The silence that filled the corridors of Buckingham Palace, of Sandringham, of Balmoral, of the royal yachts and trains, was not the silence of peace. It was the silence of people who had learned through long and careful practice that certain things were not safe to say, that certain reactions were not permitted, and that their entire professional existence depended on their ability to absorb something, to contain it, to give it nowhere to go, and to continue afterward exactly as though nothing had happened. This was the silence that surrounded one of the most photographed, most relentlessly observed men in the world, and it hid beneath the constant attention something that the people closest to him understood and the people furthest from him did not. He had a temper, not the small manageable kind that everyone has, but something more particular, something documented and witnessed across decades by the men and women who served him.

It operated at the center of one of the most powerful households in the world, and it was managed year after year by the staff who had learned that managing it was the price of admission. They were not allowed to react to it. They were not allowed to discuss it. They were certainly not allowed to repeat any of it outside the walls within which it occurred.

This is the story of what they absorbed, of the man whose temper became one of the worst-kept secrets in British public life, of where the temper came from, of the boy who became the man, of the wounds that never healed, and of the staff who lived alongside it. And it is the story of what it cost. Not him. He paid in his way, but he was protected by everything that surrounds a person of his position.

The cost was paid by other people: by the staff who learned to dive into thorn bushes when his carriage came charging, by the butlers who answered no, no, no when asked whether anyone should approach him, by the wife who said on at least one documented occasion that she would not come out of her cabin until he was in a better temper, by the son who described his father decades later as harsh and hectoring. The question that biographers have returned to again and again is why he was like that. Why did the temper exist? Why did it never resolve, never soften?

Why, at 96 years old, was he still capable of telling an RAF photographer to just take the picture at an event commemorating the Battle of Britain, in front of cameras and witnesses? The answer has to begin where he began, with a childhood that was one of the most disrupted any prominent twentieth-century figure ever survived. He was born on June 10th, 1921, on the dining room table of a villa called Mon Repos on the Greek island of Corfu. The detail of the dining room table has been repeated almost ritually by biographers, partly because it is striking, partly because it is true, and partly because it operates as a kind of foreshadowing.

He arrived in a house that was not really his family’s house, in a country that would within months no longer want them. His father was Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, a younger son of the Greek royal house. His mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, born deaf, possessed of an intelligence and courage that those who encountered her never forgot. He was the youngest of five children, the only boy, born after four older sisters who would scatter into German marriages and disappear into a continent on the brink of catastrophe.

The first loss arrived before his second birthday. Greece had been defeated in a brutal war with Turkey, and the blame settled on a handful of senior figures, including Philip’s father, Prince Andrew. He was arrested, placed on trial, and for a period of months was in genuine and credible danger of being executed. What saved him was the intervention of his cousin, Britain’s King George V, who arranged for a Royal Navy ship, HMS Calypso, to evacuate the family in late 1922.

Philip, eighteen months old, was carried aboard in a converted orange crate that served as his cot during the voyage. It is one of the small, almost mythologized details of his early life, a baby in a fruit box, a family in flight. They settled in a house in the Paris suburb of Saint Cloud, lent to them by a wealthy aunt. They had no real money, no country, no clear future.

For a few years the family was, by all accounts, genuinely affectionate. And then, between 1930 and 1933, in a sequence so rapid and total that it is difficult to describe without sounding implausible, every element of that household disappeared. His mother, in 1930, suffered a mental breakdown of considerable severity. The diagnosis was schizophrenia, though modern readings suggest something within the bipolar spectrum.

She was committed against her will to a sanatorium in Switzerland. The biographer Hugo Vickers described it as literally a car and men in white coats coming to take her away. Sigmund Freud was consulted on her case, and the recommendation he offered with the genuine confidence of medical authority in 1930 was that her ovaries should be exposed to x-rays in order to force her into early menopause, addressing what was assumed to be an underlying sexual etiology of her symptoms. His father made his own decision about what to do with his life.

He left. Not dramatically, but completely. He moved to the south of France, installed himself in Monte Carlo with a mistress, and did not return. He maintained technically his marriage, but disappeared from the family in any practical sense, spending the remainder of his life on the Riviera drifting and drinking until he died there in 1944 without ever really seeing his son again.

Philip would describe this much later with the same flat, uninflected register he applied to most difficult material. It’s simply what happened, he said. The family broke up. The four sisters, in the same period, married, all of them within roughly eighteen months of each other between 1930 and 1931, all to German princes, men increasingly aligned with the Nazi movement that was about to come to power.

Three of the four husbands would join or be involved with the Nazi party. One of those sisters, his beloved Cecil, would die in 1937 in a plane crash that killed her, her husband, and their two small children. At her funeral, the senior Nazi official Hermann Göring was present. So, within roughly three years, between his eighth and eleventh birthdays, his mother was institutionalized, his father left the family, all four sisters married and moved to Germany, and the household in Saint Cloud was dissolved.

He was sent, alone, an eight-year-old boy with no apparent home, to England to be raised by various members of his mother’s family, the Mountbattens, whom he barely knew and who took him in not exactly out of love, but out of duty. He attended a preparatory school called Cheam, where he would receive no visits from his mother for the duration of his time there. In 1933 he was sent to a school in Germany, Schloss Salem, owned by the family of one of his German brothers-in-law, chosen partly because the connection meant the school fees could be reduced. He stayed briefly before transferring in 1934 to Gordonstoun in Scotland, where the school’s founder Kurt Hahn had relocated in flight from the Nazis.

He did not see his mother between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1937 at all. Not for visits, not for holidays. He had no contact with her, no letters, no communication of any kind. She was simply gone.

There is a phrase that biographer Sally Bedell Smith uses to describe this period: dysfunctional. It is by any reasonable standard an understatement. The losses were not the kind that allow for resolution. There was no death the family could collectively grieve, no clear ending that would have permitted the slow work of mourning.

The losses were ongoing, ambiguous, suspended. His mother was alive but absent. His father was alive but absent. His sisters were alive but on the other side of a continent, in a country that would soon be Britain’s enemy.

The structure of his family had not died. It had simply, quietly, completely disappeared. He developed very early what those who knew him later would describe as a fierce self-sufficiency. He learned to need nothing, or to behave as though he needed nothing.

He told one biographer much later with the same flat affect, “I just had to get on with it. You do. One does. ” This phrase, “One does,” recurs in his accounts of his childhood with a frequency that begins to feel almost like an incantation.

Whatever happened, one got on with it. One absorbed the loss. One did not complain, and one did not display the difficulty, and one did not, under any circumstances, ask for help. His grandmother was old and grieving.

His uncle George was kind to him in his way, but died of bone cancer in 1938 when Philip was seventeen. Yet another loss. After George’s death, responsibility transferred to his uncle Louis Mountbatten, the more famous Mountbatten, the one history would come to know simply as Dickie. Louis was, by every account, a brilliant and ambitious man who genuinely cared about his nephew.

He was also, as biographer Giles Brandreth describes him, a well-intentioned control freak. There was, in 1937, another loss, the one Philip himself would describe as the worst of them. His sister Cecilie died in a plane crash along with her husband, her mother-in-law, and her two young sons. She had been four months pregnant.

The body of her newly born baby was found in the wreckage. Philip was sixteen. He attended the funeral in Darmstadt, walking in the procession alongside relatives who included senior figures of the Nazi government. He did not, as far as anyone has ever recorded, weep.

He absorbed it. He continued. One does. What this kind of childhood produces is by now fairly well understood.

It produces what attachment researchers call avoidant attachment, the deep orientation of a person who has learned very early that closeness is unsafe, that need is dangerous, that the wisest course is to manage distress alone and display nothing that might invite further withdrawal. It produces an intolerance for vulnerability, one’s own and other people’s. And it produces in many people a particular kind of anger, not the anger of someone who feels wronged in any specific way, but the deeper, more diffuse anger of someone whose foundational experience of the world has been abandonment, who has spent the rest of their life managing the fact of that abandonment without ever being able to address it directly. The anger attaches itself to small frustrations.

It expresses itself most readily toward people who cannot retaliate. He would say later, in a moment of unusual self-reflection that has been preserved because of how unusual it was, “I don’t seem able to say nice things to people, though I’d like to. Why is that? ” The question is the most honest thing he ever said about himself.

There is a particular relief that comes from finally encountering an institution that knows exactly what it is doing. For Philip, that institution was the Royal Navy. He entered Dartmouth in 1939 at the age of seventeen. The Mountbatten family was a naval family.

His grandfather had been First Sea Lord. His uncle Louis would, in time, become First Sea Lord himself. He passed out of Dartmouth as the best cadet in his term, awarded the King’s Dirk and the Eardley Howard Crocket prize. He served during the Second World War with genuine distinction.

He was at the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, operating the searchlights on HMS Valiant, work for which he was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Greek War Cross of Valor. He served on the Murmansk convoys. He was present in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender. By the end of the war, at the age of twenty-four, he was one of the youngest First Lieutenants in the Royal Navy.

This was the man Princess Elizabeth fell in love with. The love had started earlier, when she was thirteen and he was eighteen, and she had visited Dartmouth with her parents and seen him for the first time. When the engagement was finally announced in July 1947, after King George VI had insisted that his daughter wait until she was twenty-one, Philip was twenty-six. He had given up his Greek and Danish royal titles.

He had taken British citizenship. He had adopted as his surname the Anglicized form of his mother’s family name, Mountbatten. He arrived at Westminster Abbey on November 20th, 1947, no longer Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, but Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, recently created His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. He continued in the Navy after his marriage, served two more years of active duty in Malta, where he and Elizabeth lived something approaching the life of an ordinary naval couple, and then, in February of 1952, when George VI died and Elizabeth became queen, his career ended.

The Navy had been his life until he was thirty. From thirty onward, his life would be something else entirely. There was no constitutional role for him. The husband of a reigning queen had no defined position.

The last consort of a queen regnant had been Prince Albert, and his role offered no template for a man arriving in the same situation one hundred years later. The Buckingham Palace into which Philip moved in 1952 was an institution that had been operating in essentially its current form for decades. Its senior staff had their own ways of doing things, their own assumptions about what should and should not change, their own loyalties. Philip wanted to modernize the household, to make it more efficient, less encumbered by what he saw as outdated procedures.

The courtiers almost uniformly did not want him to change anything. They saw him as the foreigner. His suggestions were received, considered, and quietly buried. He was, in this period, genuinely powerless.

He was a thirty-year-old former naval officer accustomed to command, and he had been placed in a position where command was structurally and immovably not available to him. This was the soil in which the temper found its most receptive ground. Royal author Ian Lloyd has described this period with unusual directness: Philip’s frustration with his subordinate role and his annoyance that, in the early days of her reign, his dutiful wife slavishly followed the wishes of the palace old guard and Winston Churchill, led him to occasional bursts of temper. The anger was at the gap between what he expected to find and what he actually found.

The achievement was supposed to deliver respect, autonomy, the right to be taken seriously. Instead he found that the achievement counted for very little inside the world he had married into. What this produced, across the early years of the reign, was a man who was, in the words of those who observed him most closely, permanently on the brink of anger. The phrase comes from biographer Giles Brandreth, who interviewed Philip across a forty-year period.

Brandreth’s portrait is not unsympathetic, but it does not avoid what it found: a defensive man who’d never risk looking inadequate and was seldom calm. He could appear charming and easygoing, and suddenly he’d be formal and distant, sullen and crabby for no apparent reason. The phrase “for no apparent reason” is important. The temper did not arrive in response to identifiable provocations.

It was a quality of his presence, a permanent low-level reservoir of frustration. Brandreth describes a particular pattern: when you said something, his response might be a snort, a snub, or a merry laugh, as what he wanted mostly to do was disconcert. There was, additionally, the question of his marriage. It was a genuine love match.

But the marriage also contained, from the moment Elizabeth became Queen, a structural difficulty that was not really about love at all. He walked behind her at official events. He was outranked every day by the woman he was married to. He had given up his career to support her, and she, bound by institutional pressures, advised by courtiers who saw him as the foreigner, was often unable to give him what he believed he had been promised.

The result was that he began to take it out, in small and not-so-small ways, on the woman who had married him. “He could be brutal,” recalled a former member of staff who heard him berate the Queen with, “Don’t talk such rubbish,” or, “You’re completely wrong. ” These were not arguments in the ordinary sense. They were brief and brutal interruptions in which Philip dismissed something Elizabeth had said with an abruptness that those who heard it found genuinely shocking.

Margaret Rhodes, the Queen’s first cousin and lifelong close friend, described his temper in straightforward terms when she was finally asked to do so on the record. She recalled Philip’s awkward habit of jumping down people’s throats. “He was like that with the Queen. ”

The Queen’s own response, according to multiple sources, was complicated.

In the early days, the Queen, aware of the huge sacrifice Philip had made, tolerated his outbursts. There is a documented incident, recounted in multiple biographies, that captures both the dynamic and the way it was managed. It occurred during a voyage on the royal yacht Britannia sometime in the 1950s. There had been between Philip and Elizabeth what those who recorded the incident described simply as a contretemps.

Whatever was said, it had upset the Queen sufficiently that she withdrew. Her majesty was heard to say, “I’m not going to come out of my cabin until he’s in a better temper. I’m going to sit here on my bed. ” This is, by the standards of the British royal family in the 1950s, an extraordinary statement.

It is the closest thing in the historical record to the Queen acknowledging that her husband’s temper was something that produced consequences, and that she had strategies for managing it. The staff watched this. They watched it for decades. They learned the precise vocabulary of the man at the center of the difficulty, the looks that signaled the temper was rising, the tones that meant the worst was about to happen, the moments after the worst when it was safe again to enter the room.

They were not paid to discuss what they saw. They were paid to absorb it. There was a further dimension to all of this. Philip was not an obtuse man.

On the contrary, he was quick, observant, capable of making connections that less alert minds missed. And there were moments when he allowed something of his own self-awareness about the temper to surface. The most revealing was a comment he made to a family friend, recorded in the biographies: “I don’t seem able to say nice things to people, though I’d like to. Why is that?

” The question is plaintive. He wanted to say nice things. He was aware that he often could not. The staff who served Philip closely developed their own protocols.

Grant Harrold, who served as a butler to King Charles between 2004 and 2011, has provided one of the more useful accounts. His memoir, published in 2025, describes a moment that captures the dynamic. “I always remember this one time. I think I was cleaning up after breakfast in the dining room.

I looked outside and saw this gentleman walking around. Immediately I recognized it was Prince Philip. I went to one of the other butlers and said, ‘Should we go out and see if he needs anything? ‘ They all looked at me and said, ‘No.

‘ And I said, ‘Why? ‘ They all continued, ‘No, no, no. ‘” The colleagues did not explain why. The new butler was left to draw the necessary conclusions.

“I think they were a bit nervous of him,” Harrold said. “He was blunt. He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, if I can say that. ”

You learned the warning signs: the slight tightening around the jaw, the particular angle of the head, the change in the rhythm of his speech, the specific quality of the silence that meant he was deciding whether to let something pass.

These signals were not discussed openly. They were communicated through the look exchanged between two senior members of the household when they had both noticed the same change in his manner. A household of dozens of people had organized itself around the moods of a single man. There were periodically moments when the absorbing failed.

The most documented involved photographers. The most famous of his photographer outbursts occurred in July 2015 at events commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. He was ninety-four years old. “Just take the f***ing picture,” he said, losing patience with an RAF photographer.

The phrase made the news. It was treated as a gaffe, another colorful incident in the long catalog of things he had said that he probably should not have said. The press had decided what kind of figure Philip was, and the figure they had decided on absorbed these moments as features rather than bugs. Photographers who covered his carriage driving events developed a particular set of stories.

“Whenever I was given that task, I would check my life insurance, as he could be dangerous at times, especially when he was on his horse and carriage,” one royal photographer recalled. “More than once he would full charge towards me. Once I had to dive into a thorn bush to get out of his way, and he muttered a similar oath to me, even though I was doing his carriage championships a massive favor. ” The thorn bush was not metaphorical.

It was a real thorn bush, into which a working photographer had thrown himself in order to avoid being run over. Many of the staff genuinely liked him. This is a documented feature of the relationship. Grant Harrold, the butler who had been told no, no, no about approaching him, also said in the same memoir, “But I adored Prince Philip.

That’s what I liked about him. I liked the fact that he didn’t suffer fools and he did speak his mind. If he swore at you, he swore at you, but people liked it when he swore at you. That was you getting to see the real Prince Philip.

” Both were true. The affection coexisted with the absorbing. It did not replace it. There is a particular loneliness available to the children of difficult fathers.

It is the loneliness of having a parent who is present physically, officially, and yet who cannot see you. This was the loneliness of Charles, eldest son of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II, born on November 14th, 1948. The mismatch was not subtle. Charles was, by every account, a sensitive boy.

The word recurs across decades: sensitive, gentle, thoughtful, easily distressed by harshness. Philip had no available category for what his son was. Such a child was not, in Philip’s framework, simply a child of a different temperament. Such a child was soft.

The sensitivity was not a feature to be respected. It was a defect to be corrected, and the correction was the application of toughening influences. Philip believed he was helping his son. He had absorbed the conviction that what he was doing was the same thing that had been done to him, and that the doing of it had made him capable of surviving.

Charles experienced none of this as love. In the past, the heir has described his father as harsh and hectoring. The two words are precise. In 2016, Philip spoke with royal biographer Giles Brandreth and recognized that “Charles is a romantic and I’m a pragmatist.

That means we do see things differently, and because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling. ” The framing presents the difficulty as a fixed feature of the natural order. The most consequential expression of Philip’s pragmatism concerned the question of where Charles would be sent to school. The decision came due in 1962 when Charles was thirteen.

The conventional choice would have been Eton. Philip did not want Eton. He wanted Gordonstoun, the school he himself had attended, famous for its emphasis on physical hardship. He had thrived there.

He had, by his own retrospective account, sadomasochistically enjoyed the cold showers, runs in the rain, corporal punishment, and compulsory games, which he agreed made youngsters into self-contained, considerate, and independent adults. Charles arrived at Gordonstoun in 1962 and almost immediately began to suffer. He was bullied relentlessly. He was a target precisely because of the qualities his father had been hoping to extinguish.

He hated it. He described the school in later interviews as “Colditz in Kilts. ” He later described it as a prison sentence where he was a target for bullies. He wrote to his family during his time there.

The letters that have survived are heartbreaking in their restraint. He did not get help, not from his father, who saw the letters as confirmation that the school was doing its job, not from his mother, who believed that questioning Philip’s decisions was not her role. He emerged in 1967 with qualifications that allowed him to proceed to Cambridge, and with a permanent, unhealable resentment toward the man who had sent him to a school that had nearly broken him. In 1994, Charles participated in a televised biographical documentary directed by Jonathan Dimbleby and offered a series of carefully phrased but unmistakably critical observations about his father’s emotional unavailability.

Philip was furious. Charles has also blamed his father for his marriage to Diana, which was doomed from the start. Whether the blame is accurate is a question on which serious people disagree. Philip did not force Charles into the marriage in any literal sense.

What he did do was apply the kind of pressure that, in a relationship of the kind he had with his son, was almost impossible to resist. The relationship was not entirely without warmth. When Philip died in April 2021, at the age of ninety-nine, Charles spoke publicly about him with what observers identified as genuine emotion. He referred to his dear papa.

The tribute was not the tribute of a son who had nothing but resentment. But the damage was real. The hectoring had produced its predictable result. The boy who had been told, again and again, that he was not the right kind of boy had grown into an adult who carried, beneath the public composure, a permanent uncertainty about whether he was the right kind of adult.

There is a particular dread that develops in the people responsible for managing a public figure with no internal filter. This was the dread of the press secretaries and senior household figures responsible for managing the consequences of what Philip chose to say in public. The British press, by long convention, called these moments gaffes. The word was mild.

It implied a category of behavior that was forgivable, even endearing. What the word did not capture was the cumulative weight of what was being filed under it. In 1986, on a state visit to China, he addressed a group of British students studying in Beijing. The visit was diplomatically sensitive.

“If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed,” he said. The British press reported it as a gaffe. He did not apologize. In 1998, speaking with a British student who had been trekking in Papua New Guinea, he asked, “You managed not to get eaten then?

” In 2002, he shocked a Bangladeshi teenager at a London youth club by saying the fourteen-year-old “looks as if he is on drugs. ” The same year, he is reported to have asked Australian Aborigines, “Do you still throw spears at each other? ” During a 1995 walkabout, he asked a driving instructor in Oban, Scotland, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test? ” In Kenya in 1984, after accepting a small gift from a local woman, he asked, “You are a woman, aren’t you?

”

What is striking is the consistency of the target selection. The recipients were almost without exception people in subordinate positions: nurses, drivers, junior staff, members of minority communities. He did not direct comparable comments at his social equals. The comments flowed in the direction of safety.

The temper, when it surfaced in public, surfaced where it could not be answered. There were occasional exceptions, and they are illuminating. In 2013, Philip attended an event at Buckingham Palace that featured Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani activist who had survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban. “Children go to school because their parents don’t want them in the house,” he said, prompting giggles from Malala.

She was being polite. She protected him. There was one further category of public moment, captured at family events. At the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018, Philip was ninety-seven.

He had recently undergone hip replacement surgery. Grant Harrold, present in his professional capacity, has reported what he heard Philip say in the moment after the public ceremony had concluded. “When Prince Philip came out, he turned to the Queen and said, ‘Thank f*** that’s over. ‘” The remark was not part of any public record.

It surfaced only because Harrold decided it was worth preserving. This is what the staff had been absorbing for seventy years. What produced the temper? The conventional account is the childhood, the losses, the abandonment.

This account is true. But what was specific to Philip’s case? The answer has to do with a category of experience the literature calls ambiguous loss: losing someone who is not in fact dead. His mother was not dead, but she was institutionalized, then released, then institutionalized again.

He could not mourn her because she was not gone. He could not engage with her because she was not available. This was also his experience of his father. Children who experience this kind of multiple, simultaneous, ongoing ambiguous loss develop a particular set of adaptations: an unusually intense self-sufficiency, a strong intolerance for emotional vulnerability, and a tendency to convert sadness and grief into anger.

This is not a moral judgment. The temper was a psychological compensation. The boy who could not safely be sad about his mother’s absence learned to be angry about small frustrations. The grown man could not safely acknowledge the foundational wound, so he expressed its weight through outbursts directed at whoever happened to be available.

What is striking is that he understood this, intuitively. In moments of unguarded reflection, he gave indications that he knew something in him was producing something he wished it would not produce. The question, again, is the heart of the matter. He could not say nice things because saying nice things requires a particular kind of openness, and the openness had been systematically closed off in him at the age when openness was supposed to be developing.

He had been taught by the experience of his early childhood that the people you opened toward were the people who left you. There is a final dimension to the wound. His mother, Princess Alice, returned to his life. She had spent years founding a Greek Orthodox order of nuns, had hidden a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Nazi occupation, and was later honored as Righteous Among the Nations.

She came to live at Buckingham Palace in 1967 when she was eighty-two and Philip was forty-six. She lived there for the last two years of her life. The relationship that had been broken when Philip was a small boy was in those final years partially repaired. When she died in 1969, she had almost nothing to leave him.

What she had given him in those final two years was different. She had given him the experience of having his mother near him. He had not had this for the previous fifty-something years. Whether he allowed himself to mourn her in the privacy of his inner life is not something the historical record tells us.

The temper continued. The marriage ended in the formal sense on April 9th, 2021, when Philip died at Windsor Castle at the age of ninety-nine. He had been married to Elizabeth for seventy-three years and four months. Elizabeth survived him by seventeen months.

The two of them had spent more than seven decades bound to each other. The accounts of those final years are for the most part gentle. He was more visibly tender with her in the final years than he had been at any earlier point. The temper, while it had not disappeared, had softened.

Elizabeth’s grief when he died was visible. She had said in earlier years that he had been her strength and stay. The complications had been real, and she had absorbed them, but the love had also been real, and she had inhabited it. The staff who had served Philip across the decades had, by the time of his death, mostly retired.

Some of them have written about it. The disclosures have been, for the most part, measured. The staff who served closely have not, on the whole, produced bitter accounts. They have produced the more complicated kind of recollection that long professional service tends to produce, difficulty alongside affection.

The deepest resentments, paradoxically, came from the people who could not absorb him because they had no available exit. The deepest resentments came from his children. Charles, who became king in September 2022, was the most affected. He had loved his father in some real sense, and had also been damaged by him.

The damage had not, in any final way, been repaired by the late-life softening that had touched the marriage, but had reached his relationship with his son only partially.