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has in mind until the dust settles…’ 13 Martin Charteris was almost certainly acting after
consultation with Elizabeth and pointing out in a perfectly reasonable manner the
dangers of a major muddle, or, as he tactfully put it, a potential ‘conflict of interest’
over the various Trusts. Lord Charteris, as he later became, remembered no conflict with
Charles, of whom he was very fond. Only on one, delphic occasion, was the message
transmitted from Elizabeth to her son: ‘Tell him to leave the throne alone.’
Charles, however, according to his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, was apparently
infuriated at the implication that he was to be reined in by the Palace and was not
prepared to take direction even from someone as wise as Martin Charteris. ‘Though the
Prince disguised his growing resentment – except from his intimates’, Dimbleby wrote, ‘–
he was quick to detect any apparent slight from the Queen’s officials and began
resolutely to distance himself from them.’ The truth was that the Prince, reacting to
years of Palace control, was becoming something of a wild card in the royal pack. In his
determination to assert himself he was entering the kind of period of rebellion against
his parents which most people go through at the teenage stage. With his own huge
income from the Duchy of Cornwall (on his twenty-first birthday the entire income of
the Duchy – £248,000 – was made over to him, although by arrangement with the
Treasury he handed over 50 per cent in lieu of income tax) and his own staff, he was
flexing his muscles, uncertain as to which direction he wanted to go but obstinate to any
outside pressure.
Released from the hierarchical discipline of the Navy to which even a Prince had to
conform, he was becoming a spoiled, rich young man whose innate good qualities and
real seriousness were frustrated by a consciousness of the aimlessness of his life. His
personal servants and his valets – first James MacDonald and then Stephen Barry – had
indulged him and he took any kind of criticism badly. Checketts was later to be the first
victim. The self-pity, pessimism and complaining note which ran through both his
private correspondence and his journals, the ‘weakness’ which his parents had tried to
eradicate, now turned into petulance when he was crossed. He allowed the temper fits,
or ‘gnashes’, which he had inherited from his grandfather, George VI, to burst out in
what his biographer described as ‘alarming displays of uncontrolled temper, his face
[being] suffused with intense emotion’.
Unable to find a suitable challenge for his ill-focused energy, the Prince had more time on his hands than he
either wished or cared to admit. To his friends he seemed troubled by anxiety and discontent, which he
sometimes allowed to affect his behaviour towards his staff. Easily provoked by minor irritations, he became
uncharacteristically impatient and peremptory. Whereas a decade earlier his comments about the official
programmes put before him had been innocent and dutiful, in the late seventies his repsonse to yet another
‘Away Day’ [i.e. official engagement] could seem reluctant and jaundiced… 14
Even Mountbatten, now in his late seventies, was not listened to with quite such
reverence by the headstrong Prince, bent on self-enlightenment and on finding a
spiritual direction to his life, something on which his worldly great-uncle was hardly
equipped to advise him. In the mid-1970s Charles found a guru in one of Mountbatten’s