The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ comments like that did nothing for the Prince’s fragile ego. And where better to seek solace for life’s knocks, setbacks and dilemmas than with Camilla, who might laugh and tease him but would do so gently and kindly, almost in a maternal way, and who was loyal to her bootstraps. He would speak to her on the phone for hours, pouring his heart out, or write her long expansive letters – all of them handwritten with a fountain pen in black ink. His head was always buzzing with ideas and torturous thoughts about life and his curiously ill-defined role in it. They always had plenty to talk about, as they always would; conversation came easily between them and they shared the same sense of the ridiculous. She didn’t falsely flatter him, she wasn’t angling for anything, and she was one of the few people who’d never been in awe of his status. She treated him like a normal person, as she had when they were together, and if ever he behaved badly, or was selfish or thoughtless, she wasn’t afraid to tell him so. She was a proper friend.

      When they’d first known one another, Charles didn’t hunt, but in the intervening years he had discovered the sport and found it thrilling. The Queen never hunted – her interest, like her mother’s, was racing – but her father, King George VI, had been a great enthusiast, as was his father, and on back through the generations. Charles on the other hand had grown up playing his father’s game, polo. He absolutely loved it, but it is a summer sport; and so, encouraged by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, the Queen’s Crown Equerry, he wrote to the Duke of Beaufort in 1974, asking if he could join his famous hounds for a day.

      The Duke of Beaufort’s foxhounds are one of the few remaining private packs of hounds in the country, although since the ban in 2004, they now set out to follow trails and not foxes. They are also the most prestigious. They live very luxuriously in kennels on the Badminton House estate, the Duke’s magnificent ancestral home in Gloucestershire, where hounds have been kennelled since 1640, and have pedigree records dating back fifty-four generations to the mid-1700s. They hunt over 760 square miles of south Gloucestershire and north Wiltshire, much of it owned by the Duke – and while they are deadly for a fox, they are some of the softest animals you will ever come across.

      The 10th Duke laid on an extra meet with some friends specially for the Prince’s benefit. He found it ‘exciting’, ‘challenging’ and ‘dangerous’, an ‘extraordinary thrill’, and became passionate about it. The Queen’s advisers were anxious he would upset the anti-bloodsports lobby, but she thought him old enough to make up his own mind, and so Charles continued to hunt. After the ban in England and Wales, neither he nor Camilla, nor his sons, could be seen to break the law and none of them has hunted since. But for many years before that, he and Sir John travelled the country in search of the best packs to ride out with – always unannounced. He didn’t want to antagonise the saboteurs, so he seldom attended the meet. He would make arrangements with the Master to join the hunt five or ten minutes after they had moved off, and rather than jostle alongside the rest of the field, he would get special dispensation to ride up at the front with the huntsman.

      The polo season was all over by September, when the polo ponies were turned out to grass for a well-earned rest, and the hunters that had spent the summer idly munching grass were trotted round the lanes to get them fit for the hunting season. This started with cub hunting in August, which allowed the huntsmen to train inexperienced young hounds to follow the scent. Proper hunting began in October and ran through the winter until March or April, leaving just a month before the polo season began again.

      Hunting is a highly dangerous sport and because of that inspires great camaraderie, so that even if Camilla went hunting alone she would always be amongst friends, everyone looking out for one another. Horses are heavy, strong and unpredictable. A hundred and one things can go wrong, and it takes just one to consign a rider to a wheelchair for the rest of their days, or worse. It’s no wonder they start the day with a stirrup cup of sloe gin before moving off. And there is a social side to hunting that has nothing to do with horses; it includes an annual hunt ball, which is the highlight of the season and an opportunity for great drunkenness and for all the simmering sexual tension built up in the saddle to find an outlet.

      Camilla is a highly competent horsewoman. She has no fear on a horse, she is completely at one with the animal and apart from once falling and breaking her collar bone, she has never had any serious accidents, but she’s never been a risk-taker. As in life, so in hunting. She would take the day at a gentle pace and never leap blindly over any obstacle that presented itself. She jumped if it was necessary, but if something looked dangerous and there was the option of an open gate instead, she would take it. And she only ever hunted one horse, so she would go home when her horse was tired, usually in the early afternoon.

      Charles was a very different rider, as men often are. He rode his horses hard, pushing himself and his mounts to the limit. He went for the biggest and most difficult jumps, and because he came to the sport so late in life, he took a lot of falls in the early days. He needed to feel the fear and worked off a lot of his demons on the back of a horse. He invariably had a fresh animal waiting at the rendezvous point halfway through the day, by which time his first horse would be very tired.

      Charles rode his polo ponies in the same way, taking risks and sometimes suffering terrible falls. And on the ski slopes he was no different. He always went for the most difficult routes down a mountain, pushing himself to the limit – only feeling truly alive, perhaps, when the adrenalin was pumping. It is all part of his complexity. He is who he is by accident of birth; he is famous, he is revered, he attracts crowds of people wherever he goes, but not because he’s the fastest man on earth or the highest jumper, the most talented actor, the most gifted singer or the most astonishing chef. He is famous because he is the Queen’s son and he will one day be King, and no matter what he does with his life, he will be remembered in history books and studied in centuries to come. He happens to have done a huge amount of good in his adult life – building Poundbury is just one small part of it – and there will be plenty to fill those history books, but that is not why he is famous. His fame is entirely vacuous – that is his curse – and something with which he has always struggled to come to terms and one of the reasons, no doubt, why he has constantly sought approval.

      10

       An Education

      Charles’s parents have always been remote. The Queen acceded to the throne when he was just three years old, and as a young mother she had no choice but to demote her family to second place. Thanks to the demands of the job, she and her husband were abroad for months at a time and there was no thought of taking their children with them.

      Times have changed and lessons have been learned. Charles’s grandchildren, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, often travel with their parents, William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and they are a star attraction; but in the 1950s, this seemed impractical and unthinkable. Charles and his sister Anne, two years his junior, were left behind with their nanny, the terrifying Helen Lightbody, in the care of their grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. This is how the Prince of Wales developed such an enduring affection for his grandmother and why his relationship with his mother and father is more distant. And the Duke of Edinburgh was tough on Charles.

      Prince Philip had his naval career taken away from him on the death of King George VI in 1952. From that day forward he has played second fiddle to his wife – something that did not come naturally. He has made the most of it, working tirelessly to support the Queen, and he has a raft of achievements under his belt, not least the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, which recently celebrated its sixtieth year and is now run in forty-eight countries. He has also been a prime mover in the field of conservation and technology and is responsible for cutting waste and helping to streamline the monarchy. He is often thought СКАЧАТЬ