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anecdotes which were invariably self-serving but so turned to hold the wayward listener.
For hour after hour Prince Charles was entranced by these insights and the morals that
Mountbatten drew from them.’ ‘You really are becoming exactly like Queen Victoria in
her old age and nobody will know what to do when you aren’t there to help and advise,’
Charles told him on 11 August 1970. He learned far more about the taboo subject of
Uncle David from Mountbatten than he did from anyone else in his family. While
Mountbatten angled for conciliation between the Windsors and the Prince, hoping that
affection for the heir to the throne might persuade them to bequeath him their property,
and was successful in presenting Uncle David to his great-nephew in a more
sympathetic light, he never ceased to hold him up to Charles as a dreadful example of
selfishness and dereliction of duty. ‘The Prince rarely forgot anything that his greatuncle
told him, and he was invariably disposed to believe him,’ the Prince’s biographer
wrote. Nevertheless Charles, as he grew towards middle age, began to display certain
characteristics in common with the Duke of Windsor, as Mountbatten did not fail to
point out.
Philip, who had been familiar with his uncle’s modus operandi since adolescence,
warned Charles against letting Mountbatten interfere too much with his naval career,
but no warnings could dent the developing hero-worship and almost filial love which the
young prince had for his great-uncle. ‘You are the most astonishing “Great-Uncle” ever,’
he wrote to Mountbatten. By the time Charles was twenty-three, Mountbatten had
become his closest confidant and the greatest single influence on his life. The Prince
called him ‘grandpapa’ to his face and ‘honorary grandfather’ in his letters; in return
Mountbatten referred to him as ‘honorary grandson’. To Charles, Broadlands was ‘the
best and most welcoming of homes’ and it was there, rather than to his parents’ houses
that he took girlfriends for relaxing, unsupervised weekends. Later, after Mountbatten’s
death, he was to write of him:
I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me
unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism;
someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and
advice. In some extraordinary way he combined grand-father, great uncle, father, brother and friend…
Mountbatten’s relationship with Philip was difficult and often stormy. As Charles
grew closer to Mountbatten, the gap between Philip and his uncle widened and their
relationship was strained until the last few years of Mountbatten’s life, when
Mountbatten commented that Philip had become ‘more like his old self again’ and
something like their old easy friendship was restored. Elizabeth, on the other hand, did
not mind Mountbatten’s interference in her son’s life. Absorbed as she was in her own
duties, she welcomed the fact that he had a mentor and one whom she personally liked
and trusted. Unlike her mother, who always kept him at arm’s length and who, like
Philip, was suspicious of his influence over Charles, she regarded Mountbatten as an
integral part of the family. With her father dead at an early age, he was the only senior
member of the royal family to whom she could feel close. She called him Dickie and he