A Bard for Highgrove
Meic Stephens
Copyright Meic Stephens 2011
Published by Cambria Books at Smashwords
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Henry Jones-Davies
A Bard for Highgrove: a Likely Story
When the Prince of Wales takes it into his head to appoint a Household Bard he hasn’t reckoned on the delectable but subversive Cerys Gifford Huws, fine poet in the strict metres and staunch Nationalist, who tries to teach him Welsh and encourages him to make his Principate more truly reflective of the country from which he takes his title.
Under her influence, not only does he introduce Highgrove and Floomerwormwood, his little place down in Wales, to all things Welsh but insists on innovations like bilingual road-signs in England, Welsh on the school syllabus and in the law-courts, a Welsh page in all the Sunday papers, and much else besides. ‘Do remember,’ he says, ‘English was thrust upon the Welsh for centuries and they didn’t complain.’ But eventually the English Establishment reacts against ‘the Welsh Prince’ and the monarchy falls into disrepute.
By 2020, the Yookay having broken up after Scotland’s secession, Cymru is an Autonomous Republic within the Celtic Confederation and ruled by a permanent green-red coalition. Charles has renounced his title and his claim to the throne, and gone to live quietly at Gregynog, where he has found contentment at last and no longer fidgets with his cuff-links. At the last, with the death of his mother at the age of 91, and William’s succession, the Windsors troop out on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace and in a scene reminiscent of the Winter Palace in 1917, the sound of gunfire is heard echoing down the Mall. And all this happens because of a Welsh poet . . .
This novella, at once provocative and percipient, but never bland, is partly a critique of the institution of monarchy and partly a satire on the culture and politics of contemporary Wales. Laying no claim to ‘literary merit’ (the bane of so much of what is published in Wales nowadays), but elegantly written, it will make some readers grin and get up the noses of others, in about equal measure.
The Author
Meic Stephens was born in Trefforest, near Pontypridd, in 1938. Educated at the University Colleges of Wales, Aberystwyth and Bangor, and at the University of Rennes, he was for many years Literature Director of the Welsh Arts Council and latterly Professor of Welsh Writing at the University of Glamorgan.
He has written, edited and translated about 170 books, most of them to do with the culture of Wales, and founded Poetry Wales in 1965. His novel, Yeah, Dai Dando, appeared in 2008. He is Literary Editor of the magazine Cambria and Secretary of the Rhys Davies Trust.
He has lived in Cardiff since 1966. The language of his home is Welsh, which he learnt as an adult, and he writes verse in it. He also contributes obituaries of eminent Welsh people to The Independent.
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce;
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
Bertold Brecht,
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
I
The Writing on the Wall
‘NOW THAT ONE has one’s own little place in Wales,’ said Charles to Camilla over a game of Scrabble in the small drawing-room at Highgrove, ‘one rather thinks one ought to brush up a little on the language. It would make such an orf’lly good impression, don’t y’think?’
Camilla lit another Balkan Sobranie, waited for the flunkies to finish bringing in the afternoon tea-trolley (a gift from the good folk of the Western Sahara) and then, when they were quite alone again and she was handing him a plate of cucumber and watercress sandwiches cut just the way he liked them, in dainty triangles and without the crusts, she said, ‘But darling, I’d always thought you spoke fluent Welsh.’
‘You may very well think that, my dear, but one couldn’t possibly comment. By the way, there’s no such word as “yrneh”.’
‘Oh knock it orf, sweetie, everyone knows jolly well you picked up the lingo at that college in west Wales just before your Investiture.’
‘You mean Aberystwyth.’
‘Oh I can’t pronounce those outlandish names they go in for down there, but yes, Aberistwatch, or whatever. Dreadful place, full of beastly Welsh Nationalists, so I’ve heard.’
‘One rather looks back on the term one spent there with a certain fondness, brief though it was. Autres pays, autres mœurs, and all that. D’y’ know, one was taken into several public houses and once into a branch of F.W. Woolworth, and from time to time one was allowed to pop one’s own letters into a real postbox. What an experience! One met quite a number of interesting folk down there, especially among one’s fellow students at the College by the Sea . . . and yet, for some unfathomable reason, they would insist on calling one Carlo . . . not to one’s face, you understand . . . One was so sorry to read the other day that the Principal was in the habit of reporting students to our people at MI5 on account of their extreme views about one’s presence among them. One had been given to understand he too was a Welsh Nat, so one never can tell . . . ’
‘I’ve watched the ceremony so many times, you were such a nice boy in those days. You carried it orf so well. It totally freaked me out. I was like “Wow!”’, and she fluttered the fingers of both hands above her head.
‘But the noise, my dear, and the people!’
‘I did so love the horses and the gun-carriages. They were totally cool. Do have another buttered scone, ducky.’
‘That was Caernarfon, not Aberystwyth.’
‘Oh, yes, Carnarffon, how silly of me, where that big thingummy is, the castle I mean. But surely you spoke Welsh then, didn’t you, poppet? You used to say you read Daffid ap Whatsisname in bed every night. Oh, how those rustics cheered!’
‘One had to make a good impression. Actually, one was quoting a scurrilous song the Nats used to sing about one. The chorus went something like “Carlo, Carlo, Carlo’s playing polo with Daddy,” . . . in Welsh, of course . . . frightf’lly amusing, really. It occurred to one that the song’s author, a rum cove called Daffid Youwan, if memory serves, merited an MBE for adding to the gaiety of nations. One shall have to have a word with Number 10,’ he said in that droll manner and with the lopsided grin which made him so attractive to the Duchess.
‘Oh, you are so gallant, lover boy.’
‘But the whole thing was such a damned pantomime from start to finish. Cooked up by that dreadful man George Thomas to keep the Welsh Nats in check. He was Secretary of State for Wales at the time, you see. Everyone in the Firm thought him the most frightful brown noser. And d’y’know, it later transpired he was a – ’
‘But you behaved so beautifully, as you always do, and that’s what matters.’
‘Let’s share a State Secret, shall we, my dear?’
‘Oh goody-goody, do tell. I lurv State Secrets. Come on, buster, hit me with it.’ She gave him that gap-toothed smile he found so appealing.
‘Well, one’s lines were written out more or less phonetically by someone at the Welsh Office so that one could get one’s tongue round the trickier bits, and it was a great help, one must say. The London papers and lots of old ladies in Wales were convinced one was fluent. One can still remember a few phrases of what one had to say, as a matter of fact. Ur roov vee, Charles, Tu-wuss-oc Kum-ree, un toung-ee ee chee (ch as in loch) . . . ee vode un futh-lon ee chee (ch as in loch) . . . un err-bin (roll the r) pobe marth o bow-bol . . .
‘It was all one could do to keep a straight face. For some curious reason one kept thinking of sausage rolls. And then one had to say it all again in English. I, Charles, Prince of Wales, do become your liege man of life and limb . . . to live and die against all manner of folk. One doesn’t know which version was the more preposterous. But if one had giggled it would have spoilt the show and Mummy wouldn’t have been at all pleased, poor dear. She’s such a brick.’
‘“Jnana”? That’s not a proper word, sonny boy.’
‘Oh yes it is. It means “knowledge acquired through meditation”. It’s what one does when one has a moment to oneself, my dear.’
‘Really? Then you’re going to have to accept “yrneh”. It means “a unit of reciprocal inductance”, or so it says in my Scrabble dictionary. So there, poo-bah!’
‘Mmm . . . this foie gras is tasty. Do we make this at Highgrove, too?’
Three clocks deep in the House’s west wing struck four, or thereabouts.
THE SUN WAS going down in the darkling sky of Gloucestershire. The parliament of rooks was in full cry beyond the Duchy Home Farm. The last of the visitors, members of the Historic Houses Association almost certainly, had long left and from the House’s high windows only one or two of the junior garden staff could be seen picking up litter. The unsold Highgrove ice cream tubs were back in the freezer and the unsold Highgrove honey pots back on the shelf. The meadowsweet, the umbelliferae, the gloxinias, the hoelboellia, the spotted orchid, the catalpa, the gingko biloba, the ox-eye daisies, the meadow crane’s bill and the buddleia were all in bloom, thanks to the uncommon skills of old Alf Passant, the Head Gardener, and the scent of gardenias (a gift from the good folk of Tromsø) was wafting in the balmy air.
Prince Charles was never quite sure whether he was in Highgrove or Clarence House, so similar were the furnishings and ambiance in both, but one glance out of the window this fine evening told him he was in his country seat in l’Angleterre profonde, near a village called Doughton a little to the south-west of Tetbury, within driving distance of the Duchy of Cornwall and with easy road or helicopter access to the Principality of Wales, where he owned a lot of land, and yet close to the natural world by which he set such great store. He spent almost as much time at his other home, Birkhall, in Scotland, but here he was chez soi.
‘Is there any more of our Highgrove preserve left, sweetie? It’s so totally lush, let’s finish it orf. Be a love and pass me the dish, please, Pringy. Gee, thanks. Wicked.’
With that His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, Duke of Rothesay, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Great Steward of Scotland, Earl of Chester, Knight of the Garter, Knight of the Thistle, Great Master of the Order of the Bath, Order of Merit, Order of Australia, Companion of the Queen’s Service Order, Privy Counsellor – oh, and Prince of Wales – did as he was told by the woman he loved, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall (the former Mrs Andrew Henry Parker Bowles and née Miss Camilla Rosemary Shand but not, for politic reasons, to be addressed as the Princess of Wales), and passed her the jam.
SIR PEREDUR Myles Stradling Tristram Crispin St John Rice-Boothby – as he is listed in the current edition of Debrett’s People of Today - Principal Private Secretary to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, known to intimates and the Firm as Sir Perry, was not entirely happy in his work. In addition to having to put up with the Heir Apparent’s idiosyncrasies and increasingly eccentric ways - talking to plants was just the one the public heard about - it was part of his duties to deal with the brouhaha that sometimes ensued when he spoke in public.
The Prince was good at declaring this and that open – a brake linings factory, perhaps, or a young offenders’ hostel, subjects about which he knew absolutely nothing - and could even speak on black-tie occasions if well briefed, as he usually was. Most of the time there was no controversy, because he stuck to his notes and what he said was as ditch-water-dull as the occasion that had prompted him to dilate, and so could easily be passed over by news editors.
But from time to time His Royal Highness would speak on matters about which he knew a little, such as the ‘monstrous carbuncles’ episode (this was before he had unveiled his own model village at Poundbury, an exercise in the architecturally bland); or on environmental issues of which his experience was more or less limited to the time he had spent as a young man rambling, hunting and fishing on the royal estate at Balmoral; or alternative medicine, for which he had no need himself because he was attended by the best physicians in the land; or road safety - he was driven everywhere by liveried chauffeurs; or the psychological problems associated with unemployment – he had a job for life, a guaranteed income and the prospect of promotion in due course; or the need for affordable housing – he owned the Scilly Isles where he charged rents that local people could not afford; and so on.
The press would then have a field-day. ‘If a little learning is a dangerous thing,’ thundered a Times editorial, ‘the Prince is one who has tasted not the Pierian spring.’ The redtops went in for more demotic headlines like ‘Knock it orf, HRH’.
For a few days after each gaffe he would once again become ‘the controversial Prince’, held up to ridicule on such programmes as Have I Got News For You and in countless cartoons in the gutter press, until such time as the latest capers of that winsome pair, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty, or yet another scandal emanating from the Palace of Westminster, usually to do with sex or money, or both, brought a brief respite and removed him from publicity’s harsh glare.
The man was given to criticising everything, though not himself, mused Sir Perry, despite all the glum introspection he went in for. To paraphrase the broadcaster, Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince had, by the age of fifty, accumulated a number of certainties about the state of the world and did not relish contradiction. This was a man who had no direct, personal experience of the quiddities of everyday living: mortgages, dry cleaners, cold calling, overdrafts, doctors’ waiting lists, council tax, plumbers’ bills, Mormons at the door, junk mail, postal strikes, double glazing salesmen, passports, voting, cinema queues, shopping for food, petrol stations, carparks, neighbours, estate agents, gas boards, refuse collection . . . and yet he would go on and on about the world the rest of us have to inhabit without the wealth and privilege he enjoyed. His only gesture towards the possibility that he might be misinformed was his constant use of weasel expressions like ‘If memory serves one aright’ and ‘Don’t y’think?’.
It was one of the reasons why the Prince of Wales was so unpopular and, the Fourth Estate rarely being able to distinguish between man and wife, why the Duchess of Cornwall was generally tarred with the same brush. There was constant complaint about his use of the royal train, at £20,000 a trip, and the cost of his lavish lifestyle.
Furthermore, the Great British Public, ever fickle, could not put aside the knowledge that the marriage had taken place after years of persistent adultery and was still tainted by the memory of the Prince’s first wife, the incomparable but deeply-flawed Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, who had lived her life ‘like a candle in the wind’, notably enjoying a last torrid fling with Dodi Fayed of the unroyal House of Harrods, and of the horrible way in which the couple had died in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.
One of the things everyone who watched television knew was that Lady Di had said, in a Panorama interview in 1995, ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded’. His Royal Highness had gone very red in the face when, searching for something else (a poem attributed to Diane de Poitiers, mistress to Henry II of France, as it happened), he came across it in the Highgrove copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. He tried to have a word with the Secretary of the Delegates of Oxford University Press, who had been at Gordonstoun with him, with a view to removing the offensive quote, but there was nothing doing.
The Prince’s second wife, Camilla, was plainly a nice, sensible, easy-going, no-nonsense woman who, if she wasn’t as glam as Diana or as much given to intellectual pursuits as her husband, was nonetheless a good old sort who made him happy. But she too was damaged goods in the eyes of the red tops, for was she not a former mistress elevated to the status of Wife to the Heir Apparent? Yet in such a dysfunctional family as that of the Windsors, even this fact was beginning to be played down, thanks to royal apologists in the right-wing press.
Even so, it had been a great sadness that Her Majesty the Queen had been unable to attend the civil wedding ceremony at Windsor Guildhall because both bride and groom were divorcees and the Church of England, of which she was Supreme Governor, was known to be a bit fuddy-duddy about such matters, but she had been present at the Blessing and at a reception for the newly-weds held in Windsor Castle afterwards, so the nuptials had passed off as happily as might have been expected in the circumstances. The bride’s father, being a Roman Catholic, thought it prudent to stay away.
The traditionalists needn’t have worried overmuch. After all, it was not as if the Duchess would one day become Queen. Just as it had been decided that Charles, on succeeding to the throne, would be known as George VII, to avoid invidious comparison with the unfortunate precedents of his two namesakes, so Camilla, having already been denied in practice the title Princess of Wales, which again would have chimed most lamentably, was to assume the title Princess Consort. So that, the Palace had thought, ought to have been that.
Such complexities weighed heavily on His Royal Highness in his desperate desire to do what he could to improve his public image and boost his popularity ratings, though his attempts often back-fired. Even with the clout of an Heir Apparent and in a milieu where the blood royal brooked no dissent, the Prince’s reach sometimes exceeded his grasp . . . though he never could remember how that quotation finished.
So whenever the Prince opened his mouth and put his foot in it Sir Perry Rice-Boothby, Spinmeister Extraordinaire (to use a macaronic expression of which he was not fond), would have to acknowledge the letters that were delivered to Clarence House and Highgrove by the van load. Some were from the hoi polloi whose addresses had numbers in them and who could easily be fobbed off by a couple of equerries with a standard reply. But others were written on official notepaper by some of the most distinguished people in the land, or even on crested paper from country houses in the shires. These Sir Perry immediately recognized, and he had to answer each and every one personally, giving His Royal Highness a list of the more unsympathetic names to be kept against the time when the Birthday Honours were under consideration: no one got a gong who had written to complain about the Prince shooting his mouth off. Sir Perry was beginning to find this aspect of his duties irksome, though he said not a word to anyone, not even his wife.
In recent months, however, a new difficulty had arisen which he found even more tiresome. Now Peredur Rice-Boothby had been appointed to his post partly on account of his being, as he put it, sort of Welsh, which some thought might have been an advantage in the household of the Prince of Wales. On the other hand, because the Boothbys were distantly related to the gin-makers, and could therefore be said to have been in trade, eyebrows had been raised and some deplored the appointment.
Not quite of blue blood, or the blood royal, as were so many of the Old Etonians, Old Marlburians and Old Harrovians in the higher echelons of the royal household, he was nevertheless the son of a wealthy landowner descended, so he liked to claim, from that Rhodri ap Cadwgan who, about the year 1400, had rallied the men of upland Glamorgan to the cause of Owain Glyndŵr (to whom Sir Perry always referred as ‘the rebel Owen Glendower’ to avoid giving offence to his English friends), and who then, some fourteen years later, when the rising showed signs of fizzling out, had demonstrated a remarkable grasp of realpolitik by going up to London as Roderick Cadogan to seek favour at the English court, where he eventually prospered. The family crest bore the motto Spero meliora.
Sir Perry’s father, Aleck Redvers Evelyn Otis Pomeroy Rice-Boothby, with his seat and several hundred acres in the vicinity of St Donat’s in the leafy Vale of Glamorgan, whose grandmother had been a Stradling, came of good stock, although his reputation had been tarnished somewhat by his father’s decision, in the 1930s, to sell the castle to William Randolph-Hearst, on whom the newspaper tycoon, Citizen Kane, was modelled. He had had a good war and had since served as Lord Lieutenant of the old county of Glamorgan and, inevitably, as one of the Great and the Good on the umpteen quangos by which the life of the Principality had been run in the days before the establishment of the National Assembly.
The boy Peredur - the name was said to have Arthurian resonance - had been brought up in Chelsea and sent to Eton, whence he went up to Clare College, Cambridge, to read for the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos, in due course taking a starred first. He had gone on to do a Master’s in Business Administration Studies at the University of East Anglia, and that was thought to have given him a grasp of the real world after the groves of Academe, though there hadn’t been much evidence of it so far.
On his appointment to the Prince’s household, at first as an equerry, it was thought Perry’s academic prowess might lend lustre to the somewhat dull escutcheon of the Prince, who had come down from Trinity with only a Desmond. His Royal Highness cared not an ermine’s fart about the discrepancy in their academic achievements, or was too well-mannered to show it; be that as it may, he was once heard to remark in what was doubtless an unguarded moment, and with the famous tact inherited from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘One has honorary degrees from thirty-seven universities – thirty-eight if one counts Glamorgan’.
Needless to say, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic seldom came up as topics of conversation at either Clarence House or Highgrove, or indeed at any of the other houses where the Waleses rested their weary heads from time to time. Nor was Sir Perry often called upon to speak to His Royal Highness about things Welsh. Welsh just didn’t figure in the scheme of things.
All that was about to change, however, and it would turn Sir Perry’s world topsy–turvy.
Sir Perry’s wife was The Hon. Jane Ankaret Heleth Letitia Fortinbras-Pryce, a Viscount’s daughter who belonged to an old Powys family that had come over with the Conqueror. After grabbing as much land from the native Welsh as they could manage in two or three generations they had decided they rather liked it in Wales and eventually came to think they had become integrated, more or less, with those they had conquered, who looked up to them with uncommon deference, the Welsh being always ready to kow-tow to their social superiors.
One of Jane’s ancestors had been Mistress of the Robes to the first Queen Elizabeth, another a mistress of a rather different sort to George II, and yet another had served as Home Secretary in one of Gladstone’s administrations until he was obliged to spend more time with his family as a consequence of a most unfortunate incident involving Tilly Lothar, a leading actress of the day.
But otherwise the Fortinbras and Pryce families had been content to stay at home, serving their communities in modest ways as patrons of the Established Church, pillars of the Tory Party and nowadays as bigwigs of such influential bodies as St John’s Ambulance Brigade, Friends of Friendless Churches, the Distressed Gentlefolk Association, the Welsh Landowners’ Association, International Rotary, Toc H, the Historic Houses Association and the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show. The family was not at all wealthy but they were unmistakeably well-to-do and what money they had was most definitely old and, like old gold, it wasn’t at all flashy. Jane’s mother had been christened Cymbriana, a name which had come down in the family from the first Elizabeth’s time.
For a short while The Hon. Jane Fortinbras-Pryce had been one of Princess Diana’s ladies-in-waiting, but after that dreadful business in the Paris tunnel, and the subsequent engagement of Prince Charles to Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she had already observed at close quarters at both Clarence House and Highgrove, her exquisite taste and sense of decorum, long bred in her very fine bones, had dictated that she give up her position, after which she and an old chum from Cheltenham Ladies’ College opened a sandwich-bar in Rodney Street, a particularly salubrious part of King’s Cross. But that, as it turned out, was not to be her station in life.
A little later, by a stroke of great good fortune, she had been introduced to Perry Rice-Boothby at the Beulah Hunt Ball, the social event of the year in the green country between Builth and Llanwrtyd, and after a whirlwind romance, gosh and golly, the strawberry blonde with the good teeth, fine bone structure and cornflower-blue eyes had bagged the Private Secretary. Shortly afterwards he had been knighted, as he might have expected if he knew anything about royal protocol, and then promoted to Principal Private Secretary.
Her father, the old Viscount, whose family motto was Aquila non capit muscas, on hearing of the engagement, could only exclaim, ‘’Pon my word, girl, not much of a catch!’ but her mother, a real Lady, said, ‘Congratulations, darling, I do hope you will be happy.’
THE TROUBLE with which this narrative is chiefly concerned began with a poet, as trouble so often does when the Muse gets mixed up in affairs of State, especially in England.
‘One is of a mind to appoint a Household Bard,’ said the Prince as he went through his correspondence box in the Library of Highgrove during one of his fortnightly sessions with Sir Perry.
‘Your Royal Highness?’
There was not a flicker on the Principal Private Secretary’s face, but he quickly fingered the lapel of his Savile Row suit, a sure sign he was agitated, embarrassed or just plain gobsmacked, and coughed diplomatically. The tic was the counterpart of the Prince’s fidgeting with his cuff-links upon which not a few royal observers had commented over the years.
‘A Household Bard, Sir Perry. The better sort of families had them in Wales during the Middle Ages. One first heard of it in the tutorials one attended at Aberystwyth. One of one’s tutors, now what was his name? Ah yes, Dr Rhisiart Bonner. He went into some detail on the point, more than once, if memory serves. It has since struck me as rather odd that the fellow didn’t get an MBE for his trouble. One will have to have a word with the Prime Minister . . . but a capital idea nevertheless, what?’
‘I see. Splendid, splendid. If I may be so bold, Sir, may I ask what such a person would do?’
The Prince had anticipated the question and was ready with an answer.
He had read in The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales – a copy of this standard work of reference had been bound in full calf at the Gregynog Press and sent to Highgrove as a gift from the Welsh Academy – that according to the Laws of Hywel Dda, the Bardd Teulu, or Household Bard, was one of the Twenty-four Officers of the King’s Court, and that this tradition had persisted for many centuries. He now put Sir Perry in the picture.
‘Howel was the only Welsh King to be called “the Good”, y’know . . . Anyway, one hopes the Household Bard might be induced to trace one’s ancestry rather more pleasingly than the Heralds have hitherto done and show how one is related to the tenth-century king, for whom one has a lot of respect.
‘After all, that was what the bards did in days gone by: the blighters told fibs and wrapped them up in flattery so shameless and language so grandiloquent that they were eventually believed. Like PR people, they were professional liars who would say anything as long as they were paid – in mead and horses, apparently.
‘They were also good at vaticination – ’
‘Your Royal Highness?’
‘The foretelling of events not yet come to pass, Sir Perry. One would have thought you would have heard of it at Clare.’
‘I didn’t have much time for reading, Sir. I had to learn Anglo-Saxon and Norse as well as Celtic, and – ’
‘One of the reasons why my predecessor Edward I was supposed to have ordered the Massacre of the Bards after his conquest of Wales in 1282 – something else one picked up on at Aberystwyth, but from students who of course had been handpicked to meet one over coffee – was that the bards usually told the truth about their rulers, especially if they were dissolute or unjust. The rulers, I mean. One should like to make up for that monstrous act.’
‘But, Sir, it was such a long time ago – ’
The Prince, like many royals and aristocrats, was good at ignoring those who served him.
‘One has also looked up the tale of the Massacre in the Library and, of course, one has read Thomas Gray’s famous poem on the subject. D’y’ know it, Sir Perry? “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King, confusion on thy banners wait”. No? Oh dear . . . There’s even a poem on the subject in Magyar, or so one is reliably informed, though one hasn’t gone into that. One always found the Habsburgs a bit of a bore . . . ’
Clearly, all this talk of PR and massacres and telling the truth seemed dashed exciting to the Prince, even dangerously so, and he thought he might inject a little excitement into the dull routine to which he had become inured but with which he felt increasingly uncomfortable.
His mind was quite made up and there was no gainsaying the royal prerogative: there would be a Household Bard at Highgrove, and that should have been an end to the matter. But in a manner of speaking, and in ways it was impossible to foresee even with the benefit of vaticination, it would prove to be only the beginning.
EVEN SO, none of it meant anything to Sir Perry, who kept on asking what the duties of a Household Bard might be.
‘Well, for a start, he could help one with a better understanding of one’s family tree.’
His Royal Highness had not thought of telling Sir Perry where he had got this idea because he had also found in the Companion, a book he dipped into occasionally for snippets of Welsh history, an entry under ‘Principality of Wales’ in which it was stated that the Three Ostrich Feathers, together with the motto Ich Dien, adopted by Edward the Black Prince after he had defeated King John of Bohemia at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, and since then incorporated as part of his own insignia, ‘is now considered obsequious by Nationalists and Socialists in Wales, but, with the ostrich plumes, it still adorns the badge of the Welsh Rugby Union’. Mercifully, the Encyclopaedia of Wales, another gift from the Welsh Academy, contradicted this infamous gibe.
‘So much in Welsh tradition is contested that one sometimes thinks it’s all baloney,’ the Prince had remarked to the Duchess, but she had been so engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle that she said nothing in return.
‘The Welsh have their own ways of thinking that make them quite alien to us English. They are still to one another what they are not to the rest of us, and this sense of belonging makes it difficult for us to get inside their heads. It’s what’s kept them a nation, no doubt, in ways we English are unable to fathom.’
Furthermore, he mused, since the Duchess wasn’t listening, his own investiture at Caernarfon in 1969 was described by the Oxford Companion as ‘an occasion marked by popular festivities as well as bitter acrimony, much satire and vigorous protests by Nationalist groups such as the Free Wales Army and the Welsh Language Society, which saw in the symbolism of the event the grotesque celebration of the conquest of Wales’. This, he thought, was yet another example of how bloody-minded the bloody-minded Welsh could be.
He wondered what the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Wales had to say on this matter. Surely his own alma mater could be expected to do better and so he made a mental note to have a copy ordered for the Highgrove Library.
But he couldn’t let the matter rest there. To cap it all, an obscure philosopher had said the event at Caernarfon had revealed ‘the extent of the devastation which had been wrought on the Welsh people’s sense of their national identity’. The Prince had marked both entries with a pencil, a happy knack he had picked up from his tutors at Aberystwyth, and kept the book on a high shelf lest the senior staff who alone had access to the Library, in particular Sir Perry, who was not above a spot of snooping when the opportunity presented itself, should come across it during the Prince’s absence.
‘Wow, Perry would go ballistic!’exclaimed the Duchess, who until that moment had been running her finger along a low dresser (a gift from the good folk of Machynlleth, though she never could pronounce it), and checking the oak for dust, despite never having wielded a duster in all her born days. Now she had something far more substantial to exercise what we must call her mind.
Other books about Wales had recently been brought from the Library into the private rooms used by the Prince and Duchess: a History of Wales by one Dan Jarvis, whom His Royal Highness could dimly recall from his term at Aberystwyth because he could talk the hind leg off a corgi; several by Jeanette Symes, who (the Prince noted with wry satisfaction) despite her claim to be a Welsh Republican, had been made a Commander of the British Empire; and one by Ozzie Gandolf which dissected the concept of Britishness in the context of a new Europe, and now in a devolved United Kingdom, so convincingly as to make it seem redundant.
These books were not exactly bedtime reading but, so full of references to patriotism, language and the claims of nationhood were they, matters which had for long made Sir Perry bridle or yawn, he feared the royal head might be turned by dangerous ideas that could have disastrous consequences for the unity of the Realm. He was right to entertain such fears, as it was to turn out.
‘The Household Poet would also keep one informed about the latest news from the Principality,’ went on the Prince. ‘He, or she, could advise us as to which books and periodicals we should read to gain a better understanding of what’s happening down there. One feels so cut orf . . .’
The Prince had given instructions to Sir Perry to have all books about Wales removed from the Library, except for the innocuous but beatifully bound volumes from the Gregynog Press, and put up on shelves in his private rooms so that he could have easy access to them. It was not as if any books were read in the Library for most of them, in particular the many items of incunabula, were behind grilles which could be opened only with a key procured from the equerries’ office.
But among the advantages of this new arrangement was that the hundreds of cheap paperbacks the Duchess was in the habit of reading in bed would have to go. The Prince was apprehensive but it had to be done. Pulp fiction not only helped her get off to sleep but also provided her with some of the hip slang which so irritated him and made even William and Harry smirk: the boys were much more comfortable when their stepmother used the Youfspeak picked up from her iPlayer (a gift from the good folk of Utter Pradesh) and from listening to disc-jockeys like Rob da Bank and Huw Stephens on Radio One in the middle of the night when sleep eluded her.
So it was that over the next few weeks copies of novels with titles like Naughty but Dead, Die Buster Die, Sadie’s No Lady and My Cutie is a Corpse were discreetly left outside the Highgrove kitchens with a cardboard sign that read ‘Please take one’. It was months before they disappeared altogether; some were found in the wheelie bins bearing the Three Ostrich Feathers but many others were collected by a man claiming to represent a secondhand book dealer in Wales who never missed a trick in snapping up the libraries of the well-to-do.
WHEN THE DUCHESS realised that Charles was serious about appointing a Household Bard for Highgrove her suspicions, long aroused by his constant references to brushing up his Welsh, were confirmed. ‘The poor dear is well orf his rocker,’ she said to herself, adding ‘Boyacasha!’ and trying to snap her fingers as she had seen the Rastas and Yardies doing. To the Prince she was more circumspect, naturally.
‘You know, don’t you, Pringy, there’s been nothing but trouble over the Poet Laureate. Frightful dress sense, I’d say. Furthermore, there hasn’t been a half-decent poet in the post since dear old Sir John fell orf his twig. He was awf’lly cuddly and I could so totally understand most of what he wrote, too.’
‘One tends to agree, my dear. “Come, friendly bombs . . . di-dum di-dum . . . ” How does it go, now? And “Milk, and then just as it comes, dear? I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones . . . ”’
‘Oh, no, I thought we’d seen orf the last of this Highgrove mess. Much better stuff from Waitrose. Gerra grip, pal.’
‘Even so, one has to admit the Welsh experience of appointing their, or perhaps one should say our National Poet, has been a lot happier. The women tend to bleat a lot about mental illness and childbirth and the men do go on about roots and identity and the arson campaign against holiday homes, from what I read in The Telegraph, but it’s all good contemporary stuff that keeps one on one’s toes, so to speak. One likes to think the Household Bard might do something similar at Highgrove in the fullness of time, though in different circumstances, granted. “Within these stones horizons sing . . . . ”, and all that.’
‘Yeah, pal, but don’t forget what happened to your Harpist, Jenufa Thingamy. The precedent is not altogether auspicious, as me dear old Pa would say. You’re too soft, lover boy, that’s your trouble – ’
Just then, as three clocks in the west wing struck four one after another, with the tea things laid out on a low rosewood table (a gift from the good folk of Bautou), Sir Perry was summoned to the drawing-room by the buzzer on his office desk. The royal couple were so busy with their many other interests – opening things, the Prince’s Trust, admiring views, the Prince’s Regeneration Trust, building yet another model village at Coed Darcy between Swansea and Neath, turning up uninvited at scenes of disaster, patting horses, the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, telling all manner of folk off, Royal Command Performances, fending off law-suits against the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, shooting wild animals – that this was the place and this the time to find them at their ease and ready to talk about domestic matters which, in his view at least, required attention.
Today Sir Perry was going to speak to His Royal Highness about a slogan which had been found freshly painted on the far wall of the Duchy Home Farm. But he had hardly had a chance to give one of his diplomatic coughs or finger the lapel of his jacket before the Prince, rising from his armchair (a gift from the good folk of Tupungato), greeted him rather less gelidly than was his wont, and said, ‘My dear Sir Perry, one would like to make a small suggestion and ask you to deal with it.’
‘Sir?’
‘When is one next expected down in Carmarthenshire?’
‘At Floonerwormwood? Let me see, in a month’s time, as it happens.’
‘Llwynywermod, Sir Perry. Oh be a good fellow, do get the pronunciation right, please. It does make such a good impression, don’t y’ think? One has had the house long enough now and it’s dear to one’s heart, even though one doesn’t spend as much time there as one would like.’
‘Of course, Your Royal Highness – Flwynywermod. All those ys and ws quite confuse one, and the double l, of course. There seem to be so few vowels in the Welsh language. . . . Flwynywermod!’
‘There, Sir Perry, you can say it with the best of them, almost. It’s your Welsh background, of course. Huss-biss a den-giss uh deen, and all that. What’s bred in the bone . . . oh, never mind. People will take you for a native of Shir Gâr, old chap. Excellent, excellent.’
‘Shirgar, Sir? Wasn’t that the name of a horse that won the Epsom in 1981 and was later stolen, never to be found?’
‘Yes, quite right, what a good memory you have for facts, Sir Perry! But when pronounced in the correct way, the words designate the County of Carmarthen, or Carmarthenshire. Sheer Gaar, got it?’
‘Of course, Sir. Forgive me. Shergar.’
‘No, man, Sheer Gaar! Ah well, you have a month to get your tongue round it and there’ll be plenty of opportunity to use it down there. Lots of the locals speak Welsh, even some of those the Nats call English settlers. Nothing like speaking a language when one wants to speak it more fluently, if you get one’s drift.’
‘Quite so, Sir, but I was never much good at languages. At Eton the Latin master once hit me so hard I – ’
‘Now, now, Sir Perry, revenons à nos moutons.’
The small suggestion which His Royal Highness wished to make to Sir Perry was that a search for a Household Bard should be put in hand with immediate effect. It was, of course, more of a command than a suggestion.
‘Find three or four bards and invite them to Llwynywermod in a month’s time,’ he said, fidgeting with the ring on the finger of his left hand.
‘Certainly, Sir. Of course, Sir.’
‘That will be all, Sir Perry.’
‘Your Royal Highness.’
Sir Peregrine Rice-Boothby withdrew from the royal presence in the approved manner, that is to say walking backwards until he reached the door, and went down the corridor to his office in a cold sweat. Where the blazes was he going to find three or four bards and at such short notice? He could have found three or four ostrich feathers with less difficulty. To control his nerves he began re-arranging the photographs that stood in their silver frames on just about every flat surface in the room and saying, ‘Damnation!’ over and over again.
The nine hundred acres of the Highgrove estate slumbered on regardless.
‘THE MAN MUST be barking,’ Sir Perry said to his wife over dinner in the grace-and-favour accommodation they occupied at Highgrove. ‘He keeps going on about making amends for the death of Louwelin the so-called Last Prince of Wales. He was killed in 1282, for God’s sake!’
Then he had to explain what the Prince had asked him to do, the point of which still escaped him entirely.
‘Oh I don’t know, darling. There may be something in the idea. Apparently, many of the Welsh Princes had poets to sing their praises. F’rinstance, there was a court at a place called Mathrayffal, near Myffod in Montgomeryshire. As children Nanny used to take us there for picnics. I remember her telling us it brought a prince great prestige to have his very own personal bard. Like having a yacht in the Med or a villa in Tuscany or owning a football team or newspaper nowadays, but even more prestigious.’
‘But what exactly did they do?’
‘Well, there was the geneaology thingy, for a start. The Welsh are obsessed with their ancestry. Worse than the Chinks when it comes to their forefathers – ’
‘Yes, yes, he’s gone into all that for God’s sake,’ said Sir Perry, growing more and more irritated by the minute. ‘What else?’
‘Well, a bard can read his poems.’