Newly minted monarch, classical architecture fan, and recent guest of the BBC’s Repair Shop, King Charles III is known to have his quirks, as anyone born into his circumstances might have. In a new biography titled The King: The Life of Charles III, royal expert Christopher Andersen details a few of the eyebrow-raising habits that the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II integrates into his daily routines.
Namely, the king has a number of highly specific must-haves on his travel packing list–including a custom toilet seat that accompanies him any time he stays away from home, as Andersen alleges in the book and in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. The specs of the custom commode remain a mystery, but the claims of its existence are backed up by Tina Brown, who also mentioned it in her book, The Palace Papers, released in April of this year. Brown also listed an orthopedic bed, a pair of Scottish landscape paintings, and Charles’s favorite brand of toilet paper (Kleenex Velvet) among the items that are prepped to meet the monarch at his travel destinations.
Andersen, who described King Charles as “one of the most eccentric sovereigns Great Britain has ever had,” adds a few more oddities to the royal’s travel list: his own ice cube trays, a personal chef, and his childhood teddy bear. Each item warrants its own set of questions, but luckily, Andersen provided some explanation for them. The ice cube trays, naturally, are a solution for the unbearable racket produced by standard cube-shaped ice. “I think one of the funniest quirks—a number of royals have this, the queen had it as well—they don’t like square ice cubes,” the biographer said. “They carry around ice cube trays, have them brought with them wherever they go, because they don’t like the clinking sound that square cubes make.”
As for the personal chef, “they can prepare a meal for him that he’ll eat separately at the table,” Andersen explained. Although the king has apparently denied this claim, the bestselling author maintains that multiple people who have worked for him can attest to its truth. And the teddy bear? The king has had it in his possession since he was a young boy and, apparently, values it so much, that he assigned a valet to oversee its well-being when he was in his forties, as reported by Page Six. When the well-worn stuffed animal was in need of mending, the now king’s former nanny was allegedly asked to come out of retirement to fix the old bear. As Andersen put it in the new biography, “every time that teddy needed to be repaired, you would think it was his own child having major surgery.”
The same valet on teddy bear duty was also allegedly an integral part of the royal’s morning and bedtime routines, helping the former prince of Wales get dressed, shaving his face, laying out his pajamas, and even applying toothpaste to his monogrammed toothbrush, according to Andersen. Another valet was responsible for hand-washing Charles’s undergarments and tucking him into bed—with his teddy bear, of course.
Although the toast rack, an intrinsically English invention designed for elegantly serving toast whilst preventing sogginess, has waned somewhat in popularity since its Victorian-era heyday, the quaint contraption is still found on King Charles’s table. Andersen writes that the king’s breakfast tray would always “contain a cup and saucer to the right with a silver spoon pointing outward at an angle of five o’clock. Butter must come in three balls and be chilled. The royal toast is always in a silver rack, never on a plate. Assorted jams, jellies, marmalades, and honey are served on a separate silver tray” (via Page Six).
The former prince is known to skip lunch, but had similarly stringent expectations at dinner, which he usually eats accompanied by a side salad and a soft-boiled egg, likely from his beloved roost of chickens. “Chefs in the royal kitchen normally prepared several three-minute eggs before being satisfied that one had been cooked to meet the prince’s standards of softness,” Andersen alleges in The King. “The rejects were discarded.”
The King will be released on November 8.
