Hill House was only a day school and every evening he retreated to the security of the palace. At the age of eight, however, the boy who, as one of his biographers observed, ‘had never been shopping . . . never been on a bus . . . had never been lost in a crowd . . . had never had to fend for himself’ was marched out of this supportive environment to follow in his father’s footsteps, first to Cheam, then up to the remote coastal plain of Morayshire to Gordonstoun. He found the transition excruciatingly painful.

Far more sensitive than his father, Charles was miserable and homesick. It was the start of his long march in his father’s always too large footsteps. He was only eight years old and he felt the family separation very deeply. Unlike his father at the same age, he was used to the security of the matriarchal palace society of nannies, nursery maids and his grandmother, but suddenly he was on his own, one of twelve lowly new boys in a school of one hundred pupils. Philip shone in this kind of environment; Charles crumbled.

His first few days as a boarder at Cheam, he would later recall, were the most miserable of his life and his mother recalled how he ‘shuddered’ with apprehension as he journeyed there for his first day. ‘He dreaded going away to school,’ Mabel Anderson recalled.

Heartbroken, he would write to Mispy every day. He used to cry into his letters and say, ‘I miss you.’ The governess was equally distressed by the absence of the little boy she had come to love. She stayed on to teach Anne and later Andrew, but her real interest was always Charles, and they corresponded regularly for the rest of her life. (She died in the impersonal vastness of Buckingham Palace in 1968. After she retired to her rooms one Friday night, no one missed her and her body was not found until forty-eight hours later. Charles, his family remembered, was ‘inconsolable’ when he was told the news.)

He eventually settled in as best he could at Cheam, but he did not have a particularly happy time there. He was too diffident, too shy to make friends easily or to stand out and up for himself in the rough and tumbles. He still carried his puppy fat and during one game of rugby was upset to hear the shout directed at him from somewhere below, ‘Oh, get off me, Fatty!’