Although Philip tried as best he could to lay down the ground rules within his own nuclear, Mountbatten-Windsor, branch of the family, the Queen Mother was a constant source of opposition where Charles was concerned. She had always been, ever since he was a toddler. She never caused problems with the three youngest royal children, leading more than one royal relation to observe that the only reason why she meddled with Charles was that he was going to be king one day. She had made sure with her daughter the Queen, and now with her grandson the future King, that she would leave her imprimatur on the Crown by way of her influence over them. Her avowed reason with Lilibet had been and remained that she knew best what the Crown needed, and with Charles it was that neither of his parents ‘understood’ him the way she did. She felt that it was her right as a grandmother and queen consort to encourage him and give him all the love and direction she discerned he needed.
Being supportive of a man who will not stand up to his wife is no way to solve the underlying problem of how children should be disciplined. The Queen Mother was therefore inadvertently reinforcing the vacuum of influence Charles had within his own nuclear family. A vacuum which was also fostered by his hands-off parents whom he viewed with antagonism, for by this time Charles’s relationship with both the Queen and Prince Philip was anything but warm.
As William and Harry grew up, becoming ever wilder, word began to spread in aristocratic circles how out of control they were. The late Kenneth Rose, one of the best connected journalists of his day whose personal friendships with several of the royals was an open secret, wrote in his diary, following a weekend with Philip’s first cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten and her husband David Hicks, how thirteen year old ‘Prince William is tiresome, always attracting attention to himself. Hardly surprising when he is so spoilt by the tug-of-war of his parents, and by courtiers, servants and private detectives.’ Harry was even more spoilt.
Although Prince Philip was the paterfamilias with a huge amount of influence where his three other children were concerned, his lack of influence with Charles was noteworthy. He and the Queen’s position as parents to Charles had been so undermined over the years by the Queen Mother that parents and son were virtually estranged. They saw as little of each other as possible, and when they were together, they were polite the way strangers are. ‘There was absolutely no warmth between them. I think the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would have liked things to be different, but Charles simply wasn’t interested,’ a prince told me. Philip therefore was not in a position to provide the critical intervention everyone in the family felt William and Harry needed, in order for them to be brought up with a sufficient degree of discipline to enable them ultimately to perform their royal duties properly. So the two boys continued to be reared in their wild way, with all the royal adults bemoaning the lack of discipline their mother had decreed appropriate.
At the time, none of the royals realised that Diana was actually encouraging her sons to be recalcitrant, or that she was encouraging Harry to develop the rebellious streak which ran throughout her nature. This the boys would inadvertently reveal later on when they said that she used to tell them, ‘I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get caught.’ Of course, Diana expected them at all times to treat the staff well. She would never have tolerated them being rude to strangers when out in public. She never-endingly reiterated how they must always remember they were royal and therefore they should behave to the world at large in a royal manner. But, beneath it all, Diana was preaching the same lesson Joseph Kennedy had taught his boys: You can break the rules as long as you aren’t found out. It isn’t the rules that matter so much as making sure no one catches you out when you break them. As long as you don’t suffer the consequences of the breach, it’s okay. It has often been said that Joe Kennedy encouraged his sons to be amoral by instilling this code. If that is so, Diana was doing the same.
This freewheeling attitude was anathema to the Royal Family. The rules mattered. Humans being human, everyone would sometimes break the rules. But an awareness of being subject to the rules, as opposed to being above them, was an important part of being properly royal. No one exemplified this more than King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth. The Queen Mother had ruled her own immediate family, known to themselves as Us Four, with an iron hand in a velvet glove from the very beginning of her marriage. The king had been under the thumb of his wife from before he even slipped the ring on her finger. Their two daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, were also reared from birth to defer at all times to their mother. The former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had been a stickler for a happy home life grounded in good form and traditional values. These did not conflict at all with the royal regimen. Indeed, the way the future Queen Mother set up her family life reinforced it, for she overlaid iron discipline with a coating of charm and personability while adhering at all times to the traditional royal codes of conduct. Lilibet and her sister Margaret were therefore brought up to be perfect princesses and it would only be after the Queen Mother’s death that Lilibet’s less formal
