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Suddenly and without warning two weeks before the planned mass, the Palace
launched a pre-emptive strike by leaking an item to the Times diary which appeared on
16 April: ‘A request by Prince Charles to attend a papal mass in the Vatican has been
refused after a top-level decision taken in the past 24 hours, involving Buckingham
Palace, Church leaders and the diplomatic corps.’ The trouble was that after all the
careful negotiations and arrangements between the Prince, Archbishop and Pope, the
involvement of the Home Office and Her Majesty’s representative at the Holy See, the
one person who had not been consulted was Elizabeth, an omission which even the
Prince’s biographer called a serious breach of protocol: ‘with only a fortnight to go, the
Supreme Governor of the Church of England had been given no opportunity fully to
consider the constitutional implications of her son’s attendance at the Pope’s mass’. As
soon as Elizabeth was informed of the plan and prior to the Times leak, she had a long
meeting with Prince Charles, at which it can be assumed that she expressed herself
forcefully at this extraordinary oversight. The outcome of the meeting was that on 15
April a message was sent by the Prince’s office to the Vatican that the Prince would not,
after all, be attending the mass on which, according to Dimbleby, ‘he had set his heart so
many months before’. The result was an embarrassing confusion; while Adeane and the
Deputy Private Secretary, Sir William Heseltine, back-pedalled and obfuscated, their
hopes of concealment were wrecked by Vatican sources who let it be known that, but for
the last-minute cancellation, the Prince would have taken part in an historic act of
reconciliation with the Church of Rome. The news of the cancellation provoked the
predictable reaction from Dr Paisley, leader of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster,
and the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, who warned in a letter to the Prince
that ‘reconciliation to the see of Rome could jeopardize Your Royal Highness’ right to
succession’. The Prince dashed off a furious response to this which his staff marked ‘on
no account is this letter to be sent’.
The row over the papal mass indicated not only a lack of communication between
Elizabeth and her son on an official as well as a personal level but the Prince’s
increasing tendency to pursue his own initiatives without pausing to think of the
possible consequences, constitutional or otherwise, of his actions and to do so without
consultation with the Palace. From 1985 after the departure of Adeane the Prince’s
activities expanded, many of them admirable, not all of them wise, and he acquired a
number of unconventional and environmentally minded advisers. On the inner-city
front he set up not only the Prince’s Trust but the Prince’s Youth Business Trust and
Business in the Community, using his influence to lobby politicians and leading
businessmen on their behalf. The Prince’s view that his position as a Privy Counsellor,
Member of the House of Lords and heir to the throne gave him a right to ‘warn, protest
and advise’ was not necessarily constitutionally correct; some of the people and vested
interests he attacked saw it as an abuse of his influential position. The Prime Minister,
Mrs Thatcher, was incandescent when informed of a scheme of the Prince’s to establish
closer links between himself personally and the rulers of the Gulf and Middle East
generally, which, it seemed, would involve setting up some kind of secretariat. The