Thomas Charles

The King and Wales
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-914595-45-5
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 340 Seiten

'It's a book which takes its time and really delves into the pivotal moments in Charles' connection with Wales... We are offered a glimpse at a man who has, over the decades, forged both a more formal support to Wales and a more personal warmth for it.' - Emma Schofield, Wales Arts Review 'This is a highly readable and lively book, full of anecdote and character... Thomas needs to be praised for producing a well-written and pacy book on a controversial subject which is neither hatchet job nor fawning tribute.' - Myfanwy Alexander, Nation.Cymru Before Charles became King, he was Prince of Wales. It was a role he took more seriously than any predecessor of the modern British monarchy. From the moment he was created Prince of Wales in 1958 until his accession to the throne, Charles's approach to the role was to serve Wales and to promote Welsh life. But what impact has he had on the country, and what impression did the Welsh leave on him? This book examines the relationship that the Prince nurtured with a nation that meant much more to him than an honorary title. Dozens of interviews have helped Huw Thomas to unearth the untold stories of Charles's work in Wales, alongside the key role he has taken in developing industry, culture and conservation. For a man who has spent almost a lifetime waiting to be King, Huw Thomas reveals how Wales prepared Charles for the crown. Despite his initial reluctance to come to Wales as a student, his time spent learning the history and language of the Welsh at Aberystwyth in the 1960s fostered a passionate commitment to the nation. Wales has not always returned the compliment, with popular protests and more subtle snubs to his involvement in Welsh affairs. And yet those who have worked with him, and who call him a friend, cite a remarkable ability to make a difference without making a fuss. As a diplomat he is credited with bringing major employers to south Wales, offering jobs to a workforce that had been decimated by the collapse of the coal industry. As a cultural ambassador he revived royal patronage for the arts in Wales and sponsored the finest performers to emerge from the land of song. And as a champion of the natural environment, he has backed the farmers and conservationists who are nurturing the Welsh countryside, not least by employing traditional crafts to create the first royal home in Wales for 400 years.

Huw Thomas is a journalist whose writing and broadcasting covers the beating heart of Welsh life. Born in Maesteg in the post-industrial south Wales valleys, for the best part of twenty years he has reported on the people and places of Wales. He began in local radio, before joining the BBC after a brief stint producing business news for Bloomberg. His work has taken him around Wales and the UK, covering key events from the Queen's Jubilee to the Olympic Games, and the Hay Festival to the National Eisteddfod. Stories have also lured him abroad, allowing him to interview the descendants of Welsh settlers in Patagonia and Bonnie Tyler at the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden. Huw is an accomplished TV correspondent, having covered the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, while his presenting skills have seen him front programmes for BBC Wales and network radio.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thomas, Huw

Leseproben

Introduction

‘For me it is a way of officially dedicating one’s life,
or part of one’s life, to Wales.
And the Welsh people, after all, wanted it.’

It is a spring morning in 1969 when a blue sports car glides to a stop outside a Welsh country house. From the driver’s side a man emerges quickly and fumbles briefly with his light brown suit. A buttoned-up blue shirt and his tie, taut and restrictive, remain unruffled by the short journey. The man is self-conscious, his hands quickly slide into the unstitched pockets of his suit jacket. While the sixties swung, this man remained rigid. He glances at the newsreel camera which whirs its colour film. The glance never fixes on the barrel of the camera lens, instead the eyes scatter until he has turned around on the spot. He takes a small, awkward pirouette towards the back of the car to exchange inaudible small talk with his companion before he returns to the safe space between car door and front door; that sweet spot where the camera can sustain a few more seconds on the face of the man who will be King, but only for as long as he can bear to be on show.

Charles had almost finished a pre-investiture public relations epic when this scene played out on the drive of the manor house on the Faenol estate near Bangor, north-west Wales. His MG sports car, new in 1968, was the ostentatious shell for a shy public schoolboy whose path in life was indelibly etched at the moment of his birth. His friends, at school and at Cambridge, may have shared the great privileges of the aristocracy. But while their gilded paths opened doors to investment banks and the Inns of Court, Charles would take an almost lifelong walk along a deep-pile red carpet. Its destination was the crown of the United Kingdom. It is perhaps unsurprising that when life sets such a singularly simplistic and elusive goal the bearer is forced to define their existence by other achievements. The freedoms offered by great wealth and class are curtailed for royalty by the duties and service that is expected of them. For the heir to the throne, such expectations are closely defined and restrict the liberties that their siblings, cousins and aunts could indulge. But for an heir in need of an agenda, a self-defining role can be created to fill the time between reaching adulthood and reaching the throne.

The Prince’s coming-of-age coincided with an awakening in society that swept aside the stuffiness of post-war Britain and celebrated the free-thinking and free-loving that was fostered by the 1960s. Two decades earlier it had seemed radically modern that the Home Secretary had not been present to witness Charles’s birth. James Chunter Ede was the first Home Secretary in over a hundred years to have been absent from the arrival into the world of a senior royal, a practice rooted in the fears of Tudor and Stuart monarchs that their line of succession would be stolen by a changeling or a chancer. Despite the dawning modernity, Charles had been born into an ancient system of monarchy and was expected to keep it going. His supporters, while championing the ambitions of a modern prince, also pressed his pedigree. He was fifth in descent from Queen Victoria and could claim a direct route back to all the kings and queens whose names had graced schoolbooks, postboxes and pub signs for centuries. There were connections made, too, with Charlemagne, Vortigern and Cadwallader, although genealogy means most Europeans alive today could probably claim a similar pedigree. Journalists published complex family trees that linked the future Prince of Wales with the ancient and original title-holders. It was possible to claim that Charles was twenty-fourth in descent from Llywelyn the Great, a king of Gwynedd and one of the last native Princes of Wales before the title’s thirteenth-century conquest by Edward I. The public relations effort was designed to embed the idea that this was a boy prince whose lineage did not deviate from the warrior men who had gone before him.

While history charted the bloody battles for Welsh territory and Welsh titles by neighbouring rulers, the happy birth of a modern heir focused attention on celebrating tenuous genealogical links, overlooking the murderous conquests that had shaped the family tree. The grandson of Llywelyn the Great suffered a beheading which not only cut off the Welsh claim to the title Prince of Wales, it also created a totem in the story of Wales that bolstered sentiment for independence from the English, and fomented in some an ongoing rejection of the title when worn by any heir to the throne since Edward II.

If Charles had a hereditary connection to the last native Welsh princes, it was a connection that was lost on Welsh historians. ‘With the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd an epoch ended – the Wales of the Princes,’ wrote Gwyn Alf Williams in When Was Wales? ‘The Welsh passed under the nakedly colonial rule of an even more arrogant, and self-consciously alien, imperialism. Many historians… have largely accepted the verdict of nineteenth-century Welsh nationalism and identified the house of Aberffraw as the lost and legitimate dynasty of Wales. Llywelyn ap Gruffydd has become Llywelyn the Last,’ wrote Williams. Whatever the bloodlines drawn to impress Charles’s pedigree, the blood ran clear for some.

And yet the line of succession had never landed during a time of such huge societal change and liberation from the chains of tradition. The relaxing attitudes of the 1960s presented an opportunity for Charles to write his own job description. In 1968 the journalist Dermot Morrah charted the early years of the Prince, having evolved from being a correspondent for The Times to occasionally writing the Queen’s speeches. His authorised biography of Charles’s young life described the upbringing of the Prince and, assuming a long reign for his mother, offered a thesis on the heir’s adulthood:

Prince Charles will require to find some new direction of princely activity for the common good, something that grows out of the needs of the modern world as it is, and as it is becoming. He belongs to that world, and, at the end of the thoughtful years on which he is about to embark, will be better able than his elders to judge how best it can be helped.

The prospect of determining his own ‘princely activity’ must have seemed both daunting and delightful. He had an enviable opportunity to map out a role that allowed his preferred pursuits of culture and countryside to be the anchor points of a period as heir which, even then, seemed to offer a good thirty years before having to worry about becoming King.

As a modern Prince of Wales he could heal the scars left on the House of Windsor by the previous bearer of the title, Edward VIII, who took the throne and handed it back in pursuit of that most uncommon royal commodity: love.

Charles’s shoulders would carry the investiture robes a little more sensibly than another Edward, the seventh to bear the regal name when he eventually grasped the crown. Before taking the throne in 1901 Edward VII had spent the best part of sixty years gallivanting the globe as the playboy Prince of Wales. Aged thirteen he had attended a party thrown by Napoleon III in Paris which exposed the young prince to the vices available beyond Victorian England. While his mother’s name became a synonym for stuffy conservatism, the young Prince rebelled against his restrictive childhood. He is said to have lost his virginity aged nineteen on a ten-week tour of Ireland with the Grenadier Guards and continued to travel widely in order to indulge his passion for women and gambling. His mother’s longevity ensured he could spend decades exploring the attractions of the expanding Empire.

Examples from recent history may have been enough to chasten any of Charles’s more radical ideas for his time as Prince of Wales. In fiction, too, there were near-the-bone notes of caution. ‘To be Prince of Wales is not a position – it is a predicament!’ said Alan Bennett’s heir to the throne in The Madness of King George.

In 1969 it was Charles’s chance to either make it work or mess it up. He would proceed in plain sight of those who wished him to fail, and knew not only that there were a minority of committed anti-monarchists who were determined to protest his path to the title of Prince of Wales, but also that there existed a largely indifferent majority who may tune in as much for the spectacle of the investiture as they would for his wife’s Panorama interview twenty-five years later.

Sympathy for a prince can be a struggle as much in the 2020s as it was in the 1960s. When Charles’s youngest son told the American television presenter Oprah Winfrey in 2021 that he had felt ‘trapped’ in the clutch of the royal family, she responded to Prince Harry with a jaw-dropping call for clarity. ‘Please explain how you, Prince Harry, raised in a palace, in a life of privilege, literally a prince, how you were trapped.’ Similarly, ahead of Charles’s investiture, there were crocodile tears from the era’s cultural critics. The republican Labour MP Emrys Hughes hid many truths in his sarcastic take on Charles’s ceremony at Caernarfon Castle. ‘If a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the...