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privileged position as a member of the establishment who was also a journalist writing
about the royal family. His book, To Be a King, was subtitled, ‘A privileged account of
the early life and education of HRH the Prince of Wales, written with the approval of
HM the Queen’. What he wrote, therefore, can be taken as reflecting what Elizabeth
thought about her son. It is clear from hints by Morrah that as early as August 1966
Elizabeth had doubts whether he would even make captain of his house, let alone head
of the school. ‘They didn’t appreciate what a gem they’d got,’ a friend said. Elizabeth’s
response to a friend who told her how delighted she was that Charles was going to
Trinity College, Cambridge, was the dampening, ‘If he gets in.’ Philip’s behaviour at his
son’s confirmation in the royal chapel at Windsor in 1964 was odd by any standards
and hardly calculated to make the sixteen-year-old boy feel that he occupied a central
position in his father’s thoughts. Throughout the Archbishop’s address at the service he
was seen reading a book. Whether this was a gesture of protest at Charles’s
confirmation in the Church of England (Philip’s own religious history has been
chequered – from a Greek Orthodox childhood through German Protestantism to his inlaws’
Anglicanism), or aimed at discomfiting Archbishop Ramsey whose relations with
the royal family were uneasy, it was, as the Archbishop later said to the Dean of
Windsor, ‘bloody rude’. Rude not only to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual
head of the Anglican Church, but to his son whose day it was and who had approached
the occasion with real religious feeling.
His parents’ obvious lack of confidence in his abilities did not help the naturally
diffident Charles, who hero-worshipped his father and copied him even to the extent of
his habit of walking with his hands behind his back. By sending him to Cheam and
Gordonstoun they had ensured that he would be measured against his father’s
achievements there and found wanting. At Gordonstoun Philip had been captain of
cricket and, according to the experts, was good enough to play at club level. He was a
natural athlete, good at every sport he took up, even when he came to it relatively late
as he did to shooting and polo. Charles as a boy was not a ‘natural’, although through
courage and perseverance he achieved a good deal, and as he grew up he followed his
father in his passion for shooting and polo, although he never liked sailing. He showed
no interest in science or technology, to his father’s disappointment, which hurt him.
Essentially a loner, he loved his grandmother’s favourite sport, fishing, and, according
to Morrah, any older friend of the family who came to visit (often Bishop Woods who
would be sent up to Gordonstoun to take Charles out when his parents were too busy –
it would often be six weeks before they could manage a visit) would find himself ‘taken
for long walks with the Prince among the lonely mountain rocks and burns of
Morayshire, while his young host pointed out to him, with deep concentration and
apparent expert knowledge, every pool, backwater and eddy where a fish might be
expected to rise to the fly’.
On his eighteenth birthday in November 1966 after his return to Gordonstoun, Charles
became officially of age to succeed his mother and rule of his own authority should she
die, displace his father as Regent if she became incapacitated, and act as one of the