A Letter to Charles

The progenitors of pop and protest, miniskirts and peace marches are the youth of Britain. They know what they are against: it is not coincidence that the term Establishment was coined in the realm that will some day belong to Charles. He is the summa symbol of that Establishment, born old, committed, enmeshed, and he could no more drop out than change the color of his skin. The result is something of an intragenerational gap between the Prince and his contemporaries. With this in mind, TIME asked one of the Prince's fellow students to comment on the gulf that separates them. Jonathan Holmes, 21, affects theatrical sideburns and Nehru suits, is headed for a BBC television career after graduation with an honors degree in history. Here is his open letter to the Prince:

Dear Prince Charles,

We haven't seen very much of you at Cambridge these last two years. Few of us know any more about you than we did before you arrived. You have kept yourself very much to yourself.

But what do you think about? It doesn't take much insight to guess that uppermost in your mind, this last year or two, has loomed the inescapable fact that you are destined--some would say doomed--to be a king. From the dour orthodoxy of a Scottish public school you have been launched into a university society where political thought is in turmoil, where the most radical social theories from revolutionary socialism to out-and-out anarchy are bandied about like cocktail-party small talk. Your position prevents you from taking an open part in these discussions. But you must have been an interested spectator. And you must certainly be uncomfortably aware that none of the numerous social Utopias currently being advocated by your fellow students have any room at all for a hereditary monarch or an imperial throne. You could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that you have been born and trained to a job hopelessly out of date.

sb

How many of our generation look forward to enjoying the life that our parents lead, are inspired by the things that inspired them or feel to be important ideals that are the breath of life to them? How many Englishmen under 25 stand to attention when the anthem is played or long for the great days of Empire? Your father's bluff common sense and your mother's gracious ordinariness are precisely the qualities needed to capture the affection of our parents. That is precisely why they seem an irrelevancy to us. It is not that we dislike them. They simply do not seem to be important.

But you are not only Prince of Wales and Heir Apparent to the throne of Great Britain. You are also Charles Windsor, an intelligent and well-educated young man with a mind of your own and the opportunity to use it, if you want to. Certainly, we want you to. If you are to be a king at all, you must be our king. I do not mean that you should agree with us, for we do not agree among ourselves. But if you showed clearly that you were preoccupied by our preoccupations, that you can dance to our music and sing to our tunes, you would do yourself and your office more good than would a hundred Garter ceremonies or the dutiful launching of a thousand ships.

sb

There is much that is wrong in our society: and you, if you have the courage to see it, are in an ideal position to bring those wrongs to the public eye. We should like to have a king who is not afraid to speak out against hypocrisy and inhumanity as your father has spoken out against stupidity and inefficiency. We should like a Prince who can tell our elders that the long-haired layabouts who haunt their suburban nightmares are not necessarily destructive ogres, but sometimes human beings who are more concerned with men than with money.

No doubt they will want to put you safely into the Navy--the last place where the wars of modern Britain will be fought. We should like to see you in the real battlefield--in the Wolverbampton ghettos and the dreary bedsitting rooms of west London. They will give you a smart blue uniform and a stiff upper lip. We would rather give you a girl, a grin and a purpose in life.

We realize the difficulties in your way. We understand the restrictions. But if we are to have a king who is worth more than the throne he sits on, we must know who it is that we are getting. And if you are to be our king in 20 years' time, you must start to be a Prince now. Somehow you must find your voice and use it. In this brash and noisy generation, a lounge suit and a stately silence will merely sink you in oblivion. The investiture of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle will mean little to us. We are looking forward to the day when Charles Windsor emerges from the cocoon.

Sincerely,

JONATHAN HOLMES

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.