Introduction
‘For me it is a way of officially dedicating one’s life,
or part of one’s life, to Wales.
And the Welsh people, after all, wanted it.’
It is a spring morning in 1969 when a blue sports car glides to a stop outside a Welsh country house. From the driver’s side a man emerges quickly and fumbles briefly with his light brown suit. A buttoned-up blue shirt and his tie, taut and restrictive, remain unruffled by the short journey. The man is self-conscious, his hands quickly slide into the unstitched pockets of his suit jacket. While the sixties swung, this man remained rigid. He glances at the newsreel camera which whirs its colour film. The glance never fixes on the barrel of the camera lens, instead the eyes scatter until he has turned around on the spot. He takes a small, awkward pirouette towards the back of the car to exchange inaudible small talk with his companion before he returns to the safe space between car door and front door; that sweet spot where the camera can sustain a few more seconds on the face of the man who will be King, but only for as long as he can bear to be on show.
Charles had almost finished a pre-investiture public relations epic when this scene played out on the drive of the manor house on the Faenol estate near Bangor, north-west Wales. His MG sports car, new in 1968, was the ostentatious shell for a shy public schoolboy whose path in life was indelibly etched at the moment of his birth. His friends, at school and at Cambridge, may have shared the great privileges of the aristocracy. But while their gilded paths opened doors to investment banks and the Inns of Court, Charles would take an almost lifelong walk along a deep-pile red carpet. Its destination was the crown of the United Kingdom. It is perhaps unsurprising that when life sets such a singularly simplistic and elusive goal the bearer is forced to define their existence by other achievements. The freedoms offered by great wealth and class are curtailed for royalty by the duties and service that is expected of them. For the heir to the throne, such expectations are closely defined and restrict the liberties that their siblings, cousins and aunts could indulge. But for an heir in need of an agenda, a self-defining role can be created to fill the time between reaching adulthood and reaching the throne.
The Prince’s coming-of-age coincided with an awakening in society that swept aside the stuffiness of post-war Britain and celebrated the free-thinking and free-loving that was fostered by the 1960s. Two decades earlier it had seemed radically modern that the Home Secretary had not been present to witness Charles’s birth. James Chunter Ede was the first Home Secretary in over a hundred years to have been absent from the arrival into the world of a senior royal, a practice rooted in the fears of Tudor and Stuart monarchs that their line of succession would be stolen by a changeling or a chancer. Despite the dawning modernity, Charles had been born into an ancient system of monarchy and was expected to keep it going. His supporters, while championing the ambitions of a modern prince, also pressed his pedigree. He was fifth in descent from Queen Victoria and could claim a direct route back to all the kings and queens whose names had graced schoolbooks, postboxes and pub signs for centuries. There were connections made, too, with Charlemagne, Vortigern and Cadwallader, although genealogy means most Europeans alive today could probably claim a similar pedigree. Journalists published complex family trees that linked the future Prince of Wales with the ancient and original title-holders. It was possible to claim that Charles was twenty-fourth in descent from Llywelyn the Great, a king of Gwynedd and one of the last native Princes of Wales before the title’s thirteenth-century conquest by Edward I. The public relations effort was designed to embed the idea that this was a boy prince whose lineage did not deviate from the warrior men who had gone before him.
While history charted the bloody battles for Welsh territory and Welsh titles by neighbouring rulers, the happy birth of a modern heir focused attention on celebrating tenuous genealogical links, overlooking the murderous conquests that had shaped the family tree. The grandson of Llywelyn the Great suffered a beheading which not only cut off the Welsh claim to the title Prince of Wales, it also created a totem in the story of Wales that bolstered sentiment for independence from the English, and fomented in some an ongoing rejection of the title when worn by any heir to the throne since Edward II.
If Charles had a hereditary connection to the last native Welsh princes, it was a connection that was lost on Welsh historians. ‘With the fall of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd an epoch ended – the Wales of the Princes,’ wrote Gwyn Alf Williams inWhen Was Wales?
