The perfectly presented four-year-old boy — white satin shirt with lace stock and cuffs, his dark hair lacquered, he recalled many years later, “with the most frightful stuff” — sat between his bejewelled grandmother and aunt. His clenched right fist propped against his cheek, he stared downwards, his expression mingling boredom and wistfulness. It was the biggest and most public moment in the childhood of Prince Charles: his mother’s coronation as Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953. He was a young boy who could have been only dimly aware that one day he would undergo the same ritual of crowning and anointing as king of the United Kingdom and its realms.
He was born in Buckingham Palace, and less than three hours later he was displayed to the court of his grandfather, King George VI. “Poor little chap,” the private secretary to his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, wrote, “being looked at by outsiders — but with great affection and good will.” At his christening the next month, under the ornate dome of the music room at the palace, he was doused with water from the River Jordan that had been poured into the silver gilt Lily Font designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children.
As a child he was surrounded by nannies, governesses, maids and even a nursery footman who kept his pram in good working order. Still, Charles had a lonely childhood. His parents loved him, but his duty-bound mother was preoccupied by her work as monarch and the needs of her adored husband, Prince Philip.
For his part, Philip took seriously his role as head of the family, and was determined to toughen up his eldest son, who seemed to him soft and timid. Neither parent was physically demonstrative. As Martin Charteris, Queen Elizabeth’s most devoted senior adviser for nearly three decades, admitted, she was “not good at showing affection”.
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Charles found comfort with his nanny, Mabel Anderson, and in the company of the Queen Mother, who gave him the hugs he craved, and encouraged his kind and gentle nature — his instinct to share candy with other children and to select the weakest player when choosing sides for games. “My grandmother was the person who taught me to look at things,” Charles recalled.
She captivated him with her stories of Italy, describing its vistas (“magnificent cypresses standing out against the blue distant mountains”) and its architectural and artistic treasures. He frequently stayed with her when his parents were away, contenting himself with rattling the tops of her lipsticks and admiring the colours. She let him explore a nearby farm, where he could climb the hay bales and feed the cows.
From an early age he was desperate to please. At a luncheon surrounded by adults, eight-year-old Charles was served wild strawberries for the first time. As was busily removing the long stems, his great-aunt Lady Edwina Mountbatten told him he should pick up the berries by the stems and dip them into sugar. Moments later the poor child was trying to reattach all the stems. “That was so sad,” his cousin Lady Pamela Hicks recalled, “and so typical of how sensitive he was.”
Charles had a precocious aesthetic sense. He loved what he later called “the magic of the trochaic tetrametre” in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, which his father had read to him. He prowled the corridors at Windsor Castle, held rapt by the paintings of his ancestors, including Van Dyck’s famous portrait of his ill-fated namesake, Charles I in Three Positions. He complimented his great-aunt Edwina on her hats, and played with the jade pieces that his great-grandmother, the redoubtable Queen Mary, usually kept locked in cabinets.
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He was happiest in the country, which struck a “deep primordial chord”. He recalled that “every tree, every hedgerow, every wet place, every mountain and river had a special, almost sacred character of its own”. Balmoral, his mother’s 50,000-acre estate in the Scottish Highlands, had a particular allure. He spent hours wandering the heather-swathed hills of Royal Deeside, learning to identify the flora and fauna, and marvelling at the “weather beaten, lichen-covered, gnarled grandeur” of the birch woods.
From the age of two Charles shared childhood experiences with his younger sister, Anne, his assertive opposite: confident and extroverted, very much her father’s daughter. Queen Elizabeth taught them to ride when they were toddlers. Charles was timid on horseback, while Anne was bold. He was uncoordinated and had no talent for rugby, cricket and football. On holidays in Scotland he played with the local cricket league, but ended up failing to score any runs and spending most matches, by his account, “incarcerated in a pavilion”.
He was schooled at home by Catherine Peebles, his Scottish governess, who noted his tendency to “draw back” if he was scolded. He plodded through his lessons, but he was a daydreamer, easily distracted. “He is young to think so much,” Winston Churchill remarked on meeting Charles shortly before his fourth birthday. The young prince loved Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and the bizarre characters in Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, which shaped his sense of humour.
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With a view to instilling in their son “the discipline imposed by education with others”, his parents enrolled him at the Hill House School in London shortly after his eighth birthday. As the first heir to the British throne to be taught outside the palace walls, he enjoyed drawing, painting and music. But his royal status made it difficult for him to mix with the other students. Six months later he was packed off to his first boarding school, Cheam, where his father had been sent at the same age.
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Charles was acutely homesick, clutched his teddy bear and wept frequently in private. He found some relief in weekly letters home, sharing his misery with members of his family, including his mother, who concluded her son was “a slow developer”. He made no friends among his peers in five years at Cheam.
When the prince turned 13 his father sent him to Gordonstoun in northeastern Scotland, also Philip’s alma mater, a boarding school so harsh that Charles called it “Colditz in kilts”. Philip had flourished at Gordonstoun. He was tough, athletic and resilient, and he was determined to mould Charles in his own image. But it was the wrong school for Charles, who described his five years there as a “prison sentence”. He was bullied at night in the dormitories, taunted for his jug ears, and on the rugby pitch he was routinely punched. “I never saw him react at all,” one classmate recalled. “He was very stoic. He never fought back.”
Kurt Hahn, the school’s founder, was a progressive Jewish educator who had fled Germany after Hitler came to power. He sought to build character through physical challenges such as long runs at dawn followed by frigid showers. He also strove to create an egalitarian society where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege”. Each boy was required to volunteer for community service — either in the fire brigade, sea lifesaving, or snow rescue in the Grampian mountains. What counted was their sense of accomplishment, a lesson Charles would later apply to the teenage beneficiaries of his philanthropies.
Prince Philip intensified the rigour of his son’s education by sending him to the Australian outback for six months at the Timbertop wilderness school. Charles survived endurance tests such as hiking 70 miles across country in blistering heat — and showed his father he was not a weakling. He also developed confidence at age 16 when he faced crowds at royal events for the first time and discovered he could talk to strangers.
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Charles enjoyed his time in Australia, where he was liberated by the informality of a country where, as he quickly discovered, “there is no such thing as aristocracy or anything like it”. For the first time he was judged on “how people see you, and feel about you”. He encountered none of the sadistic hazing that had darkened his days at Gordonstoun. On his departure, he smiled when his mates gave him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles — a real Pommie bastard!”
Back at Gordonstoun, Charles found no companionship among his schoolmates, but two compassionate young teachers helped him to survive the macho environment and became lifelong friends. Eric Anderson, who would later become head master of Eton College, encouraged Charles to perform Shakespeare. Charles’s art master, Robert Waddell, an aesthete with the mind of a Victorian matron, deepened the prince’s appreciation of art and music. Charles escaped with Waddell at weekends to house parties hosted by Scottish aristocrats where the art master played the piano and Charles accompanied on the cello.
When Charles graduated in July 1967, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip surprisingly admitted that his years there had driven him “further in upon himself”. Yet the unconventional school put some grit in his oyster. Charles emerged from Gordonstoun with an inner steeliness and a propensity for the unorthodox ideas that would define him as Prince of Wales.
Sally Bedell Smith is author of Charles: The Misunderstood Prince and George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Shaped the Monarchy, published by Penguin
