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It's quite a thing.

Your mother dies, and you, at once, inherit the Crown

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and become the nation's Head of State.

It was always to be his duty and his fate.

And he has always known it.

A great privilege, of course, and, no less, a great burden.

As King, he now represents the nation at home and abroad.

He is the titular head of the Armed Forces

and Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

No less significantly, though not officially,

the sovereign is expected always to act

so as to sustain the unity of the nation.

I love the cry that I'm a political tool.

The idea of being a political tool is so marvellous.

The new King has had

long enough to prepare for the inevitable.

And no other Prince of Wales has lived his life so far

under such a glare of public scrutiny.

He's been fawned upon, he's been admired, he's been loved.

He's been mocked.

...is a carbuncle...

I just come and talk to the plants, you know.

And he's been vilified.

Very few of us are without an opinion about him.

This programme is not simply a rehash of all those opinions,

but my own personal view after knowing him now

for a pretty long time.

I don't pretend to be impartial or neutral,

but I am, I hope, fair and accurate.

And I happen to think that our new King

is a pretty remarkable man.

And that's what this programme is about.

On the night of the 14th of November, 1948,

a crowd gathered outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.

A little before midnight, they learnt that Princess Elizabeth

had been delivered of her first child -- a boy.

At Buckingham Palace,

which for 62 years has seen no royal births,

His Royal Highness, the baby, is born behind these windows.

So great was the enthusiasm

that a police car circled the Victoria Monument

trying to hush the crowd for the baby's sake.

Of course, the prince was blissfully unaware

of all the hullabaloo.

In the privacy of her journal,

his doting mother noted that her baby's hands were,

"Quite unlike mine or like his father's.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of them."

We want the Queen! We want the Queen!

We want the Queen!

In 1953, on the death of her father, George VI,

Charles' mother was crowned Queen.

Romantics hailed it the dawn of a new Elizabethan age.

By his mother's side, her 4-year-old son,

now heir to the British throne.

This new Elizabethan age

portrayed the Royal family as an enchanted ideal

that the nation might idolise and revere,

from a discreet distance.

A veil of formality was only lifted

for carefully choreographed glimpses

of the family behind the throne.

Prince Charles was schooled and trained rigourously

from an early age to play his part in the royal pageant.

It's pretty difficult to match the guards

for smartness on parade,

but some people had a jolly good try.

He was a shy-but-dutiful son.

With the Queen so often away, he was nurtured by his grandmother,

whom he adored.

It was the Queen Mother who saw

that the child was sensitive, creative, and inquisitive.

Balmoral has always been the favoured place

for the Royal family's summer holiday.

Here, in 1955, the family pets were the centre of attention.

At Balmoral, the Royal family's Scottish castle,

the young prince also came to wonder

at the environment about him...

...to relish the beauty of the natural world

that he would later capture in hundreds of watercolours...

and to learn the names of plants and trees,

insects, and fungi.

This was his heaven on Earth.

School was another matter.

In 1962, at the age of 13, at his father's behest,

he was sent to Prince Philip's old

boarding school in Scotland -- Gordonstoun.

Now Geoff Shelley reporting on Gordonstoun

as Prince Charles arrives with his father,

the school's most famous old boy.

And first, a welcome from the headmaster, Mr. Robert Chew.

Then the school warden.

Remember how you felt when you started?

The regime in those days was spartan --

cold showers, early morning runs,

and a bracing no-nonsense ethos.

It could be cruel as well.

The teenage prince was physically and mentally bullied,

a torture that he did his best to conceal from his parents,

but writing of it in letters to his most trusted confidants.

This is an extract from one of them,

written after he'd been at the school for two years --

"It's such hell here, especially at night.

The people in my dormitory are foul.

Goodness, they're horrid.

I don't know how anyone could be so foul.

They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows.

Last night was hell. Literal hell.

I still wish I could come home.

It's such a hole, this place."

Anyway, he survived and would say with hindsight

that it hadn't been that bad,

and might even have been good for him.

It was at Cambridge University

that he really began to find himself.

The Minis serve to underline

Prince Charles' hope that his time at Cambridge

will be uncluttered by deference to his Royal status.

The prince, who'll be 19 next month,

will be reading archaeology and anthropology.

Those who really understand the new King

know that he's long been driven by an almost-compulsive urge

to justify his unique position.

And that he's inspired by a set of ideas and values

that began to take shape here in the cloistered world,

as it then was, of intellectual and cultural privilege.

It was at Cambridge

that he began to explore what he would come to call

"the spiritual dimension of life on Earth."

The student prince was not anti-science,

but he deplored the notion that science made God redundant.

An idea began to take shape in his mind.

A vision of harmony between the spiritual universe

and earthly life.

A tapestry of interwoven threads

which he would later describe as "timeless values."

He wasn't so high-minded as to be interminably solemn.

On the contrary, he had a real eye for detail

and a gift for mimicry.

Over the years, he would accumulate a vast store

of anecdotes about the rich and the powerful,

with which, in private, inevitably,

he would puncture the vanities and pomposities of public life.

He also had a highly developed sense

of the absurd and the surreal.

The Goons -- Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe --

would reduce him to tears of laughter.

Who is it? What? What?

Who is it? Who is it?

- Good morning. - Thank you.

Once or twice at Cambridge,

his future subjects got a glimpse of this side

of his character.

His university life was interrupted in mid-flow

when on the 1st of July, 1969,

a global audience of half a billion

watched his investiture

as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.

A made-for-television pageant and the start of a long slog.

A coronet for sovereignty.

I, Charles, Prince of Wales,

do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship.

And faith and truth I will bear unto thee,

to live and die against all manner of folks.

I think, if you have a sense of duty --

and I like to think I have --

then service is something that you give yourself to people

if, you know -- particularly if they want you,

and sometimes, if they don't want you.

If you feel that you can do something,

even if they think that you're not doing something very useful,

and you think you're right there,

then you can be of service.

He was dispatched here and there

as the Royal family's young star

to perform this or that public duty,

the first of scores to come.

Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Japan...

and the United States,

where at the age of 21,

he met the not-yet-disgraced President Nixon.

Thank you very much, indeed,

for all your kind words of welcome.

We've been looking forward to it enormously because America,

to me and to my sister, has always been a very fascinating

and intriguing country.

And then, there was a further rite of passage

for the heir to the throne.

As the future head of the armed services...

Launch.

...he was virtually obliged

to sign up for a five-year stint in the Navy.

Lieutenant, the Prince of Wales,

took command of the minehunter, HMS Bronington.

He also liked sport.

Inevitably, the press dubbed him "Action Man."

And because he was linked romantically

to one girl after another, this very eligible bachelor

was regarded as something of a playboy.

But actually, he really wasn't.

After the Navy, as he approached the age of 30,

he was bombarded by advice from all quarters...

...not least from Lord Mountbatten,

the uncle he adored...

from the Prime Minister of the day, James Callaghan,

and numerous other counsellors in and out of Buckingham Palace.

Not to mention, an ever-attentive media,

which urged him to get a proper job.

Indeed, the prince himself suggested he could work

in a factory or on a trawler.

But this was already an age of terrorism.

And the heir to the throne could not simply join the workforce

like any other British citizen.

That well-meant advice didn't help very much.

What he wanted to do was to make a difference

in ways that weren't yet very clear.

But in time, although there were some false starts,

the interwoven strands of a very personal vision

began to emerge and to be put into practice.

The key word, "harmony."

This notion was at the very core of his being.

The idea that we need to appreciate

that the relationship between human society

and the natural world

is not only close, but must be kept in balance, or harmony.

And it can be detected in one of his earliest speeches.

1970 had been designated European Conservation Year.

Conservation, or problems about pollution,

should not be held up as separate concepts

from housing or other social schemes.

Conservation means being aware of the total environment

that we live in.

It does not mean simply preserving every hedgerow,

tree, field, or insect in sight,

but it means thinking rationally and consciously

just as much about the urban environment

as about the countryside.

In those days, that was quite a thing.

On the face of it, a bizarre leap of the imagination.

To link rural hedgerows with urban housing

was as radical as it was original.

So while he sounded the alarm about the threats

posed by pollution long before these became

mainstream concerns...

...so he warned

against the worsening state of Britain's inner cities

well before that became a fashionable issue.

"How is it possible that people are able to live

in such inhumane conditions?" he would ask.

You can almost hear the princely anguish and frustration

in his voice.

Something had to be done.

More to the point, he would do it,

or at least do his best, his damnedest,

to make a difference.

The prince is here to look

at some of the activities

by the youth groups around Cheshire

who've been supported, or have had grants,

from the Prince of Wales' Trust.

This was an innovative, radical, and progressive charity

that, in due course, would be renowned in Britain and beyond.

It was named The Prince's Trust.

Fond of saying, "There but for the grace of God go I,"

his goal was to salvage young lives blighted by despair.

To offer them a ladder

to escape from a future of crime or drug addiction.

There's nothing out there.

There's only about seven jobs for so many people.

What do you do with yourself, then?

Stay in bed.

At the heart of the operation was his conviction

that a wealth of untapped talent

was waiting to be unleashed.

Not with a hand-out,

but with small grants to help the young help themselves.

Instead of the dole queue,

a mini enterprise and the chance of a better future.

That was a world away from the fanfare of 1981

when he was married at Saint Paul's Cathedral

to Lady Diana Spencer, Princess Di.

It was an ill-fated union,

which would soon become the focus

of intense and intrusive public scrutiny.

But the world beyond the wedding hadn't changed.

Riots had erupted in Brixton

and spread to other inner cities across England.

An upsurge of violence

that the heir to the throne described as,

"a symptom of social distress and anger."

If things change and they begin to treat us

like ordinary people, or human, then we'll compromise.

But right now, me, personally,

I've no reasoning to reason with no police.

The prince was shocked, but not surprised.

Where a politician might have cut and run,

he stayed and talked.

Well, we're trying very hard to do something about it.

It is a big problem, isn't it?

It takes a long time for these people to realise.

It's gonna take time and money...

The riots galvanised the Trust.

Before long, thousands of young people,

supported by hundreds of skilled volunteers,

were getting at least the chance of a future.

There's an awful lot of people --

I mean, I was probably one myself --

who don't have obvious gifts

and need, I think, extra motivation,

extra pushing, along certain lines.

And The Prince's Trust is trying to help those

who aren't necessarily going to find themselves

being fantastic successes,

but to be able to develop their particular potential.

The Prince's Trust gave grants to both Chrises

to buy their own walking equipment.

The cost -- £100 each.

It's proved remarkable value for money.

The Trust and the grant from the Trust, in both cases,

I think, has been a most significant factor

in helping them not reoffend.

The Trust would grow until by 2021, it had given a hand up,

not a hand-out, to more than a million young people.

Back in 1984, though,

the prince was not content to rest on his laurels.

He was convinced that inner-city communities

would only flourish

in surroundings that were human in scale,

that made them proud, and raised their spirits.

So on their behalf, he decided to speak out.

He chose the Royal Palace of Hampton Court

as the place to do it.

A gala dinner to celebrate the 150th anniversary

of the august Royal Institute of British Architects,

where he was the guest of honour.

He chose his words with care, firing his missile

at the very heart of the architectural establishment.

And, he went on, they did not have a monopoly

on knowing what is best about taste, style, and planning.

His audience listened in glum silence.

And that wasn't the half of it.

Having rebuked them for what they hadn't done,

he then castigated them for what they had done.

London's skyline, he declared, was being ruined

by concrete stumps and glass towers.

And on plans for a new extension

to the National Gallery...

What is proposed seems to me like a monstrous carbuncle

on the face of a much-loved, elegant friend.

It may have been insensitive,

but it most certainly made an impact.

And it struck a chord with the public.

The scheme was dropped,

to be replaced by the now-familiar facade

which faces Trafalgar Square.

The prince's onslaught enraged the architectural elite.

Its leading figures hit back.

I think it's a reactionary position

that is being espoused there.

And it's not a position that I particularly admire.

I think we should go forward

and not be constantly looking back over our shoulders.

The prince was not deterred, and his constant interference,

as they saw it, made him real enemies.

Modernists who thought that his views

were out of date and narrow-minded.

And they claimed that by speaking out in public,

he was misusing his unique role.

It took a long time for him to be even partially forgiven,

and, in truth, the wounds never really healed.

Of course, the prince's own world

could hardly have offered a starker contrast

to the modernist vision of the future.

There was Balmoral, Sandringham,

St. James', and, by the time he was 32,

his own private country retreat, Highgrove House.

Here, he was free to express his innermost self

in his own backyard,

on his own land.

Here, he could design and build, dream, and scheme.

By his own account, it was a pretty haphazard creation,

but it gradually evolved into an intricate unity of design,

which, for him, mirrored that earthly ideal

of spiritual harmony that he craved.

When I first came here, it was rather sort of basic,

the whole thing, and a lot of it was fairly empty

and grew vegetables, quite a lot of vegetables.

I had always rather wanted to create something rather special

in a walled garden, and when I saw this walled garden

when I first came to look at the house,

I did rather fall in love with it, I must say.

The garden at Highgrove gave visual expression

to those timeless values

by which he thought humanity should be inspired,

as he was, by being there.

I love coming here, and I potter about and sit and read,

or I just come and talk to the plants, really.

It's very important to talk to them.

They respond, don't they?

But there was practical action, as well as philosophical musing.

A farm to run...

livestock to feed...

crops to be tilled.

And, for the prince, there was only one way to do it.

As with the garden,

it would be in working with nature, not against it.

Here, he would go organic.

All this several decades before mainstream opinion

woke up to the fact that all life on Earth,

including ours,

depends on a flourishing biodiversity in nature.

As he loathed modernist architecture,

so he came to loathe

what he once called "modernist farming."

The industrialization of agriculture,

which he lamented publicly,

had turned the countryside into a treeless, hedgeless desert

and destroyed local communities into the bargain.

He would become increasingly forthright about his beliefs.

Humankind, he would say,

must restore a feeling of harmony with nature

and a proper sense of respect and awe for the great mystery

of the natural order of the universe.

He was well aware that by expressing such ideas in public,

he made himself exceptionally vulnerable to scorn and mockery.

He dreaded that.

He knew that the tabloid press would trivialise

his most deeply-held beliefs and feelings.

And so they did, with abandon,

deciding that the heir to the throne

had turned into a loony prince

who talked to flowers and hugged trees.

Of course, he was a satirist's dream.

- You see, architecture... - Yes, I know, I know.

I mean, it's important, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

I mean, some of the architecture in this country...

- Carbuncle. - ...is a carbuncle...

- Face of society. - ...on the face of society,

- don't you think? - Yes, yes.

It was easy to dismiss such caricatures

as a bit of harmless fun, but they clung to him

and gradually came to define the public image

for those many millions of people

who couldn't possibly know him.

He was well aware of that, and it did get to him.

He would sometimes say to his friends,

"Oh, why do I bother?"

knowing full well that the answer was,

he couldn't help himself.

I do like architecture which respects nature.

I find it hard, I must say, to appreciate architecture

which shouts at you that it is in competition with nature.

That it is emphasising the rational element

in our humanity to the exclusion of the intuitive.

It was in this spirit

that against the better judgment of his own officials,

he drove forward a vision of a new town,

built on a greenfield site in Dorset

belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall.

Poundbury, on the outskirts of the county capital,

Dorchester,

would be constructed in line with his principles

and reflect his love of the vernacular,

the use of traditional materials and design.

The new town would demonstrate the timeless values

that inspired him,

and, he thought, many, many others as well.

Making a reality of that dream, though,

became something of a nightmare.

He was surrounded by skeptics, who thought his ideas

were harebrained, hopeless, or too expensive.

In the present climate, and for the foreseeable future,

erm, to actually build something like that

would be out of all economic sort of possibility.

But he refused to yield, intervening again and again

to cajole, inspire, remonstrate, and insist,

until, after a prolonged battle,

he overcame the opposition and won the argument.

You may like Poundbury as it is today, you might not.

Some people love it, others are less enamoured.

For my part, I find it just a touch antiseptic,

but that's not quite the point.

It works. People want to live here.

House prices have risen well beyond the national average.

And it would be churlish, then, to deny that for the prince,

it was something of a triumph

and an effective riposte to his modernist critics.

Let's go, let's go, let's go!

Britain's worst riots

since 1981 began just before 8:00.

In the mid-'80s, the inner cities erupted again.

Like many others, the prince was shocked and dismayed.

But he had no doubt that crime was closely linked

to deprivation.

And he was alarmed by the evidence

of Britain's worsening social divide.

When the heat died down,

he went to see Handsworth for himself.

An experience that convinced him

that with unemployment around 3 million,

he should redouble his efforts.

The idea was to get business leaders personally involved.

But first, they would have to witness the reality

with their own eyes.

They've all been standing here for hours.

The prince was uniquely equipped to bring

the two sides together.

Seeing is Believing, he would come to call the initiative.

First in Halifax,

and then later on a bigger scale in Burnley and elsewhere,

Business in the Community brought together

major employers, government, local councils, planners,

and other charities, including The Prince's Trust,

to work alongside local leaders

to restore the heart of their decaying communities.

He not only corralled business leaders in the city,

but he wanted to get the Prime Minister onside as well.

And he saw an opening when Margaret Thatcher

delivered her leader's speech

at the Conservative Party Conference

following her third election victory in 1987.

And so dying industries, soulless planning,

municipal socialism...

these deprived the people of the most precious things in life --

hope, confidence, and belief in themselves.

And that sapping of the spirit

is at the very heart of urban decay.

Her stress on the importance of restoring hope and confidence

to the inner cities prompted the prince

to get in touch with Number 10.

At first, the response was distinctly cool.

The prince suspected rightly

that the Prime Minister was reluctant

to meet some of the community leaders

that he had lined up for her.

As he wrote in one of his memos,

"The important thing is for the P.M. to meet the real people.

She must hear at first hand what their problems are.

I only hope that she won't allow herself to be put off

by people who may tell her

that she shouldn't be seeing left-wing characters."

It took time, but in due course, she was persuaded.

And her government stepped in to provide backing

for the work of the prince's charities in the inner cities.

The prince was tireless.

You only have to watch him in close-up

to see how well he engages with people one-to-one.

Charlie! Don't forget us, Charlie!

You've got a hell of a good voice.

I don't know how you do it.

Come over here.

He put them at ease,

listening to what they had to say.

And how long are you doing it for? A year?

- Two years. - Two years.

- Are you learning something? - Yeah, quite a lot.

- Like what? - Business admin.

Are you? Really?

You're gonna be able to start your own business, are you?

Yeah.

You are the man!

You are the man!

Often he would all but ignore an official welcoming party

and break away from this chain gang,

as his officials called them,

to meet those who had no particular status.

I want to see the butcher's shop,

'cause he's got rather a good reputation, hasn't he?

Now, let's have a look in here.

Morning. How are you? Morning.

No.

Good morning. How are you?

- How's it going? - Not too badly.

- Is it all right? - I'm just having a sandwich.

You're having a sandwich. Which one?

He has an uncanny ability to draw people in,

to put them at ease,

and to make them feel that he really cares,

to a degree that a politician

with an axe to grind can rarely emulate.

And he made use of these encounters...

Are you in for a drink?

...gleaning insights, which he passed

back to his various charities,

bombarding them with suggestions.

"Why don't we try this, do that?"

Within 20 years of his investiture,

the prince had created a confusingly large portfolio

of initiatives.

I can only make sense of it by imagining a kaleidoscope,

brightly coloured shards

creating an infinite variety of patterns,

but always a symmetry,

united around the common theme of harmony.

Of course, none of that was the stuff of headlines,

and the press barely covered any of it.

Their "loony prince" had become a boring prince.

In any case, their attention was elsewhere.

Am I in the way?

Princess Diana was beautiful and glamourous.

From the moment of their unhappily

labelled "fairy-tale wedding,"

she had become the world-fêted star of the Charles and Di show.

And on the surface, she showed every sign of relishing it.

How are you enjoying married life?

I highly recommend it.

- That was quick. - Wear sunglasses...

He's waving about...

Happy birthday, Your Royal Highness.

Gradually, though, the media got wind of the fact

that the marriage was in trouble,

and then, that it was crumbling.

Diana!

Symbolic photos of her, alone and apparently unloved,

came to be on every front page.

She was the adoring mother of two young children,

and, so the narrative had it,

the husband was therefore cold and remote,

indifferent to her mental turmoil,

for which, most unjustly,

some commentators chose to hold him responsible.

With the final collapse of their marriage,

they went their separate ways with different partners.

But he was widely held to be the guilty party.

That was a cruel judgment,

and a grotesque distortion of a complex misery.

For those who saw a good deal of him at the time,

like I did, it was excruciating to witness his pain.

Pain that anyone could seriously think that he was a cold father,

and that a private family catastrophe

should have to be played out so luridly in public.

Solace came through music, literature, and the theatre.

As a royal patron of the arts,

his contribution was uniquely valuable.

Whenever he's had a moment, he's escaped into his own world

of peace, beauty, and creativity.

For years, the prince had been something of a lone voice,

crying in an environmental wilderness...

...ignored and mocked, except by those few activists

with whom he shared common cause.

As with architecture, the prince went on the offensive.

Do we not, most of us, feel a profound,

almost-unconscious unease,

at the course we have all been taking?

Almost as if we were living on borrowed time.

Gradually, the world began to wake up.

Global warming, climate change,

was finally on the global agenda.

In June 1992, the first Earth Summit

was due to be held in Rio de Janeiro.

When he heard of this, the prince hatched a plan.

In the run-up to the event, he arranged for Britannia

to be anchored in the Amazon River Delta.

He invited key international leaders to a mini summit

on board to help set the agenda for the big one.

Few could resist an invitation to dinner in the royal yacht.

He drew up a pretty impressive guest list --

the U.S. senator, Al Gore; a clutch of ministers from Europe;

and senior executives from the World Bank, BP, and Shell;

and, most important of all,

the Brazilian president, Fernando Collor.

And then disaster struck. Collor backed out.

But the heir to the throne was not to be thwarted.

He wrote in his own hand to the president,

"A great deal of time and effort has been expended in order

to put this seminar together. The royal yacht is sailing

all the way out to Brazil especially.

I personally would be disappointed and downhearted

by your absence

because it would give all the wrong signals." He won.

The president came back in, the seminar went ahead.

It proved to be an exceptionally productive meeting,

which played no little part in shaping the priorities

for the Rio summit the following year.

Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali...

It was there that world leaders

signed up to the first formal agreement

to combat climate change

by reducing the emission of carbon gases

into the atmosphere.

The world is our garden,

and together we must cultivate it.

This week at Rio, we have made a start.

Beyond Rio, we must continue to carry it through.

Mr. Chairman, for our generation and for future generations,

there can be no other way. Thank you.

Convinced that urgent action was needed

to avoid what he called the "grim reality"

of catastrophic climate change,

the prince went on the environmental offensive.

Sustainability is a word much

in use at the moment among environmentalists.

It means, to put it rather simply,

the ability to meet human needs indefinitely

without degrading the environment.

Yet the challenge of sustainability has to be met.

Not content with words alone, he set up his own projects,

working tirelessly in private, as well as in public,

both at home and abroad,

where he was garlanded with awards

for his commitment and leadership.

It was no surprise that in the decades that followed from Rio,

he continued to make keynote speeches

at high-profile climate summits across the world.

It is very simple. We must save our forests,

for there is no plan B to tackle climate change.

But in Britain back in 1992,

the Rio summit was soon forgotten.

Here, public attention was focused less

on the prince's public role

than on his private travails.

It's very sad, both for Princess Diana

and for Prince Charles, and for their children.

I think everyone is very sad at the ending of the marriage.

In 1996, four years after their separation,

he and Diana were divorced.

The following year,

the princess was killed in a car accident

in a Paris underpass.

She was very young.

And she's got two wonderful children.

I just feel for the children as well.

Their son William was 15, Harry, 12.

Their mother's death was not only dreadful for the two boys,

but tragic for their father as well.

Outside St. James' Palace,

people queued quietly to record their tributes

in a book of condolence.

To make it the more painful,

some of the princess' grief-stricken admirers

appeared in some way to blame the prince for her death.

Others seemed to doubt that he loved his children enough

to guide them through the vulnerable years ahead.

That was as untrue as it was cruel.

No... Please, love.

It's too...

- Why? - 'Cause we saw him.

- Why? - It's very successful.

Why? Why?

I know how much he loved and nurtured them

through their teens and into adulthood.

And he did it with great sensitivity.

He was wise enough to let them develop

as very different individuals, in their own way.

To think for themselves.

To have the confidence to be their own people

and to make their own choices.

In 2005, he married Camilla Parker Bowles.

She was, as she is, down-to-earth, warm-hearted,

and devoid of the airs and graces

that sometimes afflict those with rare privilege.

No less importantly, she gave him

unstinting support.

His partner for life.

Still a driven man,

but better able to brush aside the slings and arrows

that might be hurled at him,

and to laugh off the recycled tittle-tattle

by which he was routinely assailed.

In the run-up to an official visit to the Gulf in 1993,

he delivered a lecture in Oxford

extolling the culture of Islam.

Although his own Christianity was, and is, deep-rooted,

he'd come to revere the Muslim faith.

He spoke, therefore, with some passion

about the need for harmony

between the world's great religions.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all peoples of the Book.

We share many key values in common --

respect for knowledge, for justice,

compassion towards the poor and underprivileged,

the importance of family life, respect for parents.

In the Islamic world, his words made a deep impact,

as they did in Britain.

I think we've tended to look at the East

as being rather primitive and underdeveloped,

and everything else.

And I feel that the time has come to remind people

in the West, if they can be reminded,

of the important things

that we can still learn from the East

and from Islam.

But he was not content simply to utter such home truths.

In a world not yet disfigured by maniacal terrorists,

he ended with a warning.

But we shall need to work harder

to understand each other,

to drain out any poison between us,

and to lay the ghost of suspicion and fear.

It is rather remarkable, I must say.

You don't often come across such total silence.

His speech did more than any politician could hope to match.

It had forged a spiritual bond

with the leadership of the Islamic world

that would not be forgotten.

It's amazing, because the bustard is so big, isn't it?

Yes.

I used to do this when I was young.

- In Scotland. - Oh, I see.

In 2007, his quest for harmony led him to take a huge gamble.

He intervened personally and decisively

to save this 18th-century Scottish mansion

from the auctioneer's hammer,

along with its 2,000-acre estate.

It also contained the finest original collection

of Chippendale furniture in the world.

His intervention was so last minute

that these precious pieces were already being loaded

onto the removal lorries for the journey

to a London auction house,

where they would have been dispersed all over the world.

Instead, they're now on public display

in their original surroundings.

The auction price was £45 million.

Benefactors were generous,

but the prince had to dig deep into his own charitable funds

to find the £21 million needed to save it for the nation.

His critics thought him reckless.

He had no doubts.

The house was certainly a lure.

But it was the grounds of the Dumfries estate

that were the real attraction.

Here, finally, the prince

could realise his vision all in one place...

a home for that tapestry of enterprises

that are woven together in the prince's Foundation.

You can see it in the care and craftsmanship

which distinguish the buildings that sprout from the landscape.

The work of young men and women, many of whom might otherwise

have seen little future for themselves.

There are apprenticeships, diplomas, and degrees.

planning and design, thatching and plastering,

stonemasonry and joinery, and much more.

If the Foundation is an exercise in nostalgia,

it serves the needs

of at least 15,000 ambitious young students every year...

keen to acquire skills that are in growing demand.

Like The Prince's Trust,

his Foundation has not been his, except in name, for many years.

Both are controlled by trustees, who are responsible

for every aspect of their activities.

The prince's guiding principles may inspire them,

but the trustees alone are responsible

for steering his vision into the future.

Underneath this soil...

The estate is open to all, from the youngest to the oldest.

It's a people's park with a purpose.

To see what happens here is to witness, in microcosm,

the values that have inspired his life.

Here's another one!

It is surely hard to think of any other living person

who's done so much, in so many ways,

for so many and for so long.

Dumfries is the prince's defining legacy.

His earthly quest for spiritual harmony

was once derided as a princely eccentricity.

Very few people of any sensitivity say that nowadays.

He learns from the past, but looks forward, not back.

He's only been King for a very short time,

and inevitably there are still questions to ask.

Principally amongst them, perhaps,

what kind of king will he be?

To the relief of some,

and the disappointment of others,

he's no longer a free man,

but a prisoner of the constitution.

His role as sovereign will limit his freedom to speak his mind.

There's no way he'll be a campaigning monarch

beating the drum for his own initiatives.

His life will be circumscribed by all those public duties

that in support of his mother, have taken up more

and more of his time anyway.

My Lords and members of the House of Commons...

State openings, foreign dignitaries to host,

honours to hand out...

garden parties and glad-handing.

But he won't be content

to confine himself to those formal occasions.

Over many decades, he's accumulated

a vast store of knowledge and experience.

At home and abroad, he's met a greater variety of people,

from the mightiest to the humblest,

than any other living person.

It would be a foolish Prime Minister

indeed who squandered such a resource.

He is a man of substance, and many parts.

In his new role, he will still be involved.

He will surely continue to bring people together

to explore solutions to the huge challenges of our time,

while ensuring that no-one could seriously believe

that the Crown had become an alternative seat of power.

He is mindful of those unwritten rules

of the British constitution, which specify

that the sovereign's only right is to be consulted,

to encourage, and to warn the government of the day.

Though he may well speak out on those great issues

where there is a broad public consensus.

In time of national rejoicing or national sorrow,

he'll seek to express the mood of the public,

but he'll surely do so by finding a language

that reflects his own lifelong search for harmony.

He'll speak from the heart as much as the script.

I'm from London! How are you?

Wherever he goes, people will have every chance to see

that he is the same man in a different role.

Diligent, warm-hearted, caring, and kind.

You can't make that up, and he can't conceal it.

Your skin is beautiful as ever.

You're very handsome.

Flattery will get you everywhere.

So, how will people feel when they see

the new King enter Westminster Abbey for his coronation?

You can't tell, but my feeling is that they will wish him well,

they'll want him to succeed,

and that they will sense he's a good man,

who will serve them and the nation

to the best of his ability for the rest of his life.