Queen for a New Day

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In their private lives, the aristocratic cocoon was not entirely protective. After her parents' messy divorce when she was eight, Diana, her brother and two sisters shuttled back and forth between separate households. Charles was not caught up directly in such marital maelstroms, but he saw at close range how the marriage of his aunt Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon cracked, then tottered and finally fell into little gaudy bits.

Being Prince of Wales was not without its sobering precedents either. Queen Victoria's son "Bertie," eventually Edward VII, had to wait nearly 60 years before he became King in 1901, and so dissipated himself passing the time that he was ill-prepared for the task. (Charles may have to wait almost as long, but rejects any suggestion that Queen Elizabeth cut short her reign, feeling that abdication undermines the mystique of the monarchy.) More sobering still was Charles' immediate predecessor, known after his 1936 abdication as the Duke of Windsor. His pitiful progress from resort to spa was followed by millions. All those awful photographs of the Duchess and the Duke, his skin scalded by flashbulbs, black ashtrays crowding the table like visas from a purgatorial kingdom of nightclubs: El Morocco, the Stork, the Lido. Those craterous eyes, staring off sidelong past the camera into the unforgiving background of history, which would soon reveal him as a dupe of fascism, an anti-Semite and a racist.

Charles, however, had quite another destiny to follow, and stronger men, like his father, to guide him. He was being readied for a kingship that "more and more depends on personal example," remarked the late Earl Mountbatten, who is considered to have had as strong an influence on Charles' life as any teacher—or even any parent. The politics of the future King of England are not a matter for the public record, although Mountbatten pointed out that "Charles is completely devoid of color prejudice. He just can't understand what the prejudices can be about. In this respect, the Queen, Philip and Charles are the complete antithesis of the Duke of Windsor."

Nevertheless, up against a few of the street realities that the rest of us contend with every day, the Prince often sounds like a football coach (as when he makes one of his frequent appearances on behalf of British trade), or like a referee who is not used to getting his shirt dirty. "See if you can sort things out," he told a group of wrangling police and black demonstrators. "You cannot go around like this."