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important area of her life – her children – the outside world was going to have its effect.
Hard as she struggled to protect their privacy, she knew that eventually they could not
be screened from the world of their contemporaries and that as media interest in them
grew ever more insatiable so the pressure on them would grow. She longed for them to
be able to lead ‘normal’ lives while realizing that ultimately this would not be possible.
Knowing that their ‘royalness’ would inevitably make them suffer, she overcompensated
for this by letting them do what they liked as much as she could. This was particularly
true of the two younger children, born at the beginning of the age of permissiveness. It
was true too of Anne, her father’s girl, in whose presence Philip’s face lit up, a
confident, independent and strong-willed individual who would never have to shoulder
the burden of kingship. It could never be as true of the Prince of Wales, born to be King
and therefore subject to the rules imposed by his destiny.
Elizabeth and Philip saw it as their duty to bring Charles up to be equal to his future
role. The fact that he was a sensitive and diffident child was, therefore, not a plus in
their eyes, nor was what they perceived as weakness outweighed by his qualities of
affection and goodness of heart. The lack of steel and tendency to self-pity in his nature
dismayed them. Initially he had been a clumsy and unathletic child who brought out all
his father’s impatience, never far from the surface. An aura of ‘wimpishness’ hung over
him which his parents were determined to eradicate. When go-karts were introduced,
Anne and Charles had been given one. Anne leapt eagerly into hers; Charles initially
refused even to get in his. ‘Windy’ was the word his parents used to describe his
behaviour; ‘lacking courage’ would be a polite translation of its meaning. As it
happened, Charles was later to prove them wrong on that count. Already he found
warmth and appreciation in women other than his mother: his nanny, Mabel Anderson,
his mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, and his beloved ‘Granny’, Queen
Elizabeth, who recognized in him the vulnerability of her much-loved husband and
encouraged him to appreciate music, art and books. Philip (although perversely capable
of great kindness) was by nature a bully and he bullied Charles, sometimes bringing
tears to his eyes. Elizabeth, like Queen Mary in a similar situation, never moved to
protect her son, principally because she believed her husband to be right and secondly
because she believed that his masculinity gave him the right to have the principal say in
his eldest son’s upbringing.
Elizabeth herself, brought up by governesses, had had no personal experience of
public education. The Mountbattens were the deciding factor in the choice of a school
for Charles – that meant Gordonstoun, the spartan school on the north-eastern Scottish
coast which Philip had attended. The Queen Mother was firmly of the opinion that he
should go to Eton as the school most suited to his temperament and where the boys,
more used to the proximity of royalty, would be more at ease with him and he with
them.
As Elizabeth’s future Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, wrote, ‘As schools go Eton
was, I think, a tolerant place. There were none of the daunting rituals for new boys, the
institutionalized bullying, about which one has heard or read of other places. One had