Once, a Future King

Kings are like stars—they rise and set, they have— The worship of the world, but no repose

In Britain, histories of kings named Charles may be read as parables about the limits of power. When Charles I insisted on the divine right of kings, Parliament lopped off his head in 1649, when he was 48. His more popular son, Charles II, tried to extend rights to Catholics and dissenters in 1672 but was forced to drop the idea. He died of an apoplectic fit at 54.

Charles III has outlived both his namesakes by a couple of decades. At coronation on May 6, he will be 74—the oldest ever British sovereign at the start of his reign. His ambitions must be kept as elegantly folded and tucked as his handkerchiefs. We know he wishes to exert influence because, for the past half-century, he’s told anybody inclined to listen. Even with beheading off the table and no hint of brain fever, constitutional monarchy requires him to proceed with caution.

When it comes to tact, he’s no match for his mother, who turned it into a superpower. It’s one of many ways she’ll be a tough act to follow. Cynics predict the new Carolean Age will be wilted (organic) lettuce, sandwiched between the meaty 70-year-and-seven-month rule of Elizabeth II and a more appetizing heir, William, Prince of Wales. On the eve of his formal ascension, the new king has experienced an uptick in popularity, something he’s rarely been troubled by. The latest YouGov polling gives him a 63 percent approval rating among the British public. William’s approval rating is ten points higher.

Charles Philip Arthur George, King of the United Kingdom and 14 Commonwealth realms has lived adjacent to brighter lights all his life. Every so often, he expresses irritation with it all. “I’m not really good at being a performing monkey,” he told his Boswell, Jonathan Dimbleby, in 1994. “I’m quite a private person. I’m not prepared to just perform whenever they want me to perform. It would be quite all right if they just went away.”

Twenty-nine years ago, They were taken to mean the tabloid press in the wake of his divorce. But really, the paparazzi were just surrogates for all of us, prying into and judging a supremely weird life. By middle age, Charles did not exactly resent attention, he just hated the kind he got. He wished to be viewed as a serious person and was set upon by People magazine. It made him cranky.

Then and now, he was full of big, laudable ideas— about architecture, organic farming, the environment, and the lives and futures of young Britons. Before his first wife blotted out the sun, then-Prince Charles was sold as the future, a high-minded type determined to drag the monarchy into the 20th century. But while he served an interminable apprenticeship and weathered scandal, the future came and went. His annoyance was entirely human.

Nobody quite expects to get old, but getting old has served him well. He’s no longer red meat for what remains of Fleet Street, and a Britain convulsed by change could likely use another reassuring gerontocrat in Buckingham Palace. Modern celebrity has been nothing but a misery to the Royal Family, and the king has the scars to prove it. Now that the blood has cooled, he’d like to focus on the things he’s always cared about. Instagram will never be one of them.

Finally, in the job he was tapped for at birth, he’s able to be generous, even to the press. “From time to time we’ve been a bit hard on each other,” he said in a conciliatory speech to newspaper editors back in 2002. On walkabout, he’s in good spirits, whether he’s pulling a pint or watching a performer play a xylophone with squeaky toy cats for keys. By simply hanging on, he’s become less of a prig and more of a Gandalf.

Born in 1948, the king is a mix of Boomer qualities. He’s always been idealistic, having come of age when young people still believed they could change the world. Occasionally, he overindulged in New Age woo-woo. He also got around (in his swinging period, Charles had many romances, not just the two lovers he was famously torn between). At his best, he can be wry and charming — a good sport when asked to read the Scottish weather report or wear a Cree headdress. At his worst, he can be pedantic and self-pitying. These days, he’s no longer embittered by all he cannot do so much as bemused by it.

Coming into the job after his mother’s death in September 2022, he’d earned a reputation as a meddler. From his father, Prince Philip, he inherited a bit of a mouth. He dislikes ugly modern buildings and ugly modern manners and is known to dash letters off to MPs, expounding on homeopathy and pollution in a scrawling hand — reporters nicknamed these spider memos. He is frequently mocked for Lord Bountiful good intention, as if he were a tedious scold carrying an Oxfam tote.

“If you’re the idiot who suggests all this,” he said of his frequently expressed concern about climate change, “you're immediately accused of being an idiot.”

Charles has felt the need to declare himself not an idiot on a few occasions. He isn’t, but has the defensiveness of somebody who has been written off as a legacy admit. As a new boy at Gordonstoun, he was bullied. At Cambridge, a false rumor flew that his bodyguard sat his exams (presumably a ringer would have done better than a second-class degree). These experiences incline one to self-deprecation.

In truth, Charles was the first reigning monarch to graduate from university and learn Welsh. He once played the cello fairly well and Joan Rivers admired his wit. Against all odds, he is an intellectually curious person. He’s also possessed of Victorian notions of duty, which is where the meddling comes in. What would the empire have been without it?

In the new monarch’s view, being head of state entitles one to riff on the state of things. Charles’s views are rooted in decades of venerating nature and bemoaning human excess. An abiding friendship with the naturalist Laurens van der Post honed these attitudes, but they are in the family DNA. The Windsor inclination to conservation is an expression not of ecological radicalism but traditionalism.

Or, as the king puts it: “Underlying everything are the fundamental patterns of the universe. What we’re doing with our own economy is to disrupt nature’s economy by not following that circular pattern. We’ve created a linear one, which imagines you can go on forever, creating ever more growth…changing everything without understanding that you have to fit together with nature, and the way she does it. Because we haven’t done it, we have caused mammoth disruption.”

So says one of the richest beneficiaries of global capitalism, the owner of vast real estate holdings, whom hundreds of people serve in a vast royal industrial complex, whose Aston Martin is powered by bioethanol derived from wine and cheese waste, who is in the habit of talking to his many thousands of trees. If these were your fundamental patterns, you would surely want them kept in place.

Still, Charles is sincere. He has worked diligently for imminently worthy causes and done plenty of good for a diversity of animals, plants, and humans. The Prince’s Trust, which he founded in 1976, has helped tens of thousands of young people get job training and start businesses. Like many ordinary folks, he is simply fed up with mammoth disruption. He would like for Britain and the world to harmonize around more eternal, humane values.

The idea that this makes him left-wing is silly. Privately, the king reportedly called the Conservative government’s plans to deport migrants to Rwanda appalling not because he is a progressive but because it is uncivilized. When asked years ago about what lessons he wished to impart to his sons, he said the most important was “sensitivity to others, which by any definition is actually called good manners, which I think a lot of people have forgotten… Do unto others as you would have them to do to you is not a bad way to operate.”

Charles notoriously fell short in this regard in his private life, which dogged him for many decades. About his marriage to Diana Spencer, everything has been written about, dramatized, and armchair-psychoanalyzed. The farther we travel from it, the more mundane it all seems.

A nasty family affair—in the end, much intrigue and dueling affairs—should not define anybody for the rest of their days. The king is now settled in a mature, boring marriage, with the person he was obviously destined to be with. Still, he will never escape the soap opera of his family. “More of a family than a firm,” he offered when he was a naïve 19.

Now that he’s the boss who signs the firm’s payroll checks, he’s moved to modernize the royal house, which is oxymoronic. This mostly involves a reshuffle of real estate and the trimming of a few ostentatious sails. It’s clear the King has no early plans to rinse the image of his louche brother, Prince Andrew, in the penalty box because of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Of more interest is his frayed relationship with his younger son.

Prince Harry will attend the coronation; his wife Meghan Markle and their children will not. It appears he will be parachuting in and getting out lickety-split as if it were a SAS operation. Presumably, this surgical strike was the subject of ornate negotiation. In any family, writing a tell-all is never going to land well.

What Harry and Meghan want, volubly, is to reframe their relationship with the monarchy along contemporary lines, which would place them in the center frame. One can empathize with a son’s unhappiness and also recognize that it’s a nonstarter. Charles was an imperfect father — if he really did refer to his second child as the spare he ought to go to the crypt apologizing. But sadly, a king is an institution, not a hug.

At least in Britain, H&M is losing this PR war; the more they talk, the more people tend to rally around the old man. Charles can afford to be forgiving in this department. Of all people, he understands feeling thwarted and growing up in a gilded cage.

His relationship with his own parents was more cordial than warm. He was a modest improvement, if hardly a revelation, in the fathering department. Presumably, his sons will do better with their kids. Still, he’s already shown himself capable of introspection undreamed of in the previous generation. “I’m not a cynical person,” he told Dimbleby all those years ago. “I have always tried to get it right and do the right thing by everybody.”

That’s the correct impulse in kings and commoners alike. The rigor and chilliness of Charles’s upbringing at least instilled in him the sense that he exists to serve a purpose higher than himself. Quite possibly, all the years of waiting, of being sidelined, of cruel headlines, have made him a little wise.

Shortly before his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, the young Charles was interviewed by the BBC. He was asked what all the pomp meant to him, and to reflect on the princely motto, Ich Dien, or I Serve. “One can be so cynical about this sort of thing and think well, it’s only a ceremony and some people are against it and perhaps it’s for television, and you know, it’s just a show,” he said. “I’d like to think that it’s something a little bit more than that, that perhaps it’s a symbolizing of Ich Dien if you like.” Then the boy prince seemed to chastise himself. “All right,” he added. “I’m the only one who thinks that.”

He isn’t, not even in cynical 2023. Charles, always quick to point out his limitations, is at last the man of the hour.

Yours Ever,

Henry Brittingham-Brett