Queen loved her children, but the Firm was always top priority
One day when Prince Charles was a small boy, he passed his mother’s study in Buckingham Palace and asked her to play with him. Gently closing the door on him, she said: ‘‘If only I could.’’
The Queen’s relationship with her eldest son, and the feeling of emotional distance that Charles says he experienced, were over the years a source of some friction.
Jonathan Dimbleby laid out Charles’s feelings about his upbringing. In his biography of the prince he wrote: ‘‘Though he was too proud to admit it, the prince still craved the affection and appreciation that his father – and his mother – seemed unable or unwilling to proffer.’’
They were harsh words, which were swiftly denied by his siblings.
Princess Anne said in an interview: ‘‘I simply don’t believe that there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest that she wasn’t caring. It just beggars belief.’’
Princess Elizabeth certainly set out with good intentions. The infant Charles had two nurses but before he was born she declared: ‘‘I’m going to be the child’s mother, not the nurses.’’
She was devoted to Charles, but was happy to leave him in the care of his nurses for much of the time. Charles, and later Anne, would have half an hour with his mother in the morning, and another couple of hours in the evening. She would give the children their bath, schedule permitting. She was torn, however, between the demands of her constitutional duties and her role as a mother, and duty always came first.
Shortly after Charles turned one, she spent some time in Malta with Prince Philip, who was stationed there with the navy. Charles spent his second Christmas with his grandparents at Sandringham.
When Elizabeth returned, instead of rushing to Norfolk to see her little boy, she spent four days in London dealing with a backlog of correspondence and carrying out engagements, including a day at the races.
When he was five, she and Philip went on a long tour of the Commonwealth. On their return, Charles attempted to join the line of dignitaries waiting to shake her by the hand. ‘‘No, not you, dear,’’ she said to the son whom she had not seen for five months. There was a 10-year gap between her first two children and her last two, and when Prince Andrew and Prince Edward were born the Queen took time off to be more closely involved with their upbringing.
By then she seemed to be relaxed around her children. ‘‘She was a less natural mother with Charles and Anne,’’ one helper suggested, ‘‘whereas she was much more the besotted parent with Andrew and Edward’’.
The legacy of the Queen’s relationship with her eldest son continued to have repercussions for years to come.
When his marriage to Princess Diana was collapsing, he felt unable to turn to his parents to discuss what Dimbleby called ‘‘the misery of his private life’’. His biographer, with Charles’s implicit approval, wrote: ‘‘The emotional gulf between the prince and his parents was hard to bridge, while communication between them was normally limited to the exchange of social pleasantries and the formal business of family enterprise.’’
It has been claimed that Andrew is her favourite child, a possibly flimsy assertion, but when he sabotaged his already tarnished reputation with a disastrous interview about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, she wasted little time in deciding that he had to step down from public duties. It was the reiteration of a theme that has run through her adult life: She loved her family, but the institution of the monarchy came first.