What Makes King Charles Furious? Pretty Much Anything

The rumors started, keen students of the Windsors will recall, with a leaky pen.

In September 2022, shortly after King Charles III ascended the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, he was signing the visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland when he encountered a particularly troublesome pen.

“Oh God, I hate this!” the newly minted monarch exclaimed as he handed the pen over to his wife, Queen Camilla, “I can’t bear this bloody thing! What they do… every stinking time!”

The moment, captured on camera, led news feeds and then went viral. The meme gods were not done with Charles, however, and a few days later, on Sept. 10, 2022, during the formal Accession Council ceremony where King Charles III was officially proclaimed the new monarch, another pen-related temper tantrum occurred.

As part of the ceremony, King Charles III had to sign a series of official documents. When it came time to sign the Proclamation of Accession, Charles was seen gesturing with comedic irritation and anger to aides about the pen and its holder’s awkward placement on the desk.

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The incidents gave a rare insight into a carefully guarded secret: that Charles has, according to sources, commentators and friends who spoke to The Daily Beast, a “terrible” temper and an “irascible streak.”

His temper was back in the news this week after two new incidents highlighted his irritability.

First, he was filmed snapping at an aide who failed to efficiently help his wife into a coat during a wet and blustery official tour of the island of Jersey, a wealthy British territory located in the Channel.

Then, at the State Opening of Parliament, he appeared to tick off a page who inexpertly laid out the heavy velvet train of the gigantic state robes traditionally worn at that event.

The incidents came as no surprise to people who know the king.

“Charles can have a terrible temper,” says one former employee, “Anything he perceives as incompetence particularly brings it out. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. In fairness to him, as anyone who has actually worked with him will tell you, he himself is always extremely well prepared, well-read on the subject matter of people he meets and is working with, diligent and respectful of expertise.

“The counter of that is that he expects other people to show him the same respect; he can certainly go off at the staff in pretty blunt terms when he perceives someone has not done their job properly, or is just being, to use one of his preferred terms, ‘idiotic.’”

The former employee added: “Ultimately, people like working for him, but everyone is under a lot of pressure, because his office is incredibly busy. He’s absolutely not a monster in the office, but he is human, and he snaps sometimes. Unfortunately there is sometimes a camera on him when it happens.”

A friend of Charles and Camilla adds: “He has an irascible streak to be sure, but it is much better since he has been with Camilla. Everyone, regardless of their position or status, experiences everyday irritations, but literally every move, every gesture he makes is scrutinized.”

Another friend of the family said: “A tendency towards temper tantrums runs through the Windsors. Philip had it, Charles has it, William has it, and Harry has it. You wouldn’t believe what used to come out of William’s mouth when he was playing football!”

Charles’s petulance was well documented in the brilliantly entertaining book Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion and Defiance of Prince Charles by Tom Bower. Bower described how Charles would snap at aides when his demands, which reportedly included such eccentricities as having his own bed, food, and artworks transported to friends’ houses he was staying at, were not met.

Paul Burrell, a former butler to Princess Diana, claimed in his book A Royal Duty that Prince Charles would send a handwritten note to his staff with specific instructions, including how he liked his breakfast tray arranged and his preferences for the temperature of his bath.

Burrell alleged that Charles could fly into a rage if his specific instructions were not followed, saying: “His underwear is folded in a certain way and his bath towel has to be placed in a certain fashion. When it comes to bathing the bath plug has to be in a certain position, the water temperature has to be just tepid, and only half full. If anyone gets anything wrong, everybody is scolded.”

Indeed, another royal servant, Ken Stronach, a former valet, gave an interview to the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World in 1995 in which he described at great lengths the-then Prince Charles’ temper tantrums.

As The Daily Beast has previously related, he claimed that Charles, while on holiday in the South of France, flew into a rage and grabbed him by the throat when he dropped one of his cufflinks down a sink. In a scene that could have been ripped from a Joe Orton farce, Stronach hid in a linen cupboard for half an hour while Charles calmed down. Stronach also alleged that one of his duties was to scrub grass stains from Charles’ pajamas after secret meetings with Camilla Parker Bowles, as she was then.

“There was mud and muck everywhere,” Stronach told the News of the World. “They’d obviously been doing it in the open air.”

A spokesperson for the king declined to respond to a request for comment, but, to be fair to Charles he has been more open than other royals about his sometimes hot temper.

Penny Junor, a royal biographer who is often perceived as being close to Charles’ camp, has written about his irritability and temper. In her book The Firm, Junor describes Charles as having a “fearsome temper” and noted that he can be difficult to advise because he often prefers to hear agreement rather than impartial advice.

Christopher Andersen, a biographer of the king whose new book The King has been a New York Times bestseller, told The Daily Beast: “The king has a famously volcanic temper, and there are plenty of examples of the tantrums he’s thrown over the years.

“Once on vacation in the South of France, Charles became so enraged at a stuck window that he threw a chair through it, and then smashed another window when he felt he still wasn’t getting enough fresh air. At Highgrove, Charles used to stand on the porch and shout orders at his gardeners through a green megaphone. I was told repeatedly that you simply could not fall short at your job or he’d let you know in blistering terms that he was not amused.”

Andersen thinks that Charles has “mellowed” since becoming king and receiving a cancer diagnosis, saying: “Facing one’s mortality obviously puts things in perspective. Things like lost cufflinks and having to wait a few extra seconds for a pen seem less important.”