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much on his own. His education had been much the same as his brothers’ – his personal
Commonwealth stint had been two terms as junior master at the Collegiate School,
Wanganui, in New Zealand. He had been to university at Cambridge where he read
history and his tutor, Robert Rhodes James, considered him to have a first-class ability
although he emerged with a second-class degree. Like Charles, he showed a talent for
acting; indeed he longed to take up acting as a profession, but it was closed to him
because of his royal birth. Instead he joined the Royal Marines, the toughest of all the
branches of the services and one utterly unsuited to a sensitive young man who dreamed
of being an actor. To most people this seemed an incomprehensible choice. He could,
after all, have simply joined the Army in a less demanding area or one of the regiments
linked with the royal household. Instead, in June 1986 he was thrown in at the deep end
into a routine of gruelling physical activity with an unsympathetic commanding officer.
In January 1987 Edward had the courage to resign from the Marines before his time was
up, enraging his father and earning himself a public and undeserved reputation as a
wimp, which fuelled rumours that he was gay. Concerned friends of his mother’s
questioned a former master at Wanganui, who assured them that the Prince had always
been surrounded by girls. Contemporaries of Edward at Cambridge testify to at least one
affair with a woman undergraduate. None the less, rumours persisted even down to the
naming of names, an allegation which the man in question resolutely denied. The story
was started by an expatriate Briton in New York, who telephoned a London tabloid with
the story that Prince Edward had an affair with one of his valets, offering it for £25,000.
Buckingham Palace staff absolutely denied that there was anything in the story and said
that Edward, who is extremely discreet, had had several relationships with women and
that his parents tried to be as helpful over this as they could, inviting his friends to
meals and making sure that there was a week free at Balmoral for Edward to ask his
own friends. He is popular with the staff towards whom his manners are a good deal
better than his siblings’. While Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Margaret are polite to
their staff, Elizabeth’s children are not. ‘Why are you all so bloody rude to the servants?’
Charles’s friend, the late Major Hugh Lindsay, was heard to explode at Balmoral.
Charles himself, once such a polite little boy, is now known for losing his temper and
tearing a strip off footmen in public, a humiliating experience for the person concerned.
Even when Edward was seen to be close to a public relations girl, Sophie Rhys-Jones,
(whom he was to marry in June 1999), insinuations went on that she had only been
used as a front to protect Edward’s reputation. Edward’s relations with the press were
unfortunate; he behaved in a notably petulant way in public, stamping out of the press
conference when reporters failed to enthuse over the embarrassing It’s a Royal Knockout.
When newspapers published photographs of Edward kissing Sophie Rhys-Jones, the
Prince, backed by Elizabeth, complained to the Press Complaints Commission on the
grounds of invasion of privacy, but then later, on the advice of a public relations firm
much patronized by the younger royals, called a few editors together and said he would
withdraw the complaint if they didn’t publish the photographs, a manoeuvre hardly
calculated either to deter the newsmen or earn their respect and cutting the ground from