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would arouse, damaging Charles’s big day? There is no doubt that the Abdication was a
subject which the royal family would prefer to have forgotten and, indeed, the ranks of
those who did remember it were already getting thinner. The younger generation
neither knew nor cared about it, but every time the Duke appeared at a royal occasion
he represented living proof of the skeleton in the family cupboard, the Duchess even
more so. The Queen Mother, everyone knew, had by no means forgiven the woman
whom she had once called ‘the lowest of the low’. All this was presumably at the back of
Elizabeth’s mind when she extended the ‘indirect form of invitation’ implicitly excluding
the Duchess, an exclusion which she must have known would make it impossible for the
Duke to accept. Caernarvon could have presented the opportunity for a public
reconciliation of the Windsor family, but the past still stood in the way. As if to make
amends, the Queen ended her letter with a reference to Wallis: ‘I hope you are both
keeping well and with love and affectionate thoughts from Lilibet.’ 13
The Duke replied generously. ‘As I do not believe that the presence of his aged greatuncle
would add much to the colourful proceedings centred upon Charles,’ he wrote, ‘I
do not feel that I should accept,’ adding, ‘At the same time I do appreciate your nice
thoughts.’ When, however, a few weeks later, he received an invitation to the dedication
of the King George VI Memorial Chapel in St George’s, he refused on the grounds that he
would be on his way to the United States at the time, adding what his biographer
described as ‘a mild rebuke’. ‘Although you did not include Wallis by name in the
invitation,’ he wrote, ‘I presume that you expected her to accompany me. You see, after
more than thirty years of happy married life, I do not like to attend such occasions
alone.’ 14 Privately, at least, a semblance of proper relations within the family had been
restored.
Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle duly went ahead despite
the fact that, unfortunately for the royal family, the atmosphere in Wales had changed
dramatically since the day in 1957 when the announcement of Elizabeth’s intention to
make her son Prince of Wales had raised cheers from thousands of loyal Welsh subjects
at Cardiff. The Welsh Nationalist movement, Plaid Cymru, had become much more
vociferous and indeed violent; there were bomb attacks on public buildings in Wales and
Elizabeth told Harold Wilson that she feared for her son’s safety. None the less, two
years previously she had decided that Charles should go to the ultra-Welsh college of
Aberystwyth for the summer term preceding his investiture and she could not now
change her plans without causing deep offence. The Welsh Nationalists were prepared
for Charles’s sojourn in their country and so was the Home Office, which mounted a
highly visible security operation at Aberystwyth, billeting seventy-odd police officers in
the town and infiltrating undercover men into the university disguised as cleaners and
students. In the circumstances Charles showed real courage in going ahead; four
Aberystwyth students went on hunger strike in protest against his arrival, a bomb
destroyed an RAF radio station nearby and an attempt was made to saw off the head of
a statue of the previous Prince of Wales, Charles’s great-uncle David, on the town’s
promenade.