[attach id=291723 size="medium"]Prince Charles leaning from a window with his indulgently smiling mother, Queen Elizabeth, on his fourth birthday.[/attach]

With the Prince of Wales celebrating his 65th birthday, the milestone may lead the heir to the throne to look back on his life.

Charles Philip Arthur George was born on November 14, 1948, and grew up in a time of quiet revolution inside Buckingham Palace.

He became heir apparent at the age of three on the death of his grandfather King George VI in 1952.

The prince’s education marked the first real step in a break with tradition.

He was the first Prince of Wales to be educated publicly instead of by private tutors.

But as a child he was hypersensitive, lonely, excessively shy and, according to his Scottish governess Ms Peebles, given to quiet pursuits –reading and painting.

Many years later he would tell his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that his days at Gordonstoun, his senior school in the Scottish Highlands, were ‘‘a prison sentence’’ but instilled self-discipline and a sense of responsibility.

It was his father who chose the Navy as a career for Charles, in the centuries-old tradition of the Sailor Kings of England.

At the age of 28, the prince returned to civilian life and began assuming an increasingly heavy burden of royal duties.

Within a few years, there was speculation about who Charles, the world’s most eligible bachelor, would marry.

In the early 1970s, Charles met Camilla Shand on a Windsor polo field, and is said to have “lost his heart” to her almost at once. They embarked on an affair.

But when the prince joined the Navy, the couple spent long periods apart and the royal missed his chance and was heartbroken when Camilla married cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles.

Girlfriends came and went until eventually on ebruary 24, 1981, Buckingham Palace ended months of speculation when it announced that Charles was engaged to 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer.

He wed his shy bride later that year on July 29 at St Paul’s Cathedral and the couple had two sons – William, born June 21, 1982, and Harry two years later, on September 15.

But within a few years all was not well with the marriage.

Charles was having an affair with his former mistress Camilla and Diana had turned to cavalry officer James Hewitt.

For the queen, 1992 was her ‘‘annus horribilis’’ – the Waleses split, as did the Duke and Duchess of York, and Windsor Castle went up in flames.

In 1994, the prince admitted adultery on national television as he spoke to his biographer, while Diana subsequently went on Panorama to give a television interview in which she said there were three people in her marriage – a strong hint towards Camilla.

Charles and Diana divorced in August 1996 but a year later the princess died tragically in a car crash with her lover Dodi Fayed in a Paris underpass.

Over the coming years, Camilla’s eventual emergence as Charles’s long-term partner was part of a carefully planned PR campaign masterminded by the heir to the throne’s spindoctor Mark Bolland.

The culmination of the romance was a marriage between the long-time lovers who wed in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall on April 9, 2005.

Over the decades the heir to the throne has also carved out a role for himself as, so his supporters would say, a philanthropic entrepreneur, establishing charities and organisations that work in a range of areas from the arts to disadvantaged young people.

Charles is leading the royal family with a conscientious sense of duty and the knowledge that the monarchy will be secure in the generation that follows him.

Now as he turns 65, he appears to be finally reaching his true potential as an heir to the throne.