How King Charles spent years courting controversy as Prince of Wales before embracing his duty

SITTING with the Queen during her last hours in her Balmoral bedroom was a wretched experience for Charles.

Even at 73, losing a mother causes monumental pain.

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Theirs was undoubtedly a ­loving bond and, being in that gloomy atmosphere as her life ebbed away, he will have reflected on all of their times together.
Over the years there were differences, but as the Queen’s health deteriorated in recent years there was a shift in their relationship.

He focused on becoming King and she gave her constant guidance and blessing.

Irrefutably, he made an outstanding start on Friday evening during his brief address just a day after his mother’s death.

Dignified, emotional and passionate, his fluent declaration of faith to Britain and the Commonwealth was heart-warming, bringing tears to the most hardened men and women.

Pressing all the right notes, Charles showed keen understanding about the fears harboured even by loyal monarchists that his past would undermine trust in Britain’s greatest institution.

And while the world mourned the loss of a modest, selfless public servant and model monarch, our new King will undoubtedly have remembered some of his disagreements with the Queen over the years.

Charles has never forgotten the Queen’s years’ long refusal to acknowledge his passionate relationship with Camilla, his wife and now the Queen Consort.

‘I’m not stupid’

The legacy of that strife complicates Charles’s fate even more than usual for a new monarch.

Over the past 50 years, Charles has battled with many demons — personal and public.

The result is that he may well struggle to save the monarchy as we know it today.

Inevitably, Charles cannot replicate his mother. In a different era we have different expectations.

The Queen was unique. The problem Charles offers to the nation is that in those decades of waiting, he has proved to be a rebel prince.

By default, he may now become a rebel King.

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“I’m not stupid,” he said in 2018. “I do realise that it is a separate exercise being sovereign.”

Yet despite his promise he would not become a “meddling” king and that he understands his constitutional role, even his coronation risks provoking controversy.

Subject to endless discussions over the past 20 years, some final, sensitive details about who should be there have still, apparently, not been agreed. Final decisions depend on King Charles III.

Single-minded and averse to taking disagreeable advice, Charles has, despite considerable achievements, become renowned for dismissing officials who challenge his orders.

“I never want to see that man again,” he said about an accountant who rightly told him that he didn’t have the money for a particular project.

Stubbornness has been Charles’s weakness ever since his childhood — partly as a mechanism to fight for his survival and partly because he believed in his divine authority as the future King.

Throughout his life, he has been determined to make his mark on British history.

Remaining impartial and uncontroversial did not appeal to a man frustrated by those using their wealth and political power in ways he considered to be wrongful.

As Prince of Wales, Charles carved out a remarkable career.

Championing unfashionable causes to protect the environment and horticulture, oppose brutalist architecture and support the Armed Forces and the importance of a good education, he fearlessly told politicians and tycoons to cease the damage they were causing.

To his credit, he sought to improve the lives of the disadvantaged.

Tens of thousands of children and adults have benefited from the Princes Trust.

Hundreds of soldiers’ widows have been comforted by his handwritten letters of condolence.

The occupants of new public housing can thank Charles’s campaigns for better quality homes.

Real anger

Throughout his life, he has shown devotion and believed that he could make Britain a better country.

“I sometimes feel I have to solve all the nation’s problems single-handed,” he once said.

In letters to politicians he condemned the decision by Norwich Council to fell chestnut trees because people might be injured by falling conkers.

Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales

King Charles III

New laws and over-regulation about hygiene, he continued, were preventing volunteers cooking and reheating meals in their own homes for the elderly.

Valued volunteers were being excluded by health and safety laws and the “blame” culture.

So many rules, he wrote, echoing the opinion of many, had been imposed with “the potential to be deeply corrosive to the fabric of our society”.

Many Britons recall his dedicated visits to schools, hospitals and hospices. Carefully briefed, he talked engagingly to staff, pupils and patients, leaving them with an enduring memory of his decency.

The contrast for the majority who have not enjoyed a personal encounter is stark.

During the many scandals that would have destroyed a lesser man, there has been no evidence that Charles suffered a moral struggle.

Despite all the eyewitness accounts of his melancholia and self-doubt, Charles has never admitted any wrongdoing.

Few doubted the sincerity of his campaigns, but over the years many feared that his provocative dissent made him unfit to be King.

“Nobody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales,” he said in 2004.

He did not seem concerned that his reference to himself — an outcast prince rebelling against the state of the world — was singularly inappropriate.

‘Toxic’

To many, he appeared like Thomas Fowler in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American: “I have never known a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

Alongside the significant benefits Charles has bestowed, he has generated a legacy of extraordinary controversy.

Not least his treatment of Diana, his relationship with controversial businessmen to raise money for his charities and his bizarre relationship with Michael Fawcett, his valet and the guardian of all his most sensitive secrets.

He once said: “To be just a presence would be fatal.”

It would seem, to make his mark, he sought controversy.

His championing of fox hunting and complementary medicine — he advocated that cancer could be cured with coffee enemas — and his protest letters to Tony Blair’s ministers, especially criticising the development of GM crops, aroused real anger.

His causes might have been just but his interference seemed to be unconstitutional.

Dealing with Charles, Tony Blair complained, was “toxic”.

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His lifestyle was, to say the least, self-indulgent.

During Charles’s visit to Hong Kong for the independence celebrations in 1997, it was reported that Fawcett became notable for pandering to the Prince’s love of grandeur and extravagance.

To set the table for the dinner, Fawcett had brought to Hong Kong a full set of 17th Century china and glasses. They would replace the governor’s 18th Century plates.

Every morning, wherever he travelled abroad, Fawcett woke the Prince, filled his bath, laid out his clothes — matching suit with shirt, socks, tie, handkerchief and highly polished shoes.

On visits in Britain, Fawcett supervised a huge lorry arriving at a host’s home. Not with Charles’s suitcases but a bed, sheets, towels, paintings, his brand of bottled water and even a lavatory seat.

Fawcett was relied upon to discreetly replace the royal lavatory paper, guard his liaisons, bow to his tantrums, test the royal boiled eggs and always speak in deferential tones.

At each of Charles’s homes, Fawcett supervised every detail: That the gravel on the drive was raked, the paintings were hanging precisely, the cushions properly stacked, the kitchens supplied with organic food from the Prince’s favourite suppliers, the elaborate flower arrangements refreshed daily and the dining table covered with the appropriate linen tablecloth, silver cutlery and candlesticks.

To complicate their relationship, last year Fawcett resigned because of allegations about the finances of the Prince’s charities.

During the 1990s, Charles’s interest in spiritualism and homeopathy heaped derision upon him every week as a crank in ITV’s Spitting Image.

He even declared: “I have come to realise that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal.”

If the Queen had died in 2011, his controversial interventions could well have caused a constitutional crisis.

And back then that was firmly Prince Philip’s belief.

Charles’s father even, quite cruelly, told his hosts at his 90th birthday dinner at a London club that he was determined to continue living to keep his son from the throne.

Philip’s friends thought him unfair, especially his scorn about Charles’s achievements and vision.

Charles ­struggled to deal with his father’s waspish tongue.

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Contrary to his image as a brave polo player and intrepid traveller, Charles suffered from profound unhappiness and insecurity.

That misery was undoubtedly overcome by his marriage to Camilla.
Strong-minded, outspoken and loyal, Camilla provided the anchor and love which Diana — another insecure person — could not provide.

“Charles went down on his knee,” said Camilla, describing the scene at his Birkhall estate in 2004.

Their first dalliance had begun 33 years earlier, their second in the late 1970s and the third, started in the mid-1980s, was a union of two unhappy, middle-aged souls seeking relief from broken marriages.

Win over doubters

Nearly 20 years later, their relationship had survived exceptional obstacles. “She suffers indignities and vilification,” said her promoters, “because she loves Charles.”

The reward for decades of frustration, Charles reasoned, would be a blissful, traditional wedding. To his disappointment, his mother was unequivocal.

She refused to attend the civil marriage in Windsor’s registry office in 2005 and watched the Grand National and a replay before emerging to the wedding party, making a brief speech and posing for less than one minute for the official photos.

Yet over the years, the Queen’s opinion of Camilla improved. So did her son. By 2011 he began to moderate his speeches and restrained his campaigns.

In 2018 he was at a crossroads. With the Queen’s health slowly deteriorating, he recognised that his fate — and the monarchy’s future — depend- ed on the public’s acceptance of him as a unifying monarch.

Purposefully, Charles and Camilla set out to win over the doubters.

Four years later their efforts have been rewarded.

After the Queen’s death there were no voices of dissent about Charles’s accession as King.

Friday’s welcome to Charles and Camilla outside Buckingham Palace would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

While he will never be the People’s King, he now has a chance to provide a successful transition to his son and Kate, the modern face of Britain’s monarchy, the safeguard of the kingdom’s values and traditions.