Graphic: Elena Scotti (Photos: Getty Images, Shutterstock)
In late March, Prince Charles was one of the earliest internationally famous names to be diagnosed with covid-19. He was at high risk by virtue of his age—71 at the time—and the situation had the makings of a terribly ironic stroke of fate. Here was a man who had waited much of his adult life to step into the role for which he was born, who might falter at the very threshold. He wouldn’t be the first heir unexpectedly felled by a global pandemic, either; Queen Victoria’s grandson, Albert Victor, was killed in a flu pandemic in 1892, putting Charles’s great-grandfather on the throne. The risk to his 93-year-old mother was also immediately apparent—around the same time, a footman with whom she had routine contact tested positive—and suddenly, William looked much, much closer to the throne. But, as it turns out, Charles fared better than the younger prime minister, Boris Johnson, and recovered quickly, while Queen Elizabeth II avoided the disease entirely. Charles will go on waiting for a bit longer.
Charles has already held the title of “Prince of Wales” longer than any other man in British history. If he ever takes the throne, he’ll be the oldest person ever to ascend, surpassing William IV, who preceded Victoria and only reigned for seven years before dying at 71, one year younger than Charles is now. He’ll be significantly older than Edward VII, Victoria’s son whom she infamously kept waiting for decades, doling out responsibilities only grudgingly. Charles has spent his decades-long wait attempting to carve out a meaningful role for himself, taking on a variety of sometimes quixotic, often mocked causes that range from environmentalism and interfaith dialogue with the Islamic world to fighting with architects over modernism and doctors over alternative medicine. At the same time, the media and the public have cast him in a variety of ill-fitting parts, including dashing eligible bachelor, prince charming, and the caddish adulterer—the latter of which put a considerable dent in the reputation of an institution that survives thanks to public goodwill. He has even faced doubts about his fitness for the job for which he was born, most famously expressed by Diana, Princess of Wales, in a blockbuster TV interview: “I don’t know whether he could adapt” to the limitations inherent in the role of king. Not only has he spent the vast majority of his life waiting—he’s spent much of that time with a question mark hanging over his head, and attempting to prove himself.
Charles has spent the last few years in particular steadily advancing toward kingship, transforming himself slowly from Prince of Wales to the king in waiting. But The Crown is dredging up old memories and depicting them in a way that makes Charles look particularly terrible, at a time when the crown is facing numerous challenges—Harry and Meghan’s departure, Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged misdeeds, and the advancing age of the longest-reigning monarch in British history, setting the stage for a delicate and high-stakes transition that hasn’t happened since the last days of the globe-spanning British Empire. And much of the responsibility for pulling it off will lie on Charles striking the right balance with his public image.
Born in 1948, a year after his parents’ marriage, Charles’s birth and early life were the stuff of international news; browsing through the New York Times archives, for instance, uncovers stories about his first haircut, his first birthday, his christening (with the first photo of the baby), a car trip to Sandringham at 7 weeks old, and the fact that he didn’t get any of the cake baked for his first birthday (because it had rum in it). The broad strokes of his childhood are well known: On top of the already distanced parenting style of their era and social class, Charles’s mother was busy with the demands of her roles as heir to an ailing king and then as a new monarch, frequently traveling all over the world for long stretches at what was essentially a demanding, full-time job. She frequently deferred to her brusque husband on matters related to Charles, and Philip thought that what his sensitive child needed was toughening up, culminating in years at the chilly Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, which was explicitly designed to harden privileged boys. Charles later called it “Colditz with kilts,” which suggests how poorly suited he was to the environment—as well as demonstrating his sometimes out-of-proportion sense of grievance. (Colditz was a Nazi POW camp.) In all this Philip was at odds with his mother-in-law, the Queen Mother, who thought Charles’s sensitivity required a bit more gentle management and frequently erred on the side of babying him; they were close until the day she died.
Charles entered adulthood in a tumultuous time, when the royal family looked increasingly square at best and ludicrously out-of-touch at worst; in pictures from his student days at Cambridge, Charles looks like Thurston Howell III lost at Woodstock. And so it was particularly important for the Palace to situate the heir as part of a long and majestic tradition, and to publicize it as much as possible. Hence his 1969 “investiture” as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in Wales, an elaborate ceremony in which he promised to serve as his mother’s “liege man of life and limb,” swearing “to live and die against all manner of folks” on her behalf. As Carolyn Harris explained at History Extra, while the whole thing was stuffed with medieval-looking flourishes, the ceremony only goes back to 1911 and has only been performed for one other person, Charles’s disgraced great-uncle Edward VIII. It was designed to address rising Welsh nationalism and, in Charles’s case, the need for the Windsors to be visible in an age of mass media.
Meanwhile, the media had its own role in which they were eager to cast him: Eligible Bachelor. Charles was a hot commodity in the early to mid-1970s, zipping around in his Aston Martin and dating a parade of glamorous and attractive young women (which the tabloids apparently dubbed “Charlie’s Angels”). They portrayed him as “Action Man,” according to Tina Brown and Sally Bedell Smith, eagerly chronicling his surfing, his waterskiing, his parachuting, his polo-playing, his riding to hounds. “Prince Charles was never shy of peeling off his shirt and showing a hairy chest and toned pecs,” the Daily Express reminisced in a recent article. These feats were in keeping with a long tradition: The title “Prince of Wales” was created in 1301 by Edward I for his eldest son, an expression of dominance over the conquered Welsh, and some of the men who held the title fought on their fathers’ behalf, like Edward III’s eldest son, known as the “Black Prince” perhaps for his brutal reputation in the Hundred Years’ War. There was a more recent antecedent, too: Charles’s bluff, tough, macho father, with his pre-coronation naval career and wide variety of traditionally masculine pursuits. Plus it contrasted Charles with the unsuitably, disastrously uxorious Duke of Windsor.
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