In 1997, the scandal-seeking journalist and biographer Kitty Kelley wrote a book about the House of Windsor, called The Royals. I was in the US when it came out, and read it on the flight back. (It was banned from publication in the UK.) It was unputdownable, and one of the key things that I, no monarchist, learned from it, was that the most humane reason for abolishing the Family, or “the Firm” as the Queen used to call it, was that the people who suffered most under the institution were its own members. This selection of photographs suggests that I was right – but in an unusual fashion.
The photograph below shows Charles III as a little boy, saluting the Trooping of the Colour: paradoxically, it looks as though even at that age he is fully conscious of all the responsibility of his position. The salute is not quite correct, but we can forgive him that, because he is four (and a half, a crucial distinction at that age, even if you are a royal). And the set of the mouth: is that the awareness of his position, the need for solemnity, or is it, in fact, the verge of tears? It may be a mixture of them all. He’d had a year and a bit to absorb the fact that he was now not only the heir, but also the Duke of Cornwall, and, in Scotland, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland.
The main photograph was taken almost exactly two years later, at Euston. Off to Balmoral, the words “you’re going to Scotland” held no terror for him yet: he was later to enter the freezing hellhole of Gordonstoun, which he described as “Colditz in kilts” (becoming in the process emblematic of every British public schoolboy who felt brutalised by freezing showers, vile food, regular beatings, and the kind of “teasing” now recognised as bullying). Relaxed and seemingly confident in his role, but perhaps with a hint of shyness or abstraction? It is, or became, one of royalty’s jobs to be inscrutable – this is a model future head of the Firm.
It is the third photograph that is, in a way, the most heartbreaking. Taken at a time when he would have been wooing Diana, before the cracks started appearing, he really does look like he’s dancing as if nobody’s watching. And yet they are – and they’re delighted. Taken at the Madeley Community Centre in Derby, Charles’ onlookers seem thrilled by this unabashed performance of Strictly Royalty. This photograph is made even more poignant by the fact that, in the months to follow, riots horribly aggravated by racial tensions would erupt around the country (the worst being in Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side).
Which leaves us with the official photograph, in his robes as the Prince of Wales. Here we can see the full weight of office, the foreboding that he was going to be wearing those robes, so to speak, for a very long time indeed. One does not expect a big grin for that kind of portrait, but here we can see the isolation, the melancholy, the erasure or concealment of personality, memories of That School still fresh in his mind. He was to wait another 53 years to swap this crown for another, even heavier one. No wonder one of his first public acts as King was to shout at a pen.
Nicholas Lezard was a book reviewer for the Guardian for 25 years and writes the New Statesman’s “Down and Out” column
