geidt was caught in the middle of an irreconcilable argument, not least because he must have been aware of Prince Philip’s opinion of his son.
At a recent dinner with friends in Mayfair, Philip had joked about his determination to live beyond ninety-five. The reason for his and the queen’s longevity, he explained amid his friends’ laughter, was to keep Charles from the throne. At ninety-one, he said, the queen was in robust health and, he implied, could well live for another ten years. Charles would have little opportunity to damage the monarchy if he was king for only a brief period. Philip did not hide his scorn for his son’s achievements and vision, and showed little confidence that Charles could impress himself upon history as an exceptional king. Many believed that Philip doubted whether his son, who had barely come to terms with the twentieth century, could unify the country in the twenty-first. His enduring image as a landowner hankering for a forgotten world threatened the institution of the monarchy. His reign would be about the past rather than the future. In a nutshell, some believed that Charles lacked the common touch. The rebel prince, Philip feared, would become a meddling monarch. The risk was the replacement of tact by wilfulness, causing a constitutional crisis which would jeopardise the monarchy’s very existence. The scenario, depicted in the recent successful play Charles III, of King Charles abdicating rather than sign an Act of Parliament to limit media freedom, had not surprised the informed audience. Charles refused merely to mutely symbolise British values; he wanted to assert them too.
Philip’s fears about his son’s intentions reflected the opinions of many in Buckingham Palace. The queen’s death could trigger repercussions among the public, most of whom had no experience of a change of monarch. Christopher Geidt’s task was to mitigate that uncertainty. To manage continuity and prepare for change was a test of his wisdom. In Charles’s opinion, Geidt had failed that test.
In early May 2017, without disclosing the reason, Geidt summoned the entire royal staff to travel from Scotland, Norfolk, Windsor and the other royal estates to Buckingham Palace. At 10 a.m on Thursday, 4 May, five hundred people gathered in the ballroom. The excuse for the unprecedented assembly was Geidt’s announcement of Prince Philip’s retirement from public duties. But Geidt’s true reason for inviting that exceptional audience was to herald a turning point in the queen’s reign, and obliquely to warn Charles about tampering with the long-established timetables and traditions once he became king.
The queen – and therefore Geidt – was disturbed by any threat to the monarchy’s focus on continuity and stability. To Buckingham Palace, Charles and his sons appeared to be pursuing their own celebrity interests at the expense of quietly fulfilling the royal family’s traditional duties. Influenced by Charles, neither of the young princes enthusiastically participated in ceremonial events, and all three performed half-heartedly, rather than as the natural focus, during moments of national celebration and crisis. If Charles failed to enhance the dignity of the crown, the queen feared, the end of her reign would become desultory, and his own reign would lack majesty and grandeur.
To resolve that problem, Geidt urged his audience – and members of the royal family – to intensify their support for the queen. Elizabeth, explained Geidt, wanted all members of the royal family to work as a team on official duties, rather than pursuing their individual interests. Philip’s retirement, he said, was ‘an opportunity to pause, reflect and refocus as a family’. The discordant relations among the royals, and their self-indulgence, he implied, had to end. The public criticism of Prince William’s recent skiing holiday in Switzerland, when the rest of the royals were at a Commonwealth Day service in Westminster Abbey, could not go unheeded.
In the few hours after the announcement, the media’s glowing headlines about Philip as a national treasure were a successful smokescreen for the queen’s serious message. Unnoticed was Charles’s irritation. First, he disliked the melodrama of summoning five hundred people to London. Second, he regarded Buckingham Palace’s briefing that the queen would encourage Edward and Sophie Wessex to play a more prominent role as offensive. Third, Geidt’s call for loyalty to the queen was a calculated snub to himself. Finally, he resented the criticism of his personal activities. If he allowed that challenge to pass, he might still be denied the prominent role he expected at the forthcoming Commonwealth conference and other state occasions in London. He refused to be relegated to the sidelines in the years before his coronation. Charles demanded from his mother that Geidt be reined in, while his office encouraged media speculation about a regency – a notion firmly rejected by Buckingham Palace. Their dispute had clearly not been settled by 20 June, when an obviously grumpy heir accompanied the queen for the truncated state opening of Parliament after the general election.
Shortly afterwards, the careful advancement of Charles and Camilla was unexpectedly derailed by the twentieth anniversary of Diana’s death. Among the deluge of television programmes and newspaper features came the first broadcast in Britain of Peter Settelen’s videos featuring Diana describing her adultery, her attempted suicide and her forlorn appeal to the queen about her wayward husband. The resurrection of Diana’s misery – magnified by replays of her revelation on Panorama about Camilla’s omnipresence throughout her marriage – reignited the public’s antagonism towards Charles. All the careful rehabilitation since the mysterious end to Paul Burrell’s trial fifteen years earlier evaporated.
Worse followed. The high point of the media’s coverage was a TV documentary featuring William and Harry recalling their mother’s universal fame. With self-indulgent emotion, Diana’s sons praised the princess, described their happy memories and intimately recounted twenty years of grief – all without any mention of Charles. In a succession of other interviews, the brothers established their separate identities from Charles. For some, the suggestion of tension between Clarence House and Kensington Palace was reminiscent of the media war between Charles and Diana during the 1990s. Clearly, Geidt’s appeal just weeks earlier for self-discipline had been flouted by the princes’ public soul-searching. Geidt’s private criticism of the princes provoked William’s fury. Harry was more measured. Already planning to announce his engagement to the American actress Meghan Markle, he felt greater affinity than William for his father. Nevertheless, the damage was done.
The blowback hurt Charles. Opinion polls showed that his popularity had plunged again. At most, only one third of Britons welcomed the prospect of Charles’s succession, and at least half the population preferred that William should be the next king. Only 14 per cent supported Camilla becoming queen. The public’s disapproval of Charles and Camilla was personal, because the polls also found that the vast majority of Britons continued to support the monarchy. By contrast, the republican movements in the Commonwealth were strengthening. However unjustly, Charles’s legitimacy was still vulnerable to a single crisis. Both he and Camilla were distraught. In the future, even when he was king, the Diana anniversaries would continue to deflate his self-confidence and undermine his popularity. His succession once again faced hostility, and more than usually, his response would test how he would behave as king.
As the heir to the throne, Charles should have automatically consulted advisers to bridge the gap between his instinctive impulses and the benefit of reason. Over the previous thirty years, that serious counsel had often been missing. By relying on sycophants willing to tolerate his tirades and his rejection of any criticism, Charles had made damaging mistakes. His grudges and disloyalty had deprived him of wise advisers. Many feared the same situation would continue once he became king. One consolation was that the embarrassments had diminished. Many credited Camilla. She offered stability and a circle of loyal friends who did not carp to the media. With her support Charles’s temper had mellowed, but the absence of a counsellor like Christopher Geidt in Clarence House aroused apprehension about the future king’s court. What followed reinforced those anxieties.
Charles’s answer to Geidt’s challenge was to re-emphasise his own interests – which was just what Buckingham Palace opposed. He also demanded to take over even more of his mother’s public duties. The obstacle, he assumed, would be Geidt, who he felt had become a hindrance rather than a help. Without a restraining adviser, Charles demanded Geidt’s resignation from his mother. Faced with that implacable demand from a man accustomed to regularly dismissing his own staff, and despite Geidt being especially trusted, the queen reluctantly agreed.
On 31 July 2017, Geidt unexpectedly announced his retirement. Insiders soon realised that his departure after ten years as private secretary was a coup orchestrated by Charles. To combat one headline – ‘Turmoil at Palace as Queen’s Right Hand Man to Quit’ – the palace forlornly tried to minimise the mayhem, but the attempt was abandoned after Samantha Cohen, an assistant private secretary, also announced her resignation, followed by Mark Leishman, Charles’s private secretary, openly frustrated by the prince. Although Geidt was contractually expected to remain in place until October, he immediately headed for his farm in the Outer Hebrides. To show her personal affection, the queen later made him a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, her highest honour. Later he was made a peer. Geidt’s demise suggested that as king Charles would only tolerate sycophants in his court, and that spelled trouble.
Charles’s victory was short-lived. Geidt’s fate reopened the debate about whether Charles’s forthright opinions threatened the constitution. The assurance from his staff that he understood the expectation of impartiality from the monarch did not reassure witnesses of his unwillingness to remain an enigma in the shadows. Few believed that he would resist continuing to promote his opinions about architecture, the environment, alternative medicine, education and other matters. There were grounds to fear that King Charles, an elderly monarch in a hurry, would spark a constitutional crisis. One possible cause was his attitude towards money.
Few doubted the outstanding value of Charles’s charitable deeds, but to continue entertaining rich donors to sustain his organisations – especially the Prince’s Trust, which William has refused to take over – would be inappropriate for a king. Fundraising would compromise his status. Persuading Charles to reduce his charitable work was not difficult. Ever since Higdon’s dismissal, his income from America had declined, and the number of international donors had also fallen. In 2016 he had no alternative but to cut the grants to his charities – some by half – and, to save money, finally begin to merge his twenty-one organisations into a single entity. On other matters however, in the absence of an independently-minded private secretary, there were misgivings about whether in King Charles’s court there would be anyone to persuade the new monarch to change his way of life.
The legacy of Charles’s noble causes, good intentions and interest in individuals has been tarnished by his addiction to luxury, his financial mismanagement, his disloyalty to professional supporters, and the torrid relationships with his family. The release of Buckingham Palace’s accounts in autumn 2017 showed that the plane used by Charles for his spring tour around Europe, including his annual visit to Romania, had cost £154,000. His summer break, sailing around the Greek islands on a yacht with Camilla as the guest of shipping magnate Theodore Angelopoulos, confirmed that Charles would not yield to any critic, especially his father. Even in their lifetime, his parents’ influence had waned. In the future there would be no one to restrain his self-indulgence. Public approval of the queen’s frugality would be replaced by disdain for her successor’s extravagance. Charles appeared impervious to the absence of popular acceptance. The same resilience that had overcome so many humiliations during his life now powered his demands of Buckingham Palace. With Geidt replaced by his amenable deputy Edward Young, Charles continued to discuss the transition of his mother’s duties and to plan his response during the six months between his mother’s death and his own coronation.
The monarchy’s success, Charles knew, depended on appealing to emotion and mythology. Sensitive to any public resistance, he had agreed with Downing Street that as king he would ‘hit the ground running’. Like a political campaign, he would first address the nation and then barnstorm through the country, with appearances in London followed by flights to Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. His message would reflect the king’s in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s celebrated historical novel The Leopard: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ Charles was a mortal prepared to bend to the changing reality, but nevertheless certain that his values – spiritual and moral – would unite the nation. At least there would be no further opposition in Buckingham Palace.
On his return to London after the tour, his own staff from Clarence House will have quietly replaced the queen’s officials. The handover, he stipulated, would demonstrate the nation’s trust of himself and the monarchy, although, according to one senior official, ‘there are doubts whether Charles trusts his own staff’. A parallel doubt is whether he loves his own fate. As king, he will be expected to symbolise the best of British values, and to unify the nation in crisis and celebration. The question is whether he can meet that necessity. If he chooses, as rumoured, to remain in Clarence House and not move into Buckingham Palace, he would weaken one enduring symbol and confirm his self-interest.
In anticipation of his coronation, the Royal Mint has finalised the plans to replace his mother’s portrait on coins with that of Charles. That task was complicated by Charles’s requests. Like the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, Charles prefers his left profile rather than the conventional right-hand side. The Mint agreed to prepare drawings of both profiles for Charles’s approval, but he was dissatisfied with the result. Both portraits showed his thinning hair and reflected his age. He demanded that he should be shown with a full head of hair, and considerably younger. The revised version was more satisfactory. He was less pleased when the Mint suggested that it should also prepare portraits for King William. That, Charles ordained, was pushing fate too far. As king, there seems little likelihood that Charles will be generous towards his two brothers, or will bond more closely with his sons. As in all his personal relationships, it seems likely that he will act alone, without any restraining adviser. For committed monarchists, that independence is alarming. They can only hope for the best.
Finally, there was the detail of the coronation. Tampering with the ritual ceremony, Charles has been persuaded, would be folly. The monarch’s strength depends upon tradition. Despite the decline of Christianity, the supremacy of the Anglican Church, Charles agreed, will be reaffirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unchallenged authority to crown the prince as defender of the faith. The alternative would be unacceptable to most Britons. Nevertheless, agreement about the final details, the participants and the words remains undecided, except for the finale. At the end of the ceremony the congregation will shout, ‘God Save the King!’ Charles profoundly hopes that the country will echo that plea.