Not a Bad Prince

Charles: The Heart of a King
by Catherine Mayer
Ebury, 2015, 448 pages, $35

When the private letters of Prince Charles to UK ministers were publicly released by the courts in the recent “Black Spider Memo” crisis, the Prince of Wales was accused of sneakily and inappropriately influencing Her Majesty’s government. Many argued that this was a violation of his fast-approaching role as an impartial sovereign of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. In response in an article for the Australian Spectator I suggested that Charles would defy his manifold critics, who assumed there’s no way to both have an opinion and maintain a position of neutrality. “Neutrality is best understood as the place from which the monarch forms an opinion, not the absence of an opinion altogether,” I wrote.

Everyone has an opinion on controversial matters; what counts in a sovereign obliged to maintain political neutrality is that he must act on the advice of his ministers. The Queen counsels, encourages and warns; but having done so, she will then follow the decisions that the ministers make. The so-called Queen’s Speech—when she lists the measures her government will take in the coming year but which is written by the Prime Minister—makes that symbolically clear. That places an obligation on ministers not to treat the opinions of the sovereign as binding political instructions but to reach the decisions that the Queen will then adopt as her own. A constitutional sovereign enjoys decisive political power only in a major political crisis when he acts as an impartial umpire seeking to nudge the parties towards a peaceful resolution within the rules. George V’s interventions in the Ulster and 1931 crises are examples of such judicious umpiring.

What did the Prince’s letters say about these rules? If criticism has to be made, it ought to fall upon those individual ministers in the government who followed his advice blindly, so as to curry favour. Charles’s letters are reasonable queries on matters of public concern. Even where he is mistaken, as many believe he is on (say) homeopathic medicine, he is doing no more than asking a minister to consider expressions of widespread popular opinion that also concern him. The responsibility for these decisions rests with the ministers concerned.

Upon the release of the memos I was proven right. Most people have seen Charles’s suggestions as reasonable and made in good faith. It’s the fawning ministers who are made to look foolish.

Now, I don’t mean to gloat—at least not much. It just seems to be evident that Charles is constantly shattering the low expectations we set for him. Despite the popular media’s best efforts, he keeps coming across as a sensible, authentic, and generally likeable man. So his detractors frequently resort to fabrication. And as with any counterfeit, such retractions can generally be exposed when held up to a bit of light.

Catherine Mayer sets out to do the same to His Royal Highness in her new biography Charles: The Heart of a King. In the introduction, Ms Mayer quotes Walter Bagehot’s reflection on the nature of monarchy: “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon its magic.” She takes it upon herself to instead throw the curtains open, to let that daylight in on the Windsors (whom Mohamed Fayed called, in an unconsciously and maliciously poetic stroke, “that Dracula family”).

Ms Mayer believes that keeping the curtains in place, except for occasional privileged access for television and favoured journalists, has been one of the defining principles of Charles’s apprenticeship: that the Prince has set about trying to master the media apparatuses with which the royal family carefully cultivates its preferred public image. The Queen has been an exemplar of the same, having never granted a single interview—not one—throughout her reign, while having been the subject of documentaries every twenty years or so. Charles, on the other hand, has been a much more activist prince.

Ms Mayer seems to argue that his attempts to grab the spotlight to highlight his legion of charities and benevolent societies have denied him the flawless public image enjoyed (or, rather, painstakingly earned) by his mother. It is an odd criticism. She admits, however, that Charles would enjoy a far less favourable public image if he had simply done nothing. Actively espousing good causes is the obvious role for someone who, for better or worse, is a privileged person in every sense. He’s damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.

Good works certainly don’t guarantee good copy. After co-operating with three biographies by Anthony Holden, who seemed increasingly cool towards the Prince, Clarence House became weary of giving privileged access to journalists. So Ms Mayer’s biography promises what no other has been able to offer for decades: a glimpse beyond Charles’s handcrafted public persona and into “the heart of a king”. One is reminded of that interview given by the newly-wed Prince and Princess of Wales: when asked if they were in love, Diana answered, “Of course,” which Charles followed quickly with, “Whatever ‘in love’ means.”

Ms Mayer is adamant that, like some great Gatsby, there must be clues to the romantic machinations hidden beneath that cultivated exterior. When there seems to be none, she occasionally, well, makes something up, or indulges in a woozy speculation on his supposed feelings. At one point she writes of the “transient” Prince:

To stimulate homeliness, he always brings with him photographs of Camilla, his children, his canvases and paints, and a cushion, more than once paraded by the British press as a symbol of indulgence but better understood as a support for the Prince’s troublesome spine if not as his version of a security blanket. As a schoolboy sent away to board from the age of eight, be poignantly wrote of missing his “homes”. As an adult, he has accepted a life of permanent homesickness …

Has no one ever outgrown homesickness? Or been glad of the opportunity, as Punch suggested in the nineteenth century, for “peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away”? There is a distinct American bias in Ms Mayer’s psychology that may not capture Charles’s traditionalist soul.

Indeed, many of the unique glimpses at Prince Charles’s “heart” offered by Ms Mayer’s biography are of just that kind: rather romantic speculations on well-documented, publicly-accessible facts. With an amusing lack of irony, Ms Mayer quotes Jonathan Dimbleby’s reason for not putting forward his thesis that Princess Diana suffered from a personality disorder: “It would be wrong to publish such a sensational conclusion: too speculative and certain to cause distress to all closely involved, not least my subject.” There was a good model to follow in Mr Dimbleby’s decision.

In the absence of any revealing nuggets offered by the Prince himself, Ms Mayer relies heavily on interviews she conducted with the actress Emma Thompson, a close friend of Prince Charles. Ms Thompson’s testimony is juicy, even charming, but hardly the stuff of an authoritative biography. On the workaholic Prince’s propensity to duck out of some social event and into his study for a long night of memo-writing, Ms Thompson says, “I keep trying to get him to have more than one gin. Have another, I keep screeching.” (Ms Thompson might consider that he probably heard that identical advice from his grandmother.) She calls the Duchess of Cornwall “rude and raunchy” (approvingly, according to Mayer). Her interviews should perhaps have been taken with a grain or two more of salt.

In the single instance I could find of Ms Mayer drawing on her own interaction with Prince Charles, she reports having asked him “the standard feature writer’s question”: “What gives you joy?” The answer is benign: his family, his faith, his work, and his gardens. Clarence House told the BBC that Ms Mayer “did not have any exclusive access to the Prince or his staff” while writing her biography; the qualification hardly seems necessary.

At times, Ms Mayer lapses out of the biographical pretence entirely. Chapter 2, for instance, begins with a paean to the Queen’s place in moderating Ukip’s xenophobic elements. Ms Mayer insists that, where the deposition of the Central Powers’ monarchies after the First World War led to a “visceral street rightism”, that has been kept at bay in the UK by the Queen serving as a tamer rallying-point for patriotic sentiment. This is silly stuff—Ukip is nearer to an Ealing comedy than to the Front National, as Quadrant’s new editor says—and the only relevance Ms Mayer can claim for it comes eight pages in when she closes her diatribe with the question, “Will her son be able to fulfil that role?” As saving Britain from fascism is unlikely to figure largely in Charles’s reign, this falls under the heading: questions that nobody is asking.

No biography of His Royal Highness would really be complete without touching on the Traditionalist School, or Perennial Philosophy, to which the Prince adheres. Ms Mayer, like most of those who’ve come before her, fumbles with the subject. Put briefly, the broad Perennial Philosophy holds that all religions are culturally and temporally specific efforts to apprehend the same “primordial religion”: undiluted and unconditioned communion with the Divine. The Traditionalist School, which is a branch of Perennial Philosophy, argues that the primordial religion may only be attained by following a single religious tradition, ideally the most sophisticated one that’s culturally and geographically relevant to the believer. The English Traditionalist would, for instance, adhere to Christianity rather than Odinism, though Odinism might be chronologically older than Christianity.

The Anglican leadership’s fears of Charles’s “universalism”, then, seem premature. As a Traditionalist, Charles has no reason in the world to be anything short of robustly Anglican, which he is—and, as Ms Mayer notes, a High Church one at that. They may even find he’s a bit too Anglican for David Cameron’s brand of “classic” C-of-E-er: “not that regular in attendance, and a bit vague on some of the more difficult parts of the faith”. Charles takes both church attendance and personal devotion very seriously, and is intimately familiar with the difficult points of Christian theology.

The real value of this biography, such as it is, is the cache of figures and testimonies it offers to those with a serious interest in the life work of the Prince of Wales. Open to the index and you’ll find an invaluable source of information on the hundreds of thousands of young people who’ve turned their lives around with the help of His Royal Highness’s premier charity, the Prince’s Trust. Readers who brave the first four hundred pages will find a wealth of quotes taken from Charles’s close associates who paint a very different portrait of the Prince from Mayer’s. Instead of a slighted child hiding in the shell of a guilt-ridden aristo, we have his private secretary Elizabeth Buchanan thundering, “He’s trying to save the world, dammit! If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Wishing to save the world is an admirable moral quality. Sadly, however, the King must ultimately follow the advice of his ministers. And even in modern British governments, ministers who wish to save the world are quite thin on the ground.