The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
A PRINCE AT HOME
When the cameras turn off and the front door of Highgrove closes, what is life really like for the Prince of Wales? Clive Aslet, former editor of Country Life, offers a rare glimpse into the inner world of our future king
Following the Prince of Wales around the country, as I’ve done many times over the past 25 years, is nerve-racking. He moves at speed. At the age of 70, he has the inexhaustible energy of his parents. And after a lifetime of talking to experts and travelling the globe, he knows so much. As people who have spent time with him often say, he’s a polymath. And you don’t have to agree with him to be awed by the range of subjects he’s made his own.
He was, until he recently rearranged his commitments to take on more of his mother’s duties, patron of more than 400 organisations. The subjects they cover are dizzying. An alphabetical list would include architecture, the armed forces, art, business, the church, communities, countryside, environment, farming, health, horticulture, housing, medicine, music, young people, wildlife, woodlands… to name a few. Which makes it hard for those on the fringes of the group travelling with him (he’s always surrounded by people). Suddenly a question will be darted at you. Unless you’re mentally on your toes,
The Prince Charles Story should really be an opera, though it would take a Verdi to write it
you’ll make a fool of yourself. Half the time he seems to know as much as the experts. This doesn’t make the Prince uniquely wise; his detractors would rather that he stuck simply to his ceremonial duties. But it is part of what makes him a truly extraordinary individual, a great, if at times somewhat under-utilised, national resource.
There is nobody quite like him. His court can seem to operate on Shakespearean lines: access to the Prince is key, and those who control access are in a powerful position – until toppled. He also lives in a manner that is surely unlike anyone else, even in an age when billionaires may be far richer in disposable income than the Royal family. When travelling, for example, he’ll only eat food prepared from ingredients pre-delivered to his hosts. Earlier this month, I heard one of them speak about this with an indignation that he would never have expressed to the Prince himself. But the same host acknowledged that he slaves long into the night on correspondence that other grandees would delegate.
I once heard that he was given an exceptionally large truffle by a head of state. He revered it so much that it was removed from its box every night for a period of communion – until it was rashly taken to the Middle East where it was reduced to a bad smell. Apart from such mystical relationships, he has demanding but ascetic tastes; his breakfast consists of freshly squeezed orange juice, a small bowl of cut fruit, special muesli, milk from the Windsor Castle dairy, granary toast and honey. He doesn’t bother much with lunch.
The Prince Charles Story should really be an opera, though it would take a Verdi to write it. Perhaps it’s too late. The drama of his first, tragic marriage, followed by the return to public esteem and personal happiness, with his marriage to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, has already been played out on the stage of the world’s media for everyone to see. To see, but not always to understand. Because no dramatist could have predicted the relationship with his sons.
While Diana, Princess of Wales was a famously warm mother, and her family said they would direct the course of her sons’ development after her death, in reality it has been their father who provided stability. Prince William and Prince Harry could so easily have gone off the rails, given the collapse of their parents’ marriage, followed by the agony of losing their mother, but both are well-grounded, with a high sense of duty – much of the credit for this must be down to their father.
And then there is his bond with his own mother. During his speech at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the Queen’s 92nd birthday, he referred to her as ‘Your Majesty, Mummy’ and for a moment it was obvious that they’re more than simply ‘the firm’.
My first personal encounter with the Prince came in 1994, when I was editor of Country Life magazine. Several years earlier I had written an article for the magazine about the Duchy of Cornwall from an historical perspective, and that year I had the chance to visit it in his company, on his annual tour. As the only journalist present, I happily scrambled after him on the outer fringes of his entourage.
It was Midsummer’s Day, but it might have been November. The granite glistened in the damp; rain gusted across Bodmin Moor in horizontal drifts. As the Prince’s hand moved to open a curtain covering a plaque on a newly restored working mine (‘on a clear day, it gleams like the Taj Mahal,’ said one of the archaeologists, implausibly), it blew open by itself. But nothing
would deter the Prince, who was out to meet his tenants.
Squeezed into the front room of one of the cottages with his retinue, he drank tea and listened as a farmer told him about ‘charming’ – an antidote to ringworm in cattle and humans. ‘There’s a lovely lady who does it. After three or four hours there’s a tingling sensation, then the ringworm turns white.’ They then chatted happily about anaerobic effluence digesters. ‘There’s one at the Home Farm at Windsor,’ said the Prince, ‘but it took years of going on at them before they would introduce it.’
Going on at people is, perhaps, the only way to achieve change. On that day in 1994, with its economic outlook that was as gloomy for farmers as the weather, the Prince was dispirited: ‘It’s difficult to make farmers see the point in adding value, in getting together to market their goods, and producing quality,’ he told me. A particular disappointment was that the newly established Duchy Originals couldn’t find a Duchy tenant to supply organic oats. ‘You can’t get people to do it,’ he said, ‘which is a bore.’ The Prince leads and it’s a constant bugbear that the rest of the world won’t always follow.
At the same event two years later, my principal memory is of running to keep up with him. We were in the Isles of Scilly, which he reached by helicopter; it then took him from island to island. I charged after him as best I could by boat – an unequal contest, as he talked to boat builders, fishermen, holidaymakers, and flower growers. ‘Nothing really changes,’ I heard him say to one lady, who had been visiting St Agnes for 48 years. ‘There’s too much change everywhere else.’ It was 1996, not a good year for the Prince: he was under intense criticism from some quarters for the collapse of his marriage. But he’s always felt at home among country people – and never more so than during what others might see as his punishing whistle-stop tours around the Duchy.
This sense of duty and commitment to the workload that goes with his position is something he undoubtedly inherited from his mother. Even his critics accept that the Prince is always working – last year he was named the hardest-working member of the Royal family, with 546 official engagements, more than both of his sons combined. Papers submitted for his approval routinely come back covered in his famously spidery script. Through the ages, diligence has been one of the first requirements of a successful monarch; and lack of it has been the undoing of many. The Prince of Wales has it in spades.
From his father, meanwhile, he inherited physical bravery – seen in the all-or-nothing manner in which he played polo, hunted and skied – and outspokenness. Admittedly, his mother’s frugality seems to have bypassed him; he is like an earlier namesake, Charles I, in his artistic tastes. But he manifests another quality, which should endear him to the British people when he becomes king: a devotion to home.
Over nearly 40 years, he has poured effort, imagination and money into creating a personal refuge at Highgrove, his home in Gloucestershire. The Duchy of Cornwall bought it in 1980, the year before the Prince’s marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. It was chosen for its proximity to the Beaufort Hunt and the polo clubs in which he played, yet it also provided a canvas for his architectural ideas. Even the box for the policemen outside the gate has a bell-shaped Cotswold-stone roof.
From an early point, he made it clear that he intended to make Highgrove the centre of his life, rather than London.
The Prince leads and it’s a constant bugbear that the rest of the world won’t always follow
Meetings with charities and business leaders were first held there in marquees, then, from the late 1990s, the Orchard Room designed by Charles Morris. There, he is surrounded by all the elegance and beauty he finds such a consolation after the buffetings of the modern world. It combines enormous houseplants in baskets with chintz curtains, lots of cushions, and wonderful paintings of landscapes and horses from the Royal Collection. A hint of the exotic was introduced by the textiles that he has collected on his travels to Morocco and elsewhere. (Superior shopping is one of the relaxations of his foreign trips; selected vendors bring their wares to wherever he is staying.)
His principal relaxations at home, meanwhile, centre around the Highgrove gardens. There is an obelisk with a rabbit warren at the base: the Prince likes to watch the rabbits from the terrace. There’s also a hut, out of bounds to all others, to which he can withdraw to meditate. With its organic farm and exuberant garden, his Gloucestershire home is an expression of his spiritual beliefs. ‘The garden,’ says the Prince, ‘really does spring from my
heart and, strange as it may seem to some, creating it has been rather like a form of worship.’ Always changing – delphiniums took over a swathe of the gardens this year – Highgrove is the painter Prince’s greatest personal creation. Fortunately, the Duchess of Cornwall seems to be happy to leave him to it; as she readily admits, she doesn’t get much of a look in.
The Prince’s other homes in London, Scotland, Wales and Romania are similarly personal, full of unexpected and curious objects, but with a gradation of formality between them. Clarence House, as befits his London residence, is firmly at the top. Japanese lacquer, French marquetry, pairs of neoclassical urns and gilding emit a discreet message about the cultural power and reserves of the Royal family, amid a setting of total domestic control; not a book is out of place, not a scrap of paper to be seen, in this setting of seeming ease. The Castle of Mey in Caithness was his grandmother’s holiday home. The garden has been developed (it was previously designed to bloom in August only, the month the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was there), but the interiors are being reverentially kept as they were. In Wales, Llwynywermod is a remodelled farmhouse, rented out when the Prince is not there. Zalánpatak, a house full of local crafts and textiles near a Transylvanian village, has a fairy-tale magic: it sits on the edge of fields blowing with wild crocus and dawn is greeted with the sound of cowbells, as cattle sway out from their barns into the pasture. No ringing of telephones disturbs the tranquillity (not least because the copper wires had been stolen).
The project of the moment is Dumfries House, a splendid Adam mansion in Ayrshire. The place was in a sad condition when I first saw it – the balusters of the bridge linking the house to the arboretum and gardens had been kicked into the river. But now, the house been immaculately restored and, when in Scotland on official business every summer, the Prince no longer uses Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh as his base, but stays at Dumfries House.
What strikes me, from these houses and from my own encounters with the Prince over the past decades, is his passion for whatever buildings or projects, charities or subjects he turns to. These aren’t the shallow or capricious stuff of drawing-room conversation, but matters of visceral conviction. I once met him, unexpectedly, at a concert at a country church; he had an equally decided (and informed) view about the music we heard. And every year, on his birthday, he contributes an article to Country Life about many more of his views – last year it was about the need to save Britain’s trees from pests and diseases.
When I invited him to guest edit Country Life in its entirety, he promised me, ‘I’ll say some things that will make people sit up,’ to the horror of the palace officials. It was leftto my successor Mark Hedges to pull off the coup, in what were more settled times for the Prince. He first guest edited it on his 65th birthday and has done so once again for this 70th birthday.
Once, gloriously, he visited the office of the magazine. It was in 2000, when the magazine was located on the 21st floor of an office building in south London. Like most royal visits, it was preceded by a scrabble by management to get the place looking shipshape. There were, however, some things beyond their control. In those days, staff brought dogs to work, and our fashion editor’s otherwise beautifully behaved and elegant black Labrador, Bella, was sufficiently affected by the tension to disgrace herself shortly before the Prince’s appearance on our floor. (The offending deposit was removed, and lest any residual stain should affront the royal eye, our lovely chief sub – equal to any occasion – chose that spot to make her curtsy when he passed through the office.) I’m sure he would have been amused if he’d known.
As it was, on entering the editor’s office on the corner of the building, his eye was not caught by the antique furniture or old books, but went immediately to a crack in the window, caused by the exceptionally hot summer the previous year, and never replaced. He pointed to it, laughed, observed at length about the horrors of modern architecture, and chaffed the hard-as-nails and unsmiling chief executive of the conglomerate that owned Country Life about her parsimony in not getting the pane fixed. She could only grind her teeth. It was a golden moment. The Prince had spoken truth to power. Long may he continue to do so.
Clive Aslet was editor of Country Life from 1993 to 2006
Highgrove is the painter Prince’s greatest personal creation