It looks like royal biographer Robert Hardman was tasked with a desperate rewrite – if not a complete reimagining – of the past year for the Windsors. 2024 was the year the wheels truly came off the Windsor bus, although one could argue that same thing with the year 2020 and 2021 (and 2022 and 2023). Look, maybe it’s been a slow-motion trainwreck for five years, okay? Back to Hardman, he’s added chapters to his biography of King Charles, and in addition to Hardman clutching his pearls over what he thinks was the media’s “performative” outrage over Kate Missington and the Curious Case of Manipulated Photos, he also wants everyone to quake with sympathy for poor Charles. Poor Charles and his profiteering from public services, poor Charles and his emotional abuse of his first wife, but no – poor Charles and his health. Apparently, Charles had a never-before-disclosed “cancer scare” years ago.
Charles went to his Highgrove chapel when he was diagnosed with cancer: In good times and bad, as both Prince of Wales and now as King, Charles III likes to retreat to his ‘sanctuary’, his tiny chapel in the grounds of Highgrove, to gather his thoughts. ‘He was feeling his mortality,’ says his old university friend, Lord Chartres, former Bishop of London, who had been invited to the King’s Gloucestershire home to celebrate Holy Communion with a congregation of just three: the King, the Queen and Lady Chartres. Even if the tiny Hobbit-style refuge had been able to accommodate more that day, they would not have been welcome. It was February 25 this year, just three weeks since the King had received a diagnosis of cancer. With his treatment still in the early stages, his doctors wanted the risk of infection kept to a minimum. That meant no crowds.
Charles’s relationship with God: He was certainly not praying for some sort of miracle, Richard Chartres reveals. ‘Quite a lot of religion is bargaining with God: ‘You do this and I’ll continue to pay attention to you’ and so on,’ he says. ‘The King doesn’t have that sort of relationship.’
The statement about the king’s prostate: ‘The King and Clive [private secretary Sir Clive Alderton] thought carefully about how open he was going to be. They agreed very quickly that it would make sense to be open, though, of course, this is a house that hasn’t traditionally done that. So this was definitely a ‘change point’ in that regard,’ says a senior member of staff. The King’s candour was driven, primarily, by medical data. ‘We looked up the number of people who suffered from this and it’s something that affects so many men over 60. The King wanted to encourage other men to seek treatment.’
Kate & Charles left the London Clinic on the same day, they swear: The King, accompanied by the Queen, left through the front in the State Bentley – designed for optimum visibility – waving cheerfully at onlookers. The Princess left unobserved through a back door. The two royal patients then returned home – the King to Sandringham, the Princess to Adelaide Cottage at Windsor – to convalesce. The rest of the family, meanwhile, started to resume regular engagements.
Why Charles publicly spoke about his cancer: Says a senior aide: ‘Cancer is a very scary word if you’re a king or anyone else. It’s a big shock. But he is a great one for taking things on the chin and then saying, ‘Right. How are we going to get on with this?’ He was very clear that he would carry on doing all of the constitutional stuff in exactly the way that he did before.’
He previously had a cancer scare: Besides, one former member of the team from his Prince of Wales days reveals that the King had actually undergone a cancer scare some years before. As for announcing the news of the King’s condition, there had been very little internal debate. ‘After the earlier announcement about his prostate, it was actually an easy decision to say, ‘Well, that’s what we do these days’,’ says a member of the King’s staff. ‘We didn’t hang about because we all felt that the country does have a right to know about this – though not in forensic detail.’
I’ve gone back and forth for months about whether the smarter play for Charles would be identifying what kind of cancer he has and explaining his treatment. I think his initial statement – leaving out the type of cancer – was an okay first step, PR-wise. But the longer this goes on, it feels strange that Charles hasn’t just come out and said, I have bladder cancer (which is the rumor going around London) and this is what my treatment entails, information is power, etc. The constant squirreliness and obsessive secrecy of the Windsors leaves a lot of people cold. Especially now that we’ve started to get glimpses past the gilded lily – these people are slumlords bilking taxpayers and public services, and they want to keep a lot of sh-t secret because they know it will destroy the monarchy. But sh-t like their health issues? I honestly don’t understand why Charles and Kate haven’t both disclosed a lot more.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.