It was, in the end, inevitable. Kensington Palace confirmed yesterday that Prince George will go to Eton in September. There had been talk of him going to his mother’s alma mater, Marlborough. But his father’s old school won out. George had, it turns out, in fact been put down for Eton over four years ago.
It makes sense. Eton is close to Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park, where the Prince and Princess of Wales live. It’s even closer to grandpa’s house, Windsor Castle. When Prince William was at Eton, he often walked across the bridge to see granny in her castle.
But the deciding factor in sending George there now was that Prince William didn’t just go to Eton – he loved it there. He was in ‘Pop’, the self-selecting club of the most popular boys in the school. Many of his closest friends today were made at Eton. Prince Harry, on the other hand, struggled academically at Eton and didn’t enjoy himself so much. Don’t expect his son to be heading there when he turns 13.
Of course, Prince George, as the future King of England, will always stand out in any group
Eton contains an unusually large amount of sons of old boys – even if there are fewer than there used to be, thanks to increasingly stringent entrance exams. Among many Old Etonians, it’s unthinkable that their boys should go anywhere else. Some of them, in a barely ironic way, refer to Eton simply as ‘School’ – i.e., ‘Were you at School?’, implying there is simply no other place worth going to.
It will help George settle in, too, that many of his pals from Lambrook, near Ascot, Berkshire, will be heading to Eton. The rude awakening of boarding in a huge school at 13 is that much easier with a few chums alongside you. There is also another huge advantage. George will be among his own tribe – the super-rich and the super-grand, who attend Eton as an inevitable rite of passage.
King Charles hated Gordonstoun because he was a bookish, shy boy in a school full of muscular, rugby-playing types. He was bullied, too, because he came from a different world – a different planet, even, from the middle-class Scots he was thrown in among. It’s striking that very few of Charles’s friends come from Gordonstoun. After he left Cambridge, he gravitated to the grand, upper-class circles from which he had sprung. It’s striking that Princess Diana’s brother and father both went to Eton.
Of course, Prince George, as the future King of England, will always stand out in any group, however grand it is. But he will move more anonymously and happily among gilded Etonians than any other group of schoolboys.
Prince William’s old friends are often seen joshing him and playfully rubbing his pate – behaving more like equals than courtiers. They will be less craven to him – a very good thing when serial sycophancy in childhood can damage character and stunt the growth of independence.
One Old Etonian contemporary of William’s once told a friend of mine, ‘Well, Wills is OK but he does like to play king sometimes.’ Another said, ‘Oh, I like him, but if he wasn’t who he is, he’d be hard-pressed to get a job at Foxtons.’
That doesn’t amount to the sort of bullying that poor Charles got at Gordonstoun. It’s the kind of friendly banter that keeps a royal ego at bay – a crucial service to the soul.
Many Etonians have alarming levels of confidence. It can be irritating but that sort of confidence is also an effective device for dealing on the level with royalty rather than cowering before it or over-compensating for inner deference by bullying a little prince. A journalist pal once said to me:
Parents don’t send their children to private schools to be educated. They send them there to make sure they end up with a posh voice and the right sort of friends.
My friend was joking but there was a kernel of truth to the line. At Eton, Prince George will be inducted into the world of knowledge lightly held, superhuman confidence offset by an effective patina of self-deprecation, and great wealth and power casually borne and adroitly administered.
This is what was once called the ‘ruling class’ – although, apart from Prince George, not many of his friends will be doing much ruling. The amount of Etonians becoming MPs – and prime ministers – is in decline. Money talks – even, or especially, in the grandest circles – and Etonians are more likely to become hedge funders than politicians these days. Most of them will still develop the born-to-rule carapace, even if they aren’t the next-but-one King of England.
Comments