The complicated relationship at the heart of the House of Windsor
In her latest book, Ingrid Seward explores why Queen Elizabeth and her heir were so very different
Last year’s fall season of royal books was a tad disappointing. In contrast, this year’s releases contain a surfeit of interesting biographies and other royal books.
One of the first of this new crop that I read was My Mother and I: The Inside Story of the King and Our Late Queen by Ingrid Seward. The veteran royal author of more than a dozen books has been editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine for the past four decades — she’s forgotten more than most authors know about the inside workings of the royal family.
Her latest is an insightful exploration of the fractious relationship between regal mother and son. As Elizabeth II’s cousin, Margaret Rhodes, explained: “The Queen loves Charles deeply. It’s just that they have a different outlook and sometimes they don’t agree.”
FYI: My review for Zoomer — ‘My Mother and I’ Offers a New Window on the House of Windsor — can be read here.
For this post, I look at three specific aspects of their lives that shaped their personalities and their relationships: how they were treated during childhood, how they express themselves, and the impact on their choice of spouses as well as their relationships with their “spares.”
While Elizabeth’s childhood was grand — she was a beloved granddaughter of King George V — she grew up as third in line to the throne. Her early years were similar to those of other aristocratic children in that she was educated at home, away from the prying eyes of the media and public. She was never thought of as a future monarch until she was 10 in 1936, the year when George V and her uncle abdicated, which vaulted her to first in line to the throne.
In contrast, Charles was a future king from the moment of his birth. His personality was shaped by the deference displayed by those around him, Seward posits. For one, he doesn’t always consider others. “He has no sympathy for trivial ailments and combats his own sinus problems by sleeping in an oxygen tent. Tiredness or oversleeping are not acceptable excuses for missing even an hour’s work, and he will never have a lie-in on a Sunday morning, even if he is feeling unwell,” writes Seward.
A small incident highlighted the difference between mother and son to Seward. She was talking to the future King when his blazer fell off the back of his chair to the floor. “He just left it there and made no attempt to pick it up. This is a man who has had valets and footmen all his life, I thought, which of course he has. The Queen would never have done that – for all her position and grandeur, she was a simple woman at heart, a ‘housewife manqué’, as Elizabeth Anson used to call her. She would have picked up her coat.”
Their differing personalities can also be seen in how they talked — while Charles is known to inject humour as well as his own feelings in his speeches and statements, his mother was the “master of the understatement.” She rarely revealed her personal thoughts to the public, reserving them to her closest friends. Sometimes, they were so cryptic as to require translation, such as her “too” statements, as deciphered by her confidante Elizabeth Anson:
‘Too white’, refer-ring to Meghan’s wedding dress, meant it was not appropriate for a divorcee getting remarried in church to look quite so flamboyantly virginal. ‘Too grand for us’ was a remark she made to Lord Mountbatten as he was relaying the virtues of Marie- Christine’s noble lineage before she married Prince Michael of Kent. ‘Too in love’ was her response to Prince Harry being under his future wife’s spell. ‘Too presidential’ described the former Labour prime minister with whom she never gelled, Tony Blair.
Though the personalities of Elizabeth and Charles were notably different, their relationships with their first loves / spouses as well as their younger sisters are remarkably similar.
Just as Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret, had an unbreakable bond throughout their lives, so has Charles benefited from his closeness to his sister, Anne. She had been the “spare” for a decade until Prince Andrew was born in 1960. Unlike Prince Harry, who fixated on comparing every part of his life to that of his older brother (right down to the size of bedrooms), the Princess Royal “developed a healthy view of her position in the royal hierarchy, which allowed her to develop her own interests in her own way.” As she said, she “always accepted the role of being second in everything from quite an early age. You adopt that position as part of your experience. You start off life as very much a tail- end Charlie, at the back of the line.”
What mother and son did have in common was their parental woes. Like others in her circle, Elizabeth left her young children to the care of nannies and other paid caregivers. “The Queen is not good at showing affection. She’d always be doing her duty,” said her longtime private secretary Martin Charteris. In turn, Charles struggled to understand his own sons, though Seward recounts how he had a good relationship with Harry until the Sussexes decamped for Los Angeles “and started using his position as the spare to make a noise.”
While “Charles was embarrassed that he was unable to stop Harry upsetting the Queen by attacking what was, in essence, his and William’s inheritance,” wrote Seward, Elizabeth fell back on her habit of compartmentalizing her reaction to family problems: “There was no point in worrying about Harry as he was not going to take notice of anyone except Meghan. William had had his problems, too, but they had mostly resolved themselves with the support and strength of his wife.”
If there is one thing that mother and son have in common, it’s how their first true loves helped them deal with the rigours of their public lives. For Elizabeth, that was Prince Philip. He drew her out of her conventional, conservative shell and was one of the few people who could speak openly and honestly with the monarch throughout their 73-year marriage.
For Charles, the route to happiness with Camilla was famously not so straightforward but their love prevailed in the end. “She has stood with me through thick and thin and her optimism and humour have seen me through,” he said at their wedding reception. Next year, they’ll celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
Camilla used her father-in-law as a model of her future role as queen consort: “‘I saw the way he supported the Queen. Not in a flashy sort of way, but just by doing it quietly, following along behind,” she recounted in a documentary about Prince Philip that aired after his death in 2021. They enjoyed spending time together: “Camilla was an excellent listener and genuinely enjoyed hearing about his life and the diverse people he had met and how amusing he was when describing them. Like Camilla, the Duke was a straight talker and the Queen appreciated how patient her daughter- in- law had been with her irascible husband.”
NOTE: This is the Thanksgiving long weekend in Canada, which means time for a bonus post that should arrive in your inboxes on Tuesday.
My latest article for Zoomer: “In ‘Q,’ Craig Brown Builds a Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II from Bits and Bobs”
“The Queen took her fame as a given,” he writes in Q. “It was part of her, something she had to live with, like a birthmark.” It was also stultifyingly repetitive; during her lifetime, she spoke to an estimated four million people. “After you’ve spoken to one million, you might get a little tired,” the author notes. Her small stock of generalized questions and answers included the resolutely neutral response, “how interesting.” By delving into these brief interactions, Brown discovered why so many people can’t remember what she said to them: according to royal protocol, the Queen asked the questions, meaning she wasn’t doing most of the talking – they were.
My latest appearance on Global TV’s The Morning Show on October 7: