It’s taken more than 70 years – the longest wait to reign in British history – but Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor is now King Charles III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At age 73, he is the oldest monarch to ever take the British throne.
Not since 1952 when Charles’ grandfather, King George VI, died and his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, took the throne at the age of 25, has a sovereign died and a new sovereign succeeded.
Charles will be crowned probably within the year; the ancient ritual of the coronation requires advance planning, although a lot of that has already been done. But there hasn’t been a coronation since June 1953 when Elizabeth was crowned.
The queen died Thursday at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, at age 96 after 70 years on the throne. Her funeral is set to take place at Westminster Abbey, where most important royal ceremonies take place.
That will be followed by a committal service in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where she will be buried in the King George VI Memorial Chapel alongside her beloved late husband, Prince Philip, and her parents and sister.
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Most people in the U.K. have never lived through such a momentous event as the death of a monarch, so they have nothing to compare it to. But there’s little puzzlement in the royal palaces, in Parliament or the British government, and almost certainly none in Charles’ mind.
What happens next has been carefully planned out decades in advance, based on combining ancient funeral and coronation traditions with practical measures to cope with such modern realities as instant communication, traffic control, social media and the vestiges of a killer pandemic.
What kind of sovereign will Charles be? That’s a different question. But we can make some guesses based on what he’s said and done at least since his investiture as Prince of Wales in an elaborate (and largely modern-invention ceremony) in July 1969 at Caernarfon Castle in Wales, when he was 20.
Legally, he became king from the moment of the queen’s death, meaning he is head of state for the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a dozen other countries. He’s also the titular head of the Church of England, head of the military and the judiciary, and a host of other royal titles and duties.
Charles, like his mother, will likely take the religious significance of his coronation very seriously, as a man long interested in philosophy and religious thought.
“He won’t really be king (in his mind) until he’s consecrated with the holy oil, makes the sacred oath and has the crown on his head,” says his American biographer Sally Bedell Smith. “That moment when he is a ‘transcendent being,’ in a way, is really, really crucial.”
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Just as the queen was the longest-serving monarch in British history, Prince Charles has been the longest-serving Prince of Wales in history – but not just that, says Bedell Smith.
“His record as Prince of Wales, in its breadth and depth, will be his real legacy,” Bedell Smith says. “He was the most innovative prince of Wales ever – he was an activist in a way no other heir to the throne ever has been.”
Part of the impetus for doing all he did, including his philanthropy, his entrepreneurial initiatives, the institutions and traditions he helped to preserve, demonstrate “his wish to prove himself worthy of being king,” Bedell Smith says.
“As prince of Wales, he had the freedom to do all these things, and he sometimes crossed the line of constitutional propriety, but as prince of Wales he was not bounded by it as the queen was.”
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The first potential problem of Charles’ reign – what to call his wife – has been mostly resolved by his mother: On the eve of her Accession Day, Feb. 6, 2022, she declared publicly in a message to her people that it was her “sincere wish” that Charles’ second wife Camilla, 75, then the Duchess of Cornwall (instead of Princess of Wales), should be known as Queen Consort when her son succeeds.
It was what Charles had wanted from the day he married the former Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005 when it was announced that she would be known as Princess Consort when he became king. It was a gesture to the many still-angry partisans of the late Princess Diana, who blamed Camilla for breaking up her marriage to Charles.
By law and custom, Camilla would be Queen Consort anyway, and legislation would be required to go against Charles’ wishes as king. But his mother provided for a smooth transition and reduced public carping by making clear her wishes in advance.
The late queen’s endorsement of Camilla was crystal clear by January 2022 when she “graciously” appointed Camilla a Royal Lady of the Order of the Garter. Founded by Edward III in 1348, the prestigious Order of the Garter is the oldest and most senior British order of chivalry; the appointment was an unmistakable sign of the top royal’s approval.
“It paves the way for the duchess to become not only queen by right when Prince Charles succeeds to the throne, but queen by name,” wrote royal biographer Hugo Vickers in The Daily Mail at the time. “There is no greater honor or better indication of the respect in which she is held by the queen.”
It also means that Camilla will be crowned alongside Charles at his coronation.
But will Charles’ low popularity ratings, still influenced in some quarters by his contentious 1996 divorce from Diana, the so-called “War of the Waleses,” hobble him? Unflattering pop-culture portrayals such as “The Crown” and “Spencer” don’t help, says Bedell Smith.
“There will be a lot of people in media and on social media who want to undermine him,” she says. “The shadow of Diana, shockingly, hasn’t diminished in all these years. It will plague him for the rest of his life; it’s baggage he’s carrying unfairly but it’s there. The only thing he can do is sail on and do his job and try not to let it get to him.”
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Charles has made no secret of his desire to “slim down” the monarchy – reduce the number of working senior royals supported by taxpayers – and reduce the overall multimillion-pound annual cost of the royal show. There has been talk that he will perhaps open Buckingham Palace to paying tourists year-round (it’s only open during the summer now) or by turning private royal residences, such as Balmoral Castle in Scotland, into museums.
His many causes (organic farming, architecture and urban planning, fighting climate change, to name a few) will not be abandoned but at least initially he will be too busy with routine matters, such as weekly meetings with the prime minister and going through the multiple red boxes of government documents he must read daily, Bedell Smith predicts.
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“He will be more voluble in those meetings than his mother, he will offer more opinions which, fortunately, (ministers) don’t have to do anything about,” Bedell Smith says. “He will be less reserved in his meetings than his mother was but he won’t try in any way to directly influence government policy because the (unwritten British) constitution prohibits that.”
Of course, there is incremental change and then there is big, honking, alarm-bell change, and the difference is in the eye of the beholder.
Charles, whose interest in religions other than the Church of England, once mused about altering his role as “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of Faith,” to acknowledge the diversity of religions in modern Britain.
But that would require legislation in Parliament and would likely send the British establishment up the wall. After all, since 1701 it’s been illegal for a British sovereign or spouse to be a Roman Catholic.
Instead, Charles might choose a less controversial gesture, such as a more inclusive and ecumenical coronation featuring a more visible presence of other faiths, suggests Bedell Smith, who describes Charles as a “spiritual questor” since his school days in Scotland.
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Most of the speculation about the new king has focused on whether Charles would violate those prohibitions by being outspoken about political and other matters of public debate in a way his mother carefully avoided.
As prince of Wales, Charles was not always as scrupulous as his mother was, says Clive Irving, a longtime British journalist (former managing editor of the Sunday Times in London) and author of “The Last Queen,” a biography of Charles’ mother that questions whether the monarchy can survive after her.
“She has always been neutral and apolitical, no one has caught her out on her political views and that is the difference between her and Charles – he can’t help himself,” says Irving. “We know nothing about her views, we know an incredible amount about Charles’ views. It’s incredibly difficult to step into the shoes of (the queen’s) kind of monarch.”
Still, says British journalist and royals commentator Anna Pasternak, Charles has learned important values from his mother, including deep loyalty to the monarchy and an “unshakeable sense of duty.” But she was no-nonsense and unemotional; he’s more passionate, Pasternak says.
“One thing I’ve observed is that the more impassioned members of the royal family don’t tend to fare well,” Pasternak says. “If you have the stoicism that the queen (had), you do better, you’re able to put the role before your own character and your personal needs. Charles hasn’t been able to do that.”
A frank critic of Charles, Irving describes him as a “self-centered and narcissistic,” having lived a coddled, entitled and privileged existence, an “archaic-looking figure” out of step with the times, and unused to being challenged.
“How can that kind of psychology possibly adapt to a completely different responsibility as head of state?” Irving says. “The magic of monarchy means something different to him, he interprets it through his own psychology.”
Irving predicts that the first year of Charles’ reign will see the monarchy head “over a cliff very fast” amid disillusionment with the new king. “She was brilliant at projecting classlessness – how can he possibly share the realities of our lives if he’s never lived those realities?”
However privileged his upbringing, Charles has gone out of his way to demonstrate he cares about the less fortunate, especially through his charities, such as the Prince’s Trust, which he founded in 1976 to help disadvantaged youths. The trust claims to have provided support to more than 1 million youths over the years.
Last month, Charles served as editor of a special edition of the British African-Caribbean newspaper The Voice, the only national Black British newspaper operating in the U.K., which is marking its 40th anniversary this year. According to the palace, his edit celebrated the achievements of the Black community and reiterated Charles’ collaborations with Black leaders and the work of his charities in those communities. (Charles’ charities, his vast Duchy of Cornwall, and a host of other prince of Wales duties and activities will be taken over by his heir, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and other members of the family.)
Charles also has attempted to push back against the criticism that he is too much a meddler to be a constitutional king. In an interview with the BBC for a documentary when he turned 70 in 2018, Charles made it clear he knows the rules and will follow them as king.
“I’m not that stupid,” he snapped in the interview. “I do realize that it is a separate exercise being sovereign, so of course, I understand entirely how that should operate.” He should: He’s been in training for this job since he was 4.
Charles faces a challenge few other succeeding monarchs in British history have ever faced, a challenge not alleviated by his lower popularity ratings compared to his mother’s, says Carolyn Harris, a historian and teacher at the University of Toronto and author of “Raising Royalty: 1000 Years of Royal Parenting.”
“When there is a long reign, the monarchy and the person as the monarch come to be seen as the same,” Harris says. “For many people, the queen is the only monarch they’ve ever known, so they closely associate the monarchy with her. The challenge is to step into that role when there’s been a successful monarch in that role for decades.”
Irving says this transition could have been ameliorated had the queen abdicated or stepped aside before her death, allowing Charles to serve as prince regent for a period. But the queen promised she would never abdicate and she kept her promise.
“It would have been an entirely different piece of chemistry there, the country would have had the chance to get used to him, it would be easier than a sudden switch,” Irving says.
Cold life-expectancy calculations suggest Charles’s reign will not come close to matching his mother’s in years. He’s more likely to echo the experience of one of his ancestors, Edward VII, who waited almost 60 years to succeed his mother Queen Victoria in 1901, and then reigned for only nine years.
Christopher Andersen, author of multiple royal biographies (including his latest, “Brothers and Wives: Inside the Private Lives of William, Kate, Harry and Meghan”), thinks Charles could still enjoy a longish reign given his parents’ longevity. (His father, Philip, died just short of his 100th birthday.)
“He has been waiting his entire life to do the job he was born to do, and will rush to make his mark on the monarchy,” Andersen predicts. “Given his mother’s immense popularity and his lackluster standing in the polls, Charles would be wise to go slow, but he won’t.
“Charles is not by nature a patient man; he is used to getting his way,” Andersen says. “Now that he no longer has Mama to answer to, that’s not likely to change.”