![]() Footage of Prince Philip teetering on a tricycle and zooming down a slide on the Royal Yacht Britannia contradicted his reputation as a tetchy martinet, and scenes of the Queen romping with her children were meant to dispel the notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.Ĭharles was sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned antennae were susceptible to slights and rebukes. Home movies depicted an idyllic childhood at the family’s country estates at Sandringham, in Norfolk, and Balmoral, in Scotland. Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make amends in a TV documentary tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. She was “not indifferent so much as detached.” ![]() Charles was less harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a bitter edge. easily drew tears.” While brusque, Philip was “well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke with Charles’s permission described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying” his son. Dimbleby noted that, as a little boy, Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father,” whose rebukes for “a deficiency in behaviour or attitude. When Prince Charles hit bottom after his separation from Diana, in 1992, he unburdened himself about the miseries of his youth to Jonathan Dimbleby, who was writing an authorized biography. Prince Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years of the boy’s life, though on his return from overseas duty he did take the time to teach Charles to shoot and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace pool. She managed to celebrate her son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her son, for long intervals. Yet she was often away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy, who was posted to Malta in October 1949. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two months, until she contracted measles and was forced to stop. The Archbishop of Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan that had been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children. In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders-but with great affection and good will.”Ĭharles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the start-unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood. ![]() ![]() “Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary. Under the 46-foot-high ceilings-juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in red-and-gold embroidered velvet-the infant was swaddled in white blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth. While his 22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George officially became public property.
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