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all the rest of the world seemed like an unfamiliar and different breed. He had his own
set of rooms, including his own kitchen, and more privacy than he had had anywhere
away from home hitherto. Kindly, relaxed and highly intelligent, the Master and his
wife, Mollie, provided a refuge for the Prince in the Master’s Lodging to which he had
his own key. First-year students were not supposed to have cars, but Butler turned a
blind eye to the Prince’s MGB, realizing that he would need to get away. The Butlers
introduced him to Lucia Santa Cruz, Butler’s research assistant and the daughter of the
Chilean Ambassador. She seems to have been Charles’s first real girlfriend; the Prince,
Mollie Butler remarked, ‘cut his teeth on’ her. Elizabeth was always ‘very nice to her’;
she was a suitable girl and it was time that Charles lost his diffidence with girls of his
age. Charles worked hard and enjoyed university life – acting, music and dining clubs.
To Butler’s disappointment he did not make friends outside the upper-class circle to
which he was accustomed; he was too diffident to make the effort to cross such bridges
although he was temporarily almost converted by a socialist undergraduate on his
staircase and asked Butler whether he thought it would be a good idea if he joined the
Labour Club. Butler was anxious that the Prince should be given the time and space to
achieve a good, civilizing university education, something unknown in his family. While
George VI had picked up a useful grounding in Dicey’s The English Constitution and the
ultimate treatise (with the same title) on the British monarchy by Walter Bage-hot, the
Duke of Gloucester had been reduced to killing mice to relieve the tedium and the future
Edward VIII at Oxford had concentrated on sport and left with his Warden’s opinion,
‘Bookish he will never be…’
For all three a university education had been merely a gesture; Charles took it
seriously and was determined to succeed on his own terms. But in this as in every other
attempt to lead a normal life, his destiny got in the way. Elizabeth’s promise to the
Welsh made at Cardiff in 1957 to present Charles to the people as their Prince of Wales
had to be fulfilled and a date had been set in June 1969 for his formal investiture. As the
date approached she realized that the future Prince of Wales had hardly set foot in his
principality. Britannia had called briefly at Holyhead in 1958, when Mountbatten and his
daughter Pamela had taken the nine-year-old Prince ashore and, as Mountbatten
characteristically put it, ‘We thus had the unique privilege of bringing the newly created
Prince of Wales to Wales for the first time.’ To Welsh nationalists the idea of an English
Prince of Wales was abhorrent; the original presentation of the Black Prince as Prince of
Wales in Caernarvon, the castle of the defeated Welsh prince, Owen Glendower, had
been a blatant act of triumphalism. Now they were going to be presented with a Prince
who had a mere smattering of Welsh blood (through the Queen Mother), who neither
spoke Welsh nor had ever lived in Wales. Elizabeth’s solution was to transfer Charles (to
Butler’s fury and the Prince’s dismay) to the University of Aberystwyth to study Welsh. It
was all part of a plan to relaunch the monarchy in the year 1969. From now on the
emphasis was to be on the younger generation.
When Charles left Gordonstoun, his sister Anne was sixteen and in her last year at
Benenden, one of the top girls’ boarding-schools in the country. With her forceful