The queen also bestowed him with the symbols denoting the Prince of Wales: a girdle, sword, coronet, rod, and mantle. The ceremony included a public reading of the letters patent declaring Charles would receive “the title, style, honour and privilege of the Principality of Wales and Earldom of Chester,” according to History Extra, the website for the BBC History Magazine.

The queen places a crown on Prince Charles’s head during his investiture on July 1, 1969. It was one of the biggest broadcasts for an event in Wales, the BBC reported, with 4,000 guests watching in the castle, 19 million watching at home in Great Britain, and more than 500 million watching all over the world. He set up the arena so that it could be easily filmed and broadcast. Many parts of the ceremony were actually organized by Lord Snowdon, a photographer and Princess Margaret’s husband at the time. Surely enough, when Charles was 20, after studying Welsh language and culture at Aberystwyth University, he was invested by his mother on July 1, 1969, at Caernarfon Castle. Toward the end of his term, he said good morning – ‘Bore da’ – to a woman at college she turned to him and said: ‘I don’t speak Welsh!’” He did speak Welsh at his investiture.Īs the eldest son of the queen, Charles was the Prince of Wales ever since his mother ascended the throne (he was nine years old), but the sovereign wanted to wait to invest him with his title until he could appreciate it as an adult, according to BBC. “He had a one-on-one tutorial with me once a week,” he recalled of their lessons in 2015. Edward Millward ahead of his investiture. Prince Charles was, in fact, tutored by a Welsh nationalist named Dr. Prince Charles at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in April 1969. But in a term it’s quite difficult, and I’m not as brilliant a linguist as I’d like to be,” he added in the doc. “I did my utmost to learn as much as I could. He also explained that he did learn Welsh, as is portrayed in the Netflix drama however, he didn’t learn as much of it as he wanted to. “Anyway, that was an interesting experience.” With a counter demonstration usually by splendid middle aged ladies who got out of a bus,” he said in the film, which commemorated his 50th anniversary as the Prince of Wales. “Every day I had to go down to the town where I went to these lectures, and most days there seemed to be a demonstration going on against me. In an ITV documentary, he recalled the “hotbed of radicals” he encountered at school, per The Telegraph. And as the show reveals, Welsh nationalists were not in favor of an English prince taking the title. Prince Charles Is The Crown's Resident SoftboyĪs The Crown accurately depicts, Prince Charles spent a semester at Wales’s Aberystwyth University in 1969 to learn about the country’s language and culture before being invested as its prince.Today, his love for the arts still stands he’s a royal patron of The Old Vic, London’s not-for-profit theater. Apparently, one of his roles was as a weather forecaster. In the club, he participated in a number of productions, several of which were comedies. He joined the drama club Dryden Society at his school, Trinity College, in Cambridge, in 1968, according to Sally Bedell Smith’s biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life (per Town & Country). In reality, the Prince of Wales was a theater kid in college. Prince Charles’s first big scene is one where he’s backstage rehearsing for a school production. Here, we look at Charles’s real-life journey as an evolving young man. As the series opens up the stage for the next generation of royals, we get a deeper understanding of the heir to the throne through his formative years, as he grows into his role as the Prince of Wales and falls deeply in love for the first time. Prince Charles’s story is one of the most captivating tales in The Crown’s third season.

Camilla and charles young