Royal experts have claimed that King Charles III was closer to the Queen Mother as a young boy, as his mostly absent monarch mother wasn’t a comforting figure during an apparently miserable childhood.
ITV documentary Charles: Our King aired tonight at 9 pm, giving an inside perspective on his upbringing and how it shaped a sensitive young boy into the King he is today.
Heartwarming black and white videos painted an idyllic family image, showing the Queen smiling with joy at a four-week-old Charles.
Nevertheless, royal commentators said that they believed the young prince had a miserable childhood.
The late Queen was coronated in 1953 when Charles was four years old. A clip of him at the coronation showed him standing next to his grandmother the Queen Mother, as they looked on at the monarch being crowned in front of the entire world.
Catherine Mayer, author of Charles: The Heart of a King, said that he grew up in an isolated world and that she dubbed it ‘Planet Windsor’, and that it works on a slightly different set of rules to planet Earth. It looks and sounds like ours but it’s extremely lonely.
She said he was extremely young when his mother became Queen and the bond he had with his mother was never as strong as it might have been because she had a lot of responsibilities.
The children lived on the top floor of Buckingham Palace at the time where there was a nursery wing and the Queen would visit her children.
Penny Junor, author of Charles: Victim or Villian? said that the Queen would go up and see Charles but more often than not she held back, she wasn’t that all-encompassing comfort that a child normally expects from a mother.
Clips were then shown of Charles beaming up at Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, King George VI’s widow, on a train platform, as the narrator explained that he would develop a close bond with the Queen Mother as his parent were frequently away travelling the globe.
In 1954 the Commonwealth tour lasted six months, and Catherine Mayer described the moment Charles was reunited with his mother after her long time abroad. She said that finally, the royal yacht anchored, and the dignitaries stood waiting, and the young prince was so enthusiastic he lined up with the dignitaries to see his mother.
But the Queen was extra busy, so his Grandmother stepped up.
Charles as well as his siblings had nannies to alleviate the Queen of any care they needed, while their mother was busy waving, smiling and attending functions, and being a good mother was not one of them, but then being Queen wasn’t a 9-5 job, it was a vocation, and it must have taken up almost all of her time, energy at such a young age. She had a duty to the Realm and Commonwealth, which always came first, even before her children.
Perhaps the Queen Mother spoilt him and his siblings, and gave him a sense of entitlement, although he was going to be the next King, he didn’t actually need a sense of entitlement, he was literally entitled.
Then there was the footage of the Queen returning from a long tour and shaking 3-year-old Charle’s hand when she meets him, I mean, what normal mother does that? But the Queen wasn’t a typical mother because her title, and position as Monarch made it impossible for her to be a normal mother.
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