Which unruly monarch was once known as ‘Basher’ and ruined a children’s party by throwing sandwiches and ice cream across the room? (A clue: he liked to brag that ‘my father is the Prince of Wales’)

Today we laugh at the cheeky appearances of five-year-old Prince Louis.

If he grumbles and fidgets today, we know he will all too soon be drawn into a life of royal duty.

In any case, Louis is not the first young royal to push the boundaries of good behavior. It wasn’t that long ago that another prince raised his eyebrows…

William, his father, had quite an unruly reputation as a child, known as ‘Basher Wills’ or ‘Billy the Basher’ when he was at Mrs Mynor’s nursery in Kensington.

“Noisy, brash, and defiant of discipline, Wills soon angered his classmates by pushing his way to the front of the dinner line and getting involved in playground fights,” writes biographer Robert Lacey.

Four-year-old Prince William with a cheeky look into the camera. He is pictured with a friend on the way to the school’s nativity scene in December 1986

A sullen-looking Prince William with his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, at the Cartier International Polo Smith’s Lawn in Windsor in July 1989. By then the worst of his tantrums were behind him

“My father can beat up your father,” he would say. “My father is the Prince of Wales.”

In his best-selling book Battle of Brothers, Lacey explains that neither Charles nor Diana were keen to play the disciplinarian and it was left to Nanny Ruth Wallace to sort him out.

‘In the fall of 1987, she tore the five-year-old home from a birthday party after throwing a tantrum when he wasn’t allowed to blow out the candles on the cake and had expressed his displeasure by throwing sandwiches and ice cream around. the room.’

Nanny made him clean up the mess before he left.

Royal biographer Penny Junor recalls how his misconduct became public knowledge during Prince Andrew’s wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, where William was a page boy.

“William sat wiggling throughout the ceremony,” she writes, “rolled his orders into a trumpet, scratched his head and covered his face with his fingers, stuck out his tongue… and left the abbey with his sailor hat wildly askew. ‘

Diana, Lacey says, was quite forgiving: “William is very enthusiastic about things,” she explained. “He’s pushing himself right into it.”

In the fall of 1987, Spitting Image had included five-year-old William among its latex characters. The doll was shown dressed in combat gear, armed with a knife and machine gun, wildly attacking the meek and submissive Harry.”

Times change of course. The phase passed quickly and, as Lacey writes, there was no more inland navigation by the time he was at Wetherby Pre-Preparatory School Notting Hill the following year.

It hardly needs to be said that the Prince of Wales is now known as a paragon of politeness.

What could have accomplished the transformation, other than the passage of time?

Robert Lacey speculates that with his parents’ marriage collapsing around him, his fate as a future monarch proved his salvation.

Prince Harry with his older brother at the Smiths Lawn Guards Polo Club in Windsor in June 1987

Prince William seems preoccupied with the Cartier polo in 1989

“William began to find comfort in the idea that one day he would be ‘king,’” he writes

“This observation seems to have given the young prince the strength he needed to endure the pain and confusion that any child would feel as his family fell apart around him.”

The trauma seemed to have matured him early, Lacey suggests. And William, of course, was denied a fate for his younger brother.

“Prince Harry, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite direction,” the author concludes.