Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  Alice took an even greater risk then. Until late 1943, she had done nothing to help the few Jews who had not been deported and were still in Greece. But then the widow of Haimaki Cohen, who had housed Andrew’s father after the flood, some twenty-five years earlier, turned to her for help. Alice hid Rachel Cohen and two of her children so they were not sent to the death camps.

  Meanwhile, Philip was moving in very different circles. In Christmas 1943, ‘having nowhere particular to go’, he went to Windsor Castle with David Milford Haven, lately resident in a brothel. Philip had travelled around the world and already had at least two romantic relationships; Lilibet was a child by comparison.

  Crawford noticed how Philip had changed from a rather bumptious boy to ‘a grave and charming man’. He looked like a Viking, she thought, ‘weather-beaten and strained and his manners left nothing to be desired’. In his company, Elizabeth had ‘a sparkle about her eyes none of us had ever seen before’. On Boxing Day, they all danced till one in the morning. As her father had done in 1920, Elizabeth had fallen in love. After Christmas, she and Philip wrote to one another and she placed a photograph of him in the little private sitting room she had been given.

  Louis Mountbatten began to sense an opportunity, especially after the death of the Duke of Kent, the King’s younger brother. The Duke had fulfilled engagements on behalf of the King. Rather as if he were running an employment agency, Mountbatten touted the idea that Philip could now fill in for the Duke of Kent. As a preliminary, Philip would give up his Greek citizenship. It seems possible that Mountbatten was also seeking to make a point: the Battenbergs had been sacrificed in the 1914 war. Now the Windsors needed them.

  Mountbatten pushed his scheme too far, though, when he suggested that, as Philip and Elizabeth were getting on well, they should marry. The King wrote to him a few weeks later to say that he had been thinking it over and ‘I have come to the conclusion that we are going too fast.’ Ben Pimlott, in his biography of Elizabeth II, suggests it is quite implausible that the King would accept help from his young and distant cousin who belonged to the Greek royal family, which had not exactly covered itself in glory. It was less than twenty-five years since they had given up the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha name; they did not need a Greek suffix now.

  The behaviour of Alice in Athens may also have worried George VI. When the city was liberated in October 1944, Harold Macmillan found her ‘living in humble, not to say somewhat squalid conditions’. The two did not communicate well as Macmillan had not realised she was deaf (he also had a beard at the time, which made it hard for her to lip-read). In a letter to Philip, his mother admitted that, in the week before Greece had been liberated, she had had no food except bread and butter, and had not eaten meat for several months. By early December, the situation in Athens grew worse as Communist guerrillas were fighting the British for control of the capital. To the dismay of the British, Alice insisted on walking the streets, distributing rations to children and breaking the curfew. When told that she might have been shot by a stray bullet, she replied: ‘They tell me that you don’t hear the shot that kills you and in any case I am deaf, so why worry about that?’

  Religious though she was, Alice still seems to have wanted the glittering match for her son. Mountbatten warned her not to mention a word of his plan when she visited the King and Queen in England. For once, Alice did as her family requested.

  In his pursuit of Elizabeth, Philip was as pressing as George VI had been in pursuit of her mother. In June 1946, Philip apologised to the King for brazenly inviting himself to the Palace, but added, ‘nothing ventured nothing gained.’ He did gain, because Elizabeth’s parents liked him enough to invite him a few weeks later to Balmoral to shoot. It was there that the couple ‘began to think about it seriously and even talk about it’, Philip said. Crawford was sure they would marry. ‘Where Lilibet gives her love and affection she gives it once and for all,’ she wrote. The King and Queen were still hesitant: their daughter was so young, Philip’s family so problematic and Mountbatten so keen on the marriage. In the end, the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert married their great-great-granddaughter.

  The Little Princesses ends with the birth of Prince Charles in 1948. ‘Lilibet has become Mummie,’ Crawford noted wryly. Princess Margaret joked that she had become ‘Charley’s aunt – probably my proudest title of all’.

  In 1948, Crawford left royal service to marry a bank manager. She was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. Some writers have suggested that she was offended not to have received a more senior honour and wrote her book in a fit of pique and revenge. One would have to be perverse to believe this. Though occasionally critical, The Little Princesses is a loving tribute to two girls and their parents. In the end, the governess had better manners than the royals. They ignored her totally after the book came out. In her will, the ever-loyal Crawford bequeathed a collection of the pictures she had taken to the Queen.

  12

  Prince Charles – and Separation Anxiety

  The marriage of Philip and Elizabeth took place in 1947. Alice was invited, but not her three surviving daughters, whose sons had fought for the Nazis – Britain was still hostile to her recent enemy.

  After Princess Elizabeth gave birth to their first child – Prince Charles- in 1948, the boy nestled by his mother for an hour or so and was then moved to the nursery. He was circumcised, even though he was not Jewish. In 1950, she gave birth to a daughter. Charles and Anne would see far less of their parents than Elizabeth and Margaret had done of theirs. Nevertheless, the Queen had absorbed a great deal from her own childhood; she and Margaret hugged, and were hugged by their parents often. Touching, as Winnicott observed, is important. Elizabeth was not remote and liked to give Charles and Anne their baths, something the white-capped Mrs Knight had usually done at 145 Piccadilly.

  In 1949, the family moved to Clarence House at a time when George VI’s health was causing some concern: his perpetual smoking was affecting his lungs. His daughter started to take on some of her father’s duties. One of Charles’s first biographers, G. F. Wakeford, noted: ‘the Prince learned early in life the inevitability of separation’ and went on, in a splendid display of psychological naïveté, to add, ‘Charles was still young enough not to feel the absence of his mother too keenly.’ Wakeford obviously hadn’t even read newspapers such as The Times attentively, or he would have learned of groundbreaking research by Harlow and by John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst at London’s Tavistock Institute. The work showed that both human and monkey infants cried bitterly when their mothers left them and sometimes hurt themselves in their distress. In his study of forty-four juvenile thieves, Bowlby also established that most of them had been separated from their mothers when they were young.

  Of course, Charles did not turn into a juvenile thief, but too much of his childhood was spent away from his parents. There were good reasons of state for this, but a toddler could hardly be expected to understand the need to show the flag round the world, as the royals had been doing for generations. His parents missed his second birthday because his father was serving at sea and his mother had to help her own father. The King’s poor health forced Philip and Elizabeth to delay their departure for two weeks in October 1951as her father had to have an operation to remove his left lung after the discovery of a malignant tumour. When she finally left, Elizabeth took a sealed envelope with her. It contained documents that she would have to sign if George VI died. As a result, Charles spent yet another birthday, his third, without his parents.

  Almost as soon as his mother returned from America after a four-month-long absence, she began planning a tour of the Empire and Commonwealth, which would again take her away from her son. There are suggestions that she was not happy that she had to put her duties first, but she had no choice and it is likely her husband saw no need to mollycoddle Charles; after all Philip had had to grapple with far more serious problems than whether his parents would light the candles on his birthday cake.
At Christmas, Elizabeth took Charles to visit Father Christmas at Harrods, but most psychologists would suggest what Charles really wanted for Christmas was his parents.

  Charles saw much of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, but very little of his other grandmother as Alice stayed in Greece. In January 1949, she fulfilled her ambition and founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns: the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. She modelled it on the order her aunt, the martyred Ella, had established forty years earlier. Alice devoted much energy to raising funds for her mission and travelled to America twice for this, as well as to Sweden and India. ‘What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta?’ pondered an amused Princess Victoria (she herself had smoked since the age of sixteen).

  Princess Victoria died in 1950. Before she did, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, who had lost one child and tried to help another through her ‘madness’, told her son, Louis Mountbatten:

  What will live in history is the good work done by the individual & that has nothing to do with rank or title. I never thought I would be known only as your mother. You’re so well known now and no one knows about me, and I don’t want them to.

  A bereaved daughter

  Soon after Christmas, Charles and Anne were once again left alone by their parents. In January 1952, a frail George VI waved his daughter and her husband off at London Airport as they flew to Africa. While they were in Kenya at a hunting lodge, the ailing King died. Back home, the two children spent most of the day in the nursery. Charles sensed something was wrong and asked to be taken to see his granny. The Queen Mother took him on her knee and assured him that ‘Mummy and Papa will be home soon.’ She comforted him, admitting later that he comforted her, too.

  Four days later, when Charles’s mother came home, she had tremendous new responsibilities. She herself was only twenty-five years old but her father had made her aware that she had to be extremely conscientious. Whatever controversies there might have been about the private lives of the royals, no one disputes that Elizabeth has been a hardworking Queen, who only faced one moment when the survival of the monarchy was even remotely in question: after the death of Diana.

  Charles seemed too young to sit through the whole of his mother’s Coronation ceremony but he did attend part of it. Alice came from Greece and there is a wonderfully dramatic picture of her, walking in her nun’s habit down the aisle of Westminster Abbey. Marie Bonaparte spent much of the ceremony flirting with Francois Mitterrand, later the President of France, but by then Princess Marie was over sixty and too old for the priapic President so they just talked. The contradictions in Philip’s background are striking.

  Following this, the Queen and Prince Philip moved into Buckingham Palace. They were obviously worried about how the change would affect their son and tried hard to make the nursery seem as much like Clarence House as possible. Charles brought his box of toy soldiers, his cuckoo clock and his 10ft-high mock Tudor doll’s house. His mother’s study was out of bounds, however. Once when he walked by her door, Charles asked her to come and play with him. ‘If only I could,’ she said.

  In an age of deference, everyone deferred to the royal family as a matter of course but the children also had to defer to adults. The Queen and Prince Philip also did not want their children spoilt – they insisted the Palace staff call their son ‘Charles’ without any flummery. He was once punished when he spoke to a detective without saying ‘Mr’ to him. When he misbehaved, Philip smacked him and the nannies were told not to be inhibited if Charles was naughty. Philip once spanked him when he stuck his tongue out at the crowd watching the royal family being driven down the Mall. When a footman rushed to close a door left open by Charles, Philip told him to leave it. ‘The boy’s got hands,’ he said. When Charles threw some snowballs at a soldier in Sandringham, Philip told the man to pelt his son back. Compared to the way James I and George IV were treated, the princely bottom was thwacked rarely and mildly, but times had changed.

  Charles did not enjoy a normal childhood, though. It was not just the many and long separations. When he was three, he got a car, a chauffeur of his own and his first own personal footman. At the start of this book, I quoted his father who questioned: ‘What is a normal upbringing?’ Prince Philip was not being either insensitive or ironic, which he often is; the best footman is not a father, as Queen Charlotte suggested in the 1780s.

  Privilege was not the only problem: there was enormous press interest in Charles, which only increased when his parents decided to send him to a real school (revolutionary for a royal). In 1957, a week before his eighth birthday, he was sent to Hill House in Knightsbridge. Through her private secretary, the Queen appealed to editors to spare her son ‘the embarrassment of constant publicity’. They were more respectful then than now, but the appeal still did not entirely succeed.

  In his splendid How to be an Alien, the Hungarian humorist George Mikes, who had taken refuge from the Nazis in Britain, poked fun at postwar society. The true Brit did not just have a stiff upper lip but also never cried. Sadly, no one read this book to Prince Charles. In 1956, when the Queen and Prince Philip went on another politically necessary foreign tour, the boy was allowed to see his parents off at Heathrow, but cameras caught him crying. When his parents flew back, Charles was made to stay at Buckingham Palace and watch their homecoming on television: it would not do for the future King to be seen blubbering, sniffling or showing emotion. Prince Charles was learning that, if he displayed his feelings, he would suffer. A few months later, his father left for a four-month world tour, the highlight of which was to open the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne.

  After Hill House, Charles followed in his father’s footsteps to Cheam. Philip introduced the headmaster to his wife by saying, ‘This is my late headmaster, who used to cane me.’ The Revd. Harold Taylor later wrote that the Queen smiled and responded: ‘I hope you gave it to him good and proper.’ Cheam trained boys for Eton and the great public schools, but Prince Philip wanted his son to follow him to Gordonstoun because he thought Charles needed to be toughened up.

  Philip personally flew his son to see the school. The event was filmed and Charles behaved impeccably, shaking hands at all the appropriate times (obviously, he felt under pressure to do as his parents wished). Gordonstoun gave Philip the stability he desperately needed in the 1930s, but he had one key advantage over his son: no one knew, or cared, who he was because at the time he was not well known; his fellow pupils did not see him as being ‘different’. Charles was the future King and he was teased and sometimes bullied. The inspirational, if eccentric, Hahn was also no longer in charge. The school did not suit Charles so well as it had done his father; when he attended school in Australia for a brief time, he liked it better. The Queen and Prince Philip wanted to give him experience of a school other than in Britain; it also showed the flag in Oz.

  The 1960s saw a great change in sexual mores. One did not have to be Bohemian or a member of the Bloomsbury set to experiment. The Mountbattens had led raffish lives so it is hardly surprising that Louis thought that, after he left school, Prince Charles should sow his wild oats – and, as one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, he did not find it hard to attract girls. The press made much of his affair in Australia with a girl he met on a beach, but, when I made The Madness of Prince Charles, I discovered that Charles did not always get his girls himself. I was introduced to Luis Basualdo, a top-class Argentinian polo player who had been the son-in-law of Lord Cowdray. Luis gave me an amusing history of his friendship with Charles and some interesting insights.

  By the time I met him in his New York apartment, Luis was a handsome man in his late fifties. His hair was slicked back and he enjoyed recalling his friendship with the Prince. He described two different periods in Charles’s life in some detail. The first was around 1967-8. The Prince was at Cambridge, studying properly for a proper degree, although Lord Butler, the Master of his College, was often annoyed when the Palace insisted Charles take time off from his st
udies to perform some minor public duty. Luis said that he and Charles were part of a polo-playing group that included Camilla Shand and her future husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. Parker Bowles was ‘very witty’. Charles, however, was shy and not confident with girls. Luis said that, as he was three years older, he gave him advice on how to handle the opposite sex: he told him to be tough and frankly encouraged him to use his position to attract girls. It worked – girls threw themselves at the future King of England.

  Luis told me that personally he liked younger girls, but Charles did not at all. He sometimes introduced him to stunning seventeen-year-olds only to find that the Prince wasn’t interested. Luis smiled at me and spread his arms, which he brought together to hug himself: mothers hug. He said that he thought Charles was always looking for lovers who mothered him and he shrugged after making that observation.