A completely different picture is emerging of Prince Edward, who seems destined to be the Royal Family’s new “leading man” – albeit temporarily – thanks to both the King and Prince William curtailing their public duties.

Although some eyebrows may have been raised over him abandoning his training as a Royal Marine and for embarrassing the Royal family through dabbling in show business, I heard from a man who had a different view entirely of the youngest of the late Queen’s four children.

“He was a really tough bloke,” said a former Balmoral gamekeeper, who took Edward deer stalking in the hills around his mother’s Highland home.

As a result I’ve always thought that this picture of Prince Edward, who succeeded his late father as Duke of Edinburgh last year and has already, with Sophie, his wife, taken on an extended list of duties since the King’s illness, should be better known. Not for shooting deer but, according to my informant, for having an inner steel.

With King Charles suspending his list of public engagements while he is treated for cancer and now William, the Prince of Wales, expected to do the same at least until the middle of next month while his wife, too, receives treatment, Prince Edward may now become an even more central figure in the nation’s life.

This is all the more likely, thanks to the fact that his elder brother, Andrew, is no longer involved in royal duties.

With William temporarily cutting back on public duties for the time being, Edward will be the senior male involved in royal engagements, although his older sister Anne, the Princess Royal, is already heavily involved in supporting the monarchy through this incredibly difficult period.

Edward, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, was third in line to the throne when he was born after his elder brothers Charles and Andrew. He has now slipped to 14th.

Although he and Sophie have been popular and hard working Royals for many years, Edward had a somewhat chequered early career thanks to his involvement in Ardent Productions and organising an episode of TV’s, It’s Knock Out game, which did nothing for his reputation as a senior member of the Royal Family.

But those days are long gone. One person who always thought highly of him was Sandy Masson, the former head stalker on the royal estate at Balmoral.

To this hard as nails countryman, Edward was “the best of them all”.

Nicknamed “Massacre Masson”, by Edward’s father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, because of the number of stags the stalker shot in the estate’s annual cull, Masson regularly took members of the Royal family stalking. He was in no doubt about which of them he respected most.

Of the three senior Royal princes – Charles, Andrew and Edward – Masson declared to anyone who’d listen in the Climbers’ Bar at the Glen Clova Hotel: “Edward was easily the toughest of all the princes. Nothing was too much for him.”

Asked how he explained the Prince’s decision to quit his Royal Marine training, which is renowned for its toughness and for the “beasting” endured by recruits, he replied: ‘That’s easy – he didn’t want to waste people’s time. He didn’t want to be a Marine. Simple as that.”

Masson, who died several years ago, introduced several generations of the Royal family to this sometimes controversial sport – earning some unflattering headlines years later when he “blooded” the then teenage Prince William after he’d shot his first stag.

I had met Masson several times when he had a cottage on the edge of the Balmoral estate and as is typical of gamekeepers and stalkers everywhere there was no ‘them and us’ in the relationship with the Royal family.

To Masson, the man who’s now King Charles but was then Prince of Wales, was simply “Wales” but it was clear from these conversations over a dram that he had a special regard for Prince Edward.

In a different field, Edward hasn’t lost his cultural interests and is a popular royal patron of the UK’s largest music school – Chetham’s in Manchester.

It’s not just his relatively new title as Duke of Edinburgh that links Edward to Scotland, prior to that being awarded by the King last year, he was also Earl of Forfar and is a regular visitor north of the border. He and the Duchess had several royal engagements in Aberdeenshire late last week.