Royalty Inc by Stephen Bates

Author:Stephen Bates [Bates, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781314791
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2015-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

18 Of the Queen’s etchings, the Scottish poet and translator Sir Theodore Martin wrote: ‘Of them it is enough to say that the drawing is not remarkable and that, as etchings, the difficulties of the art have not been overcome.’ Modern art critics have tended to be similarly sniffy about Prince Charles’s more accomplished watercolours of the Cairngorms.

19 The puzzle was subsequently restored to its previous place in the paper. Who says the royals have no influence over the media?

Chapter 8:

‘I think we’re a soap opera’

(Prince Charles to Jeremy Paxman)

The attempt to present Prince Charles in the 1970s as something he manifestly was not: a handsome action hero who also happened to be the most eligible young bachelor in the world, was largely a creation of the British press, but not entirely so. There was some collusion from the palace and especially from the Prince’s ‘honorary grandfather’, his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, who was determined to mould him for kingship, preferably in his own image and with himself as kingmaker. Charles, a sensitive, somewhat shy, unselfconfident soul, had had to endure the sort of rugged upbringing he loathed: Gordonstoun public school followed by a time (which he enjoyed more) at a similar remote establishment in Australia, then a lonely undergraduate life at Cambridge and a period of training as a junior officer in the Royal Navy. While it was probably a more varied sequence than previous princes had undergone (with similar lack of enthusiasm) it was still a rarified and socially narrow experience, every attempt at fostering normality somehow isolating a young man born to be King. The difference was that each outing was now accompanied at every step by an obsessive media interest, for he was the first young, male heir to the throne for fifty years – and every attempt to show Charles to be a normal young man underlined the fact that he palpably was not.

In November 1948 at the time of Charles’s birth The Times had editorialised: ‘This child from the moment of his birth becomes to many peoples the symbol of their common aspirations for an even more splendid realm and Commonwealth than have been handed down to them by the virtue and prowess of their ancestors.’ And so the weight of expectation continued, especially once he had become the heir to the throne at the age of three – and has continued ever since for more than sixty years. Few people spend all their lives, the best part of seven decades, in training and waiting for their life’s real work to begin, or knowing that their destiny depends on the timing of their mother’s death. Much of the royal soap opera of the past forty years has indeed been centred on Charles, his future and the obsessive question of what sort of king he will be.

By the mid-1970s, the active search was on for a royal bride, not only among the media but within the royal family itself. Once Charles left the navy in 1976

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.