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Head of the Family
‘The Queen has shown firmness in every area of her life except with her children…’
Anonymous
With the birth of Prince Edward, Elizabeth’s family was complete. ‘Goodness what fun it
is to have a baby in the house again!’ she told a friend. ‘He is a great joy to us all,
especially Andrew who is completely fascinated by him. In fact he considers him his own
property, even telling Charles and Anne to “come and see mybaby”!’ In the 1960s, when
Anne and Charles were teenagers and Andrew and Edward still young children, she
seemed to have found a satisfactory balance between the demands of her work and her
children. Prince Charles went on record as saying that he thought of his family as ‘very
special people’. ‘I’ve never wanted to get away from home,’ he said. ‘We happen to be a
very close-knit family. I’m happier at home with my family than anywhere else.’
Later, as his private life turned spectacularly and publicly sour, he blamed his
mother’s remoteness and his father’s impatient strictness for the disaster. The Prince
protested too much, but there was more than a little truth in what he was to say to his
biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. Elizabeth was noticeably more relaxed with her two
younger children, Andrew and Edward, than she was with him. This was especially true
with Andrew, an uncomplicated, rumbustious child, who was her favourite. ‘She began
to feel that she ought to do more about the children when Andrew was born,’ a relation
said. Elizabeth loved Charles and he her, but he was in awe of her and she was
undemonstrative in her affection. One courtier remembered being in the room when
Charles came to say goodnight to his mother as she was working on her papers. After he
had kissed her goodnight, he was on his way out when Elizabeth said, absentmindedly,
‘Goodnight, darling.’ Charles stopped in his tracks and turned round saying in a
surprised voice, ‘You called me darling!’ This did not mean that the children were not an
important part of her plans, just that she had less time to give them than most mothers.
When Charles caught chickenpox just before Easter 1959, she was forbidden to see him
as she had never had the disease, but as soon as he was no longer infectious, she refused
invitations in order to be with him. ‘As it means I won’t have seen him very much,’ she
wrote, ‘I feel that to go away just as Charles is getting visible again would be unfair…’
Although Elizabeth seemed superficially impervious to the changes taking place
outside the Palace walls as the Swinging Sixties gathered pace, she knew that in one