My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  The middle was where Charles stayed for the whole of his school life, except for mathematics where he was permanently rooted near the bottom. That did not particularly concern his father. It was his character that he was interested in and while it was the Queen who authorised this experiment in royal education, it was Philip who had the deciding say in which schools he would attend and, unsurprisingly, he would choose the schools that he himself had attended when Charles reached the age to go boarding.

  Hill House was only a day school and every evening he retreated to the security of the palace. At the age of eight, however, the boy who, as one of his biographers observed, ‘had never been shopping . . . never been on a bus . . . had never been lost in a crowd . . . had never had to fend for himself’ was marched out of this supportive environment to follow in his father’s footsteps, first to Cheam, then up to the remote coastal plain of Morayshire to Gordonstoun. He found the transition excruciatingly painful.

  Far more sensitive than his father, Charles was miserable and homesick. It was the start of his long march in his father’s always too large footsteps. He was only eight years old and he felt the family separation very deeply. Unlike his father at the same age, he was used to the security of the matriarchal palace society of nannies, nursery maids and his grandmother, but suddenly he was on his own, one of twelve lowly new boys in a school of one hundred pupils. Philip shone in this kind of environment; Charles crumbled.

  His first few days as a boarder at Cheam, he would later recall, were the most miserable of his life and his mother recalled how he ‘shuddered’ with apprehension as he journeyed there for his first day. ‘He dreaded going away to school,’ Mabel Anderson recalled.

  Heartbroken, he would write to Mispy every day. He used to cry into his letters and say, ‘I miss you.’ The governess was equally distressed by the absence of the little boy she had come to love. She stayed on to teach Anne and later Andrew, but her real interest was always Charles, and they corresponded regularly for the rest of her life. (She died in the impersonal vastness of Buckingham Palace in 1968. After she retired to her rooms one Friday night, no one missed her and her body was not found until forty-eight hours later. Charles, his family remembered, was ‘inconsolable’ when he was told the news.)

  He eventually settled in as best he could at Cheam, but he did not have a particularly happy time there. He was too diffident, too shy to make friends easily or to stand out and up for himself in the rough and tumbles. He still carried his puppy fat and during one game of rugby was upset to hear the shout directed at him from somewhere below, ‘Oh, get off me, Fatty!’

  The education of Princess Anne was not as constitutionally important or sensitive, and neither the Queen nor Prince Philip took much interest in Anne’s academic progress. Before she was sent away to Benenden, a girls’ boarding school in Kent, like her brother she had been educated privately at Buckingham Palace under the tutelage of Miss Peebles. The schoolroom was in the old nursery wing, and the Queen’s rooms were close by on the floor directly below, yet Anne does not recall her mother paying even one visit to her classroom to see how she was progressing.

  It was left to Princess Margaret to monitor her niece’s work, and she did so with enthusiasm, going into the schoolroom to speak with the governess and even conducting oral examinations of her own. It was the foundation of a relationship between aunt and niece that matured into an adult friendship that few outside the family circle knew about.

  Being educated in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom with a few carefully selected friends was an idealised, hugely privileged style of education, and in any previous generation it would have continued to its conclusion. Philip had other ideas. As with Charles, he wanted Anne to experience life on the other side of the palace walls. It was, he argued, a vital preparation for dealing with the exigencies of the modern world. Benenden, a traditional establishment for ‘young ladies’, was duly chosen and at the age of thirteen Anne became, not the first princess (that honour belongs to her cousin, Princess Alexandra), but the only daughter of a reigning sovereign ever to be sent away to school. Anne’s own memories of Benenden were pleasant ones. ‘I enjoyed my time at school, and no doubt my riding experiences helped,’ she wrote.

  Charles could not say the same when he went to Gordonstoun. Philip had thrived there, but it did not suit his son. The hearty outdoor life, if never as Spartan as legend made out (there were always hot showers to go with the cold, and the early-morning runs were little more than fifty-yard trots up the road and then never when it was raining), was still tougher than he would have wished. ‘I hated the institution, just as I hated leaving home,’ he would later say. ‘I did not enjoy school as much as I might have, but this was because I am happier at home than anywhere else.’

  ‘I had a dream,’ he once recalled, ‘that I was going to escape and hide in the forest, in a place where no one could find me, so I wouldn’t have to go back to school.’ A housemaster of that time described the school thus: ‘Good for the very clever, good for the laird’s idiot son, but not so good for the average boy.’ And in matters academic and athletic, Charles was never other than average. He only managed to pass O level mathematics at the third attempt. His history was something of a struggle (on one well-reported occasion his tutor, Robin Birley, shouted at him in front of the whole class, ‘Come on, Charles, you can do better than this – after all, this is the history of your family we’re dealing with!’). He was disappointing at rugby and cricket.

  Where he did excel was in music and acting. He was taught to play the cello by an old German woman who had been at the school since Philip’s day. And his ability on the stage was quickly noted by Dr Eric Anderson, who would go on to become headmaster of Eton. Anderson cast him in the role of Macbeth and he turned in a memorable performance. However, Prince Charles sees it in an altogether different light and still talks about the humiliating day his parents came to the school to see him perform and his father burst out laughing.

  ‘I had to lie on a huge fur rug and have a nightmare,’ Prince Charles remembers. ‘My parents came and watched along with other parents. I lay there and thrashed about and all I could hear was my father and ha ha ha. I went to him afterwards and said, “Why did you laugh?” and he said “It sounds like the Goons.” ’

  In 1994, Charles revealed to his official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he felt ‘emotionally estranged’ from his parents and all his life he had yearned for a different kind of affection that they had been ‘unable or unwilling to offer’. His revelations hurt his parents, but all Prince Philip would say on the record is that they did their best. And according to Lady Kennard, their best wasn’t so bad. She maintained Philip was a ‘wonderful parent. He played with his children, he read them stories, he took them fishing, he was very involved.’

  The Queen Mother, aware of her grandson’s introverted nature, had argued that he would be better served at Eton College, on the other side of the Thames from Windsor Castle, and with 600 years’ experience of accommodating the wide interests of its pupils. A number of the Queen’s advisers agreed with her, but Philip was not to be swayed and Gordonstoun it was. ‘In effect the decision meant an attempt to mould him in his father’s image, to which . . . he did not naturally approximate,’ royal expert Dermot Morrah wrote.

  His difficulties at the school did not prevent him becoming Guardian, as Gordonstoun’s head boy is called, as his father had been. The whole point of Charles’s education, as Prince Philip saw it, was to train him to accept responsibility, a responsibility that was his by birthright and one which was not to be evaded.

  For Charles, there was no escaping his destiny. ‘I didn’t suddenly wake up in my pram one day and say, “Yippee,” ’ he said, referring to the prospect of his kingship. ‘It just dawns on you slowly that people are interested . . . and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility. It’s one of those things you grow up in.’

  He was surrounded by reminders of wh
o he was and what lay ahead. His mother’s face was on the stamps he stuck on the letters to Mispy and on the coins he bought his chocolate with in his schools’ tuckshops – a fact that his schoolmates were not slow to point out. Brought up among the sons of the privileged, he was always more privileged, and a personal protection officer accompanied him to Gordonstoun. Whereas everyone else had to see each term at Gordonstoun through without the benefit of a break (there was no half-term holiday at the school when he was there), he was allowed out to join his parents on various state occasions.

  He was spared the anxiety of choosing a career – he was going to Cambridge. Then, and despite his seasickness, he was going into the navy. Everything was laid out for him. His great uncle, Earl Mountbatten, spelt it out: ‘Trinity College like his grandfather; Dartmouth like his father and grandfather; and then to sea in the Royal Navy, ending up with a command of his own.’ A suitable marriage would follow. In 1987, in a cry of frustration, he declared: ‘You can’t understand what it’s like to have your whole life mapped out for you a year in advance. It’s so awful to be programmed. I know what I’ll be doing next week, next month, even next year. At times I get so fed up with the whole idea.’

  As a youth he had to bear it even if he couldn’t grin. And no matter how definite the plan, it provided no protection against the bruisings he received along the way. Rather the contrary. When he was at Cheam, he watched his mother on television announce that she was going to make him Prince of Wales. ‘I remember being acutely embarrassed,’ he recalled. ‘I think for a little boy of nine it was rather bewildering. All the others turned and looked at me in amazement.’

  He was faced with similar moments throughout his schooldays. His photograph was often in the newspapers, and if the accompanying stories owed more to imagination than fact that was no consolation to Charles as he struggled and usually failed to live up to the image the press were determined to create for him. When faced with situations over which he had no control, however, he would withdraw deep into himself. Fearful of confrontation, desperate to avoid ridicule, he constructed a wall of regal reserve to protect the sensitivity which had been his most notable characteristic as a child.

  On one occasion, one of the senior boys had the bright idea of making a tape recording of Prince Charles snoring. Waiting until he was asleep, several boys crept to the open window of Charles’s dormitory and lowered the microphone by an extension cable to just above his head. It was easy as Charles’s bed was next to one of the windows, which were always kept open. The plan worked like a charm and a little later that night the excited plotters listened to the loud snores of their future king on the tape recorder.

  It was bullying of the cruellest kind and, although the tape was confiscated, the Charles-baiting went on without respite. Furthermore, he was always being told about his father’s wild exploits when he had been at the school. Without a doubt, Philip had ‘been one of the lads’ and was often referred to as a ‘good man’ or a ‘good shade’, as the Gordonstoun terminology has it. To other pupils, it seemed as if he was always trying hard to live up to his father’s great reputation, not by misbehaving or having adventures, but striving energetically to excel at everything he did. He has been doing so ever since.

  Chapter 7

  PHILIP AND ALBERT

  With the Queen now settled on the throne, Prince Philip needed to secure for himself a proper role, and he had to fight to ensure that his own needs and position weren’t entirely overlooked, as the courtiers’ focus was unsurprisingly on his wife. For Philip, it was a difficult transition, and one in which he would have to learn to make his own way. As we have seen, he spoke to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands about it, but there was also one other very important role model he could look to in the past: Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert – the last man to have been in a similar position to him. And what he saw, when he looked, made him realise that he wasn’t getting treated as well.

  Prince Philip’s family name before he became Philip Mountbatten was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a name handed down from his Danish great-grandfather, but the German connections in his family tree were the cause of some gossip among the establishment in the early post-war years. Indeed, this may have been one of the reasons why he was initially treated so poorly by some who worked in the palace.

  It is a fact that all four of Prince Philip’s sisters married aristocratic Germans, of whom two were active in the 1930s in Hitler’s Nazi party. None of the sisters was invited to the wedding of Philip and the Queen, largely because of these links to our wartime foes. But if that was the case, it was also true that Philip’s mother Alice risked her life to save persecuted Jews in Athens during the war, for which she was awarded Israel’s highest award for a foreigner. In 1994, Philip and his sister Sophie went to Jerusalem to receive the award posthumously on behalf of their mother.

  For his own part, one of the greatest influences in Philip’s life was Kurt Hahn, a German Jew who founded Salem school and later Gordonstoun. Hahn had to flee Germany to escape persecution from the Nazis. There is a world of distinction between being German and being a Nazi, but in those difficult times some chose not to make that point. Indeed, as we will see later, these spurious allegations would never entirely go away.

  The fact is that, in common with the British royal family, Philip has German blood on his mother’s side and many German relatives. This background still has an impact, even in some minor ways: for example, they retain the German custom of opening their presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning, following the tradition that Prince Albert maintained.

  His mother’s family name was Battenberg and her father was Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German who joined the Royal Navy aged fourteen and rose to the rank of First Sea Lord by 1912. Although he was married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Victoria of Hesse, Louis was forced to resign in 1914 because of anti-German sentiment brought on by the war, and he subsequently anglicised the family name to Mountbatten. For the same reason, in 1917 King George V abandoned the German-sounding family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and changed it to Windsor, after the castle.

  The royal family had taken the dynastic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when Queen Victoria married her first cousin, Albert. By contrast, Philip was forced to abandon his family name for his children in favour of Windsor. His reported reaction was to exclaim: ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.’ But, under a declaration made in Privy Council in 1960, the name Mountbatten-Windsor was applied to male-line descendants of the Queen and Prince Philip when a surname was required.

  It wasn’t the only way in which Albert’s official status appeared greater than Philip’s. Queen Victoria’s husband was formally titled ‘HRH Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duke of Saxony’ for seventeen years until he was awarded the formal title of ‘The Prince Consort’ by Queen Victoria in 1857. He is the only husband of a British Queen to have held it. The Duke of Edinburgh is a prince of the United Kingdom but he is not Prince Consort. Yet Clarence House has announced it is likely that when Prince Charles becomes sovereign, his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, will have the title ‘HRH the Princess Consort’. It may seem a small point to some, this matter of titles, but to a proud man such as Philip it did appear to diminish him in some way. There are no specific duties for the consort that have been laid down by Parliament or established by custom, nor is any power conferred by the title. As Prince Philip himself said: ‘Constitutionally I don’t exist.’

  Philip says he read several biographies of Prince Albert to see what he could learn from his experience. He also admits his interest in science, and in originating the Prince Philip Designers Prize, was inspired by what his predecessor did in setting up the Great Exhibition. He considers Albert an original thinker and says: ‘All original thinkers have a certain quality you can probably recognise.’

  There are parallels to be drawn between Prince Albert an
d Prince Philip. They were both of German ancestry and by all accounts both were very good looking as young men. Queen Victoria wrote: ‘Albert is extremely handsome . . . his eyes are large and blue and he has a beautiful nose and very sweet mouth with fine teeth.’ In both cases, it seems to have been love at first sight when their future wives first set eyes upon them.

  Each also had an influential, empire-building uncle working to support them: in Albert’s case, it was King Leopold of the Belgians, and in Philip’s, Lord Louis Mountbatten. When Albert married in 1840, Queen Victoria was already on the throne and took precedence over him. In Albert’s own words: ‘I am very happy and contented; but the difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, not the master in the house.’ It was a situation very similar to that in which Philip found himself when his family had to move from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace after the accession.

  There were, however, significant differences between Prince Philip’s role as consort and that of Prince Albert, who involved himself in affairs of state soon after his marriage. Albert read the government papers delivered daily to the Queen in red boxes. He gave her advice, which she welcomed, and became her private secretary and closest adviser. Only months after his marriage, Albert wrote: ‘Victoria allows me to take much part in foreign affairs and I think I have already done some good.’

  By contrast, and to some extent reflecting the changing role of the monarchy in politics since Albert’s time, Philip does not see the contents of the red boxes and, indeed, has never wished to do so, which has allowed him the freedom to speak his mind, as he so often does.