In case you wondered whether the Prince of Wales had been usefully occupied during his summer holidays, look no further. He’s been nurturing a designer beard.
Prince William and Princess Catherine emerged from their Norfolk abode at the weekend to release a video congratulating Team GB on their Olympic achievements. And they did it very nicely.
But …what on earth was this? He was bearded, or, as he would probably want us to say, ‘rocking’ a beard.
Why has he grown this regrettable bristle? Perhaps it is his way of telling us defiantly that he is off-duty with his family – on holiday, having time away and demonstrably relaxing.
Some have suggested it might be a poke at his estranged brother Prince Harry.
William and Kate congratulate Team GB on the last day of the Olympics
In his memoir Spare, Harry tells how the subject of beards came between them. Apparently William had wanted to have a beard when he married Kate Middleton, and the Queen put her foot down, insisting he went through the ceremony clean-shaven.
When Harry got married to Meghan Markle, however, he was sprouting an unsightly ginger beard, and – so he claimed – the Queen had given his facial fungus her blessing. This was reportedly one of the touch-papers which ignited the row between the two Princes.
Whether or not this particular story is true, whether or not William is flaunting his whiskers to spite his brother, we must hope that he gets shaved pronto.
William has, of course, grown a beard before, during a ten-day training exercise with the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service in Barbados in 2008.
King Charles, too, sported some brush as Prince of Wales in 1976. This was when he had been given command of his own ship, the minehunter HMS Bronington, after finishing a lieutenant’s course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.
Harry and Megan on their wedding day
Brothers at war, Harry and William
It is also true that a number of Royal forebears – Edward VII and George V, for example – were proudly unshaven.
Edward VII belonged to that mysterious generation of European men who, from about 1860 to 1910, all sprouted facial hair. Men had been clean-shaven in Western Europe since the times of the Roman Caesars, and then this generation really let themselves go – with the likes of the scientist Charles Darwin, novelist Anthony Trollope and others wearing not merely beards but growths of facial hair which were positively Father Christmas in nature.
Queen Victoria loved beards, especially after she fell in love with her bearded Highland ghillie John Brown, during the 1860s. According to Julian Farrance, a senior curator at the National Army Museum, she considered the beards grown by the heroes of the Crimean war to be ‘very manly’.
But in the decade after she died in 1901, the beard craze was phased out. After that, beards were restricted to, on the one hand, artists and the like, who wore them to distinguish themselves from respectable suburban chaps who had to catch the 8.15 every morning in a stiff collar, smart suit and bowler hat and, on the other hand, naval officers.
King George V was first and foremost a naval officer, and his beard made him all but indistinguishable from his cousin, the Tsar Of Russia, Nicholas II.
No one complains about bearded royals while they are serving in the Navy as Charles and William did when they sprouted growth. It is perfectly reasonable for sailors not to shave on the high seas, where the swaying of the ship in stormy rollers would make the wielding of a cut-throat razor an enterprise of hazard.
But this is not the sort of beard William is sporting. It is more of a design statement, an attempt to look a little hip. Is it a coincidence that, in the video of him congratulating Team GB, the other two men wearing stubbly, carefully shaped little chin-growths are David Beckham and Snoop Dogg?
We do not complain about David Beckham sporting such an unappealing facial adornment since a meterosexual is what he pointedly and deliberately is. But we do not want the Prince of Wales to be such a figure.
No one is insisting that Prince William should follow his father’s fashion instincts. Charles – arguably the best dressed, certainly the best-tailored, man on the planet – set out to be an old fogey from the age of about 11, and has defied fashion ever since. We want William to look like a young middle-aged man of his generation, and there is no need for him to be a fuddy-duddy.
But the sort of beard he is sporting – like the beard of his brother Harry – gives off all the wrong signals. It is urban chic.
Royal personages should always be well-turned out, whether in formal attire or on occasions where casual dress is demanded. But they should not be chic. They should be above fashion.
And that is what makes me shudder about Prince William’s effort. He’s trying to be the David Beckham of the Royal Family, and it won’t do. Please, sir – shave it off.
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