The True Story of Young Prince Charles, as Seen on 'The Crown'
Prince Charles’s story is one of the most captivating tales in The Crown’s third season. As the series opens up the stage for the next generation of royals, we get a deeper understanding of the heir to the throne through his formative years, as he grows into his role as the Prince of Wales and falls deeply in love for the first time. Here, we look at Charles’s real-life journey as an evolving young man.
He was a college thespian.
Prince Charles’s first big scene is one where he’s backstage rehearsing for a school production. In reality, the Prince of Wales was a theater kid in college. He joined the drama club Dryden Society at his school, Trinity College, in Cambridge, in 1968, according to Sally Bedell Smith’s biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life (per Town & Country).
In the club, he participated in a number of productions, several of which were comedies. Apparently, one of his roles was as a weather forecaster. Today, his love for the arts still stands; he’s a royal patron of The Old Vic, London’s not-for-profit theater.
He did study in Wales for a semester.
As The Crown accurately depicts, Prince Charles spent a semester at Wales’s Aberystwyth University in 1969 to learn about the country’s language and culture before being invested as its prince. And as the show reveals, Welsh nationalists were not in favor of an English prince taking the title. In an ITV documentary, he recalled the “hotbed of radicals” he encountered at school, per The Telegraph.
“Every day I had to go down to the town where I went to these lectures, and most days there seemed to be a demonstration going on against me. With a counter demonstration usually by splendid middle aged ladies who got out of a bus,” he said in the film, which commemorated his 50th anniversary as the Prince of Wales. “Anyway, that was an interesting experience.”
He also explained that he did learn Welsh, as is portrayed in the Netflix drama; however, he didn’t learn as much of it as he wanted to. “I did my utmost to learn as much as I could. But in a term it’s quite difficult, and I’m not as brilliant a linguist as I’d like to be,” he added in the doc.
Prince Charles was, in fact, tutored by a Welsh nationalist named Dr. Edward Millward ahead of his investiture. “He had a one-on-one tutorial with me once a week,” he recalled of their lessons in 2015. “He was eager, and did a lot of talking. By the end, his accent was quite good. Toward the end of his term, he said good morning – ‘Bore da’ – to a woman at college; she turned to him and said: ‘I don’t speak Welsh!’”
He did speak Welsh at his investiture.
As the eldest son of the queen, Charles was the Prince of Wales ever since his mother ascended the throne (he was nine years old), but the sovereign wanted to wait to invest him with his title until he could appreciate it as an adult, according to BBC. Surely enough, when Charles was 20, after studying Welsh language and culture at Aberystwyth University, he was invested by his mother on July 1, 1969, at Caernarfon Castle.
Many parts of the ceremony were actually organized by Lord Snowdon, a photographer and Princess Margaret’s husband at the time. He set up the arena so that it could be easily filmed and broadcast. It was one of the biggest broadcasts for an event in Wales, the BBC reported, with 4,000 guests watching in the castle, 19 million watching at home in Great Britain, and more than 500 million watching all over the world.
The ceremony included a public reading of the letters patent declaring Charles would receive “the title, style, honour and privilege of the Principality of Wales and Earldom of Chester,” according to History Extra, the website for the BBC History Magazine. The queen also bestowed him with the symbols denoting the Prince of Wales: a girdle, sword, coronet, rod, and mantle. The new Prince of Wales swore an oath to his new position as well.
Charles really did say his speech in both Welsh and English; a transcript of the address is printed on his official website. The parts about him inserting messages of feeling undervalued and like an outcast, which was highlighted in the show, don’t appear in the original copy.
The prince later said of the grand event, “It was a remarkable occasion, which I shall never forget.”
His relationship with the queen seems better in real life.
In this season, we get a look of the queen’s relationship with her children for the first time on the show. Her bond with Charles appears to be shaky and fraught with tensions over what royal duty requires, according to showrunner Peter Morgan’s interpretation. After he shares in his investiture speech that he feels overlooked and like an outsider, the queen reprimands him, which leads Charles to admit that he doesn’t feel seen or heard in his family.
The real-life Prince of Wales doesn’t open up much about his bond with his mother, but he did tell author Jonathan Dimbleby for an authorized biography in 1994 that it was “inevitably the nursery staff” who spent the most time with him in his early years, according to Town & Country. He was, however, very close with the queen’s mother. At her funeral in 2002, the prince said he “adored her” and that she had “meant everything” to him since he was a boy.
Princess Anne shut down rumors that the monarch was a distant parent in a 2002 BBC documentary. “I’m not going to speak for anyone else but I simply don’t believe that there is any evidence whatsoever to suggest that she wasn’t caring. It just beggars belief,” she said, per The Telegraph. She noted that as kids, she and her siblings also understood their mother’s job, which included traveling and being away from home.
“But I don’t believe that any of us for a second thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did,” Anne added. “I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true."
She also denied suspicions that the queen was a “disciplinarian” or a controlling mom. In fact, Her Majesty gave her children freedom to explore and make mistakes. “We’ve all been allowed to find our own way and we were always encouraged to discuss problems, to talk them through,” Anne explained. “People have to make their own mistakes and I think she’s always accepted that.”
Last year, at Charles’s 70th birthday celebration, the queen honored her eldest with a heartfelt toast, giving us a rare, tender look at their real-life bond. “Over his 70 years, Philip and I have seen Charles become a champion of conservation and the arts, a great charitable leader — a dedicated and respected heir to the throne to stand comparison with any in history — and a wonderful father,” she said.
He did meet Camilla Shand at a polo match.
Charles and Camilla Shand did, as portrayed in The Crown, meet at a polo match in the early 1970s. However, the exact accuracy of the details of their rendezvous and her entanglements with Andrew Parker Bowles are unclear. We do know that Charles did join the Royal Navy in 1971, which ultimately brought an end to his budding romance with Camilla. (It’s unconfirmed whether Lord Mountbatten and the Queen Mother actually broke them up, which the show would have us believe.)
After Charles joined the army, Camilla rekindled her relationship with Parker Bowles, whom she originally met in 1965, according to biographer Penny Junor. They married in 1973, then divorced in 1995. Charles met Lady Diana Spencer in 1997 and married her in 1981. The prince reportedly revisited his relationship with Camilla in the mid-1980s. He and Diana finalized their divorce in 1996. Of course, the Diana drama is saved for Season 4.
He was close with Edward VIII.
An unlikely companion to Prince Charles in all of his growing pains? His great uncle, Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne, causing his younger brother (Queen Elizabeth II’s father) to ultimately become King George VI. This season presents an interesting parallel between Charles and Edward, being outcasts because their family disapproved of the people they fell in love with. And because of that, they bond. They write letters to each other, and Charles often visits him and his wife, Wallis Simpson, in France.
Charles and the former king actually were close in real life. Time points out that the book Charles: The Man Who Will be King, which is based on excerpts of the prince’s diary, reveals the young man’s tight bond with his great uncle. He even asked Edward if he wanted to return to England for his final years, according to one of his diary entries.
The Crown Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.
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