Charles, prince of Wales (b. 1948). Born during the reign of George VI, Prince Charles was 3 when his mother succeeded to the throne as Queen Elizabeth II. He was sent to Cheam School, Gordonstoun, Geelong Grammar School in Australia, Trinity College, Cambridge (where he took a degree in history), and University College, Aberystwyth, where he studied Welsh. Created prince of Wales in 1958, he was invested in Caernarfon castle in 1969. He then entered the armed forces and pursued a vigorous training programme—flying a supersonic jet, qualifying as a helicopter pilot, catapulting from the deck of Ark Royal in a Buccaneer, training in minesweepers and submarines, and commanding a mine-hunter. His private pleasures included not only painting, music, and acting, but surfing, sailing, skiing, fishing, shooting, riding, and playing polo to international standard. His reward for these strenuous activities was to be increasingly portrayed in newspapers as a ‘crank’, ‘a young twerp’, and a ‘wimp’, who admitted talking to flowers and showed an interest in alternative medicine. Protest groups soon latched on to the fact that demonstrations, preferably violent, on a princely visit gained them publicity, and he was threatened with boycotts, hunger-strikes, air-fresheners, and bombs. His public utterances on matters like the environment, modern architecture, and the preservation of natural resources, on which he feels strongly, were greeted with indignation by interested groups. He is anxious to modernize the monarchy but not all of his suggestions have been well received. In 1994 he remarked that he would like to be defender of all faiths, and not merely that of the Church of England—which, as some newspaper correspondents tartly observed, sounded as if it did not matter what one believed provided one believed something. In 1981 the prince married Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul's cathedral: the Clay Cross council in Derbyshire announced it would call a Republican Day (subsequently cancelled), and a Yorkshire councillor resolved to go on hunger-strike in protest at the cost of the ceremony. Two sons, Prince William and Prince Henry, were born in 1982 and 1984, but disharmony in the marriage was increasingly the subject of comment, and the royal couple separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996. After Princess Diana was killed in a car crash the following year, speculation at once began whether the prince would remarry. On 9 April 2005 he married at Windsor registry office Camilla Parker-Bowles, created Duchess of Cornwall.

J. A. Cannon