For generations, to the often unconcealed horror of doting aunts and grandmothers, well-heeled young Britons have been bundled off to boarding schools at the tender age of eight or nine to learn to be young gentlemen in a manly atmosphere free of the influence of mothers and nannies. Last week, in similar fashion, Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip took their eight-year-old son Charles by the hand and delivered him over to Headmaster Peter Beck at Philip's own alma mater, Cheam, one of England's oldest and most tradition-encrusted preparatory schools.
As the royal couple's black Lagonda, with Prince Philip...