How beast boasted of royal friendship
PETER Ball boasted of being a confidant to Prince Charles and of his close links to the Royal Family. The disgraced bishop attempted to exploit his royal contact to ‘bolster his position’, the report says.
He used it in particular to influence Lord Carey and others from whom he hoped to receive sympathetic treatment.
Ball’s solicitors claimed to have a supportive letter from a royal during his initial investigation for abusing a novice monk in 1992, although no copy of it has never been produced.
Following his police caution and the retirement of his twin, Michael Ball, as Bishop of Truro, the brothers lived together in a house rented from Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall estate, which had acquired it ‘specifically for that purpose,’ the report says. Ball publicly claimed that it was his ‘loyal friend’ the Prince of Wales who ‘allowed me to have a Duchy house’.
The Duchy said the house was purchased, and let on a commercial basis, by the Duchy estate, not by the Prince. The report added: ‘Ball clearly intimates on many occasions, to Lord Carey and others, that he enjoys the status of confidant of the Prince of Wales…
‘There are frequent references in Ball’s letters to Lord Carey and others to his attending royal functions and to meeting members of the Royal Family. In one letter to Lord Carey in 1998, Ball wrote: ‘I get more and more invitations… I have spoken to 400 voluntary workers in Eastbourne... I am shortly to preach to the Grenadier Guards; preach at Wellington College, confirm at Radley College and next year preach at Dartmouth to what looks like a full turn-out of the Royal Family.’
Ball arranged to meet Lord Carey in April 1996 to deposit a collection of his correspondence with Charles in the Lambeth Palace Library for ‘posterity’.
But the report said a review of correspondence held by the Church found ‘no evidence that the Prince of Wales or any other member of the Royal Family sought to intervene at any point in order to protect or promote Ball’.