Take note, Omid Scobie – this is how you write a royal biography
Royal biographies are a bit like buses. You wait for one, and then two come along at once. Had Ingrid Seward’s latest book been published before Robert Hardman’s headline-grabbing Charles III, it would be receiving all of the plaudits. Although both were published mere days before the biggest royal news of the year – the King’s cancer diagnosis – they are revelatory in their own way. And My Mother and I boasts the two most important components of any riveting royal read: history and histrionics
A solid and timely 296-page whip through the life and times of the King and all those who influenced him on his path to the throne, Seward’s book revisits well-trodden paths while offering new insights into the late Queen’s final years and the impact of “Megxit”. Let’s be honest: it’s hard to be original when covering the antics of a 1,000-year-old family, which is why The Crown had to make a lot of it up.
The sign of a good royal bio-g-raphy, as opposed to a lazy “cuts job”, is the need for reviewers to issue a spoiler alert. Who knew, for example, that Meghan reminded Prince Philip so much of the Duchess of Windsor that he nicknamed Prince Harry’s wife “DOW” behind her back? While we had heard rumours that Elizabeth II had raised concerns about the “whiteness” of the American divorcée’s wedding dress – that’s Meghan, not Wallis – it’s gratifying to have it confirmed by one of the late Queen’s closest confidantes, Lady Elizabeth Anson.
According to Seward, Her late Majesty was “not comfortable” with the then-Prince of Wales standing in for Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, by walking the bride down the aisle of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and “like everyone else [she] was startled by the impassioned spoutings of the American archbishop [sic] Michael Curry”. She was also upset over Harry’s “high-handedness”, both before and after the wedding, and (says Anson) their relationship was “quite badly damaged by it all”.
Fascinating stuff – but sadly not quite as compelling as rival Hardman’s revelation that “Brenda”, as Seward reveals Elizabeth II was nicknamed by Princess Diana, was “as angry” as one royal aide had ever seen her over the naming of Harry and Meghan’s daughter, Lilibet – her own childhood nickname. Similarly, while Seward informs us, for the first time, that the late Duke of Edinburgh died suddenly in April 2021 after feeling dizzy in the shower, before the late Queen could reach his bedside, it isn’t quite as revelatory as Sir Edward Young’s memo, detailed in Hardman’s rather more forensic account of her final hours. Describing the late monarch’s last moments at -Balmoral Castle, where she died on September 8 2022, aged 96, her -private secretary wrote: “Very peaceful. In her sleep. Slipped away. Old age. She wouldn’t have been aware of anything. No pain.”
There is still some good detail in My Mother and I, however, about how the resident trooper Princess Anne rallied the relatives. -According to Seward, she was out sailing on the Moray Firth with her husband, Tim Laurence, during a break in engagements when she received an emergency call on her ship radio. Arriving before Charles, “Anne took charge of proceedings while her brother struggled with his emotions, knowing not only that his mother was dying but that he was about to become King.” We learn that, assuming the role of “unofficial hostess”, she welcomed the rest of the family “as they arrived later in the day – too late, as it turns out”. (Oh for a blow-by-blow account of the greeting Anne gave her errant nephew, fresh from his latest meeting with Netflix.)
Seward offers several explanations as to what went wrong with Harry. Pointing out that both Charles and Diana indulged his antics, while even the late Queen regarded him with “grandmotherly tolerance”, she proffers that “later events would suggest that more early discipline might have been helpful”. Diana was apparently so concerned that everyone would consider her younger son “thick” that she called on her alternative healer Simone Simmons to cure him of the headaches caused by his dyslexia. Seward confides that “Diana once told me, ‘William is very sensitive and Harry is very lively’”, then adds that Harry may have “inherited some of his father’s more unattractive characteristics”.
While the King himself “never passes a footman in a palace corridor without acknowledgment” and “loathes the word ‘servant’”, we are left in no doubt that ours is a complex monarch – and a product of his “difficult” childhood. Harry called it “genetic pain”, but Seward is more specific. The King was never bathed by his mother as a child; at school, the maids stole his underwear and the boys rigged up a microphone to catch him snoring; he loved his father, but never liked him. All of which may go some way to explaining why he still carries around a teddy bear that he sends to his wife’s couturier to be mended, with instructions to do it quickly so he can have it back.
There’s an air of melancholy throughout My Mother and I, a story of a family forced to be a Firm -carrying the motto “duty first”. One of the most interesting chapters details the King’s close relationship with his grandmother, the late Queen Mother – and how much Diana resented the omnipresence of the woman whom Seward describes as “not the gentle old lady of popular imagination but a force to be reckoned with”. She writes that Diana “hated the performance Charles put on when greeting his grandmother: he would kiss her hand in a gentlemanly way but then place kisses all the way up her arm with a theatrical flourish”. Yet while he did not enjoy the same intimacy with his own mother, the late Queen nonetheless understood her son so well that “she privately acknowledged long before anyone else that his marriage to Camilla was inevitable”.
Seward concludes: “His ‘darling Mama’ is no longer here, and he realises she is a very hard act to -follow… In the end, Charles earned the love and support that he craved all his life.” A case of no genetic pain, no gain, perhaps? After Prince Harry’s Spare, and the nonsense served up by the likes of Omid Scobie, this biography, like Hardman’s, marks a return to good old-fashioned balanced royal journalism.
My Mother and I is published by Simon & Schuster at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books