A conflict of royal duty and passions

The new king wears his primary passion on his sleeve, and they are green sleeves.

Britain's King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort, ride in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach on the way to his coronation. Picture: AFP

The reign of the first Charles to occupy the British throne, known as the “Caroline era”, ended most unhappily for Charles I, with the loss of his head.

The second so-called “Carolean era” of the restored King Charles II and his brother, brought a flourishing of the arts, but that too came to a sticky end with James II forced into exile by the Glorious Revolution.

What may the world expect of the Carolean Age now beginning, four centuries after the first King Charles ascended the throne?

The new royal era, for reasons of both politics and personality, will be very different to the Second Elizabethan age it follows: more open, human and engaged, perhaps more cultured and funnier, less aloof but also more prone to error, and occasionally irritable. The institution is likely to be more casual in private moments, while just as lavish in public ceremonial; more informal, if not more intimate; the Defender of the Faith has made it clear he intends to defend faiths in general.

The “Firm” will be slimmer, more agile, more diverse, less rural in its tastes, and bolder. It will have to demonstrate a good return on the investment of public affection and support it receives. Its finances will be more closely scrutinised than ever.

Charles’s character is very different from that of his mother. If she had opinions, she never expressed them openly, whereas Charles’s are well known, frequently controversial, and firmly held. Elizabeth liked dogs, horses and her family, roughly in that order. Charles is less interested in all three.

By contrast, he is concerned with contemporary issues, and one above all: Charles III will be the Climate King, reorientating his monarchy around protection of the environment, a cause he espoused long before it became fashionable. Elizabeth II symbolised a set of beliefs – in crown, church, state and stability – but her own convictions were opaque. The new king wears his primary passion on his sleeve, and they are green sleeves.

The Carolean era will also be relatively short. Charles III, at 73, is the oldest monarch ever to ascend the throne. To rule for as long as Charles I he will have to live to the age of 97, a year longer than his mother. To outdo Charles II he will need to survive, or at least not abdicate, until he is 98 years old.

Charles is older than most of his subjects, and knows he has a shorter time to stamp his mark on the British throne. That may lend an urgency lacking from the previous reign, which unfolded over seven decades, unhurried and, at least on the surface, unchanging.

Starting in 1952, when a young princess suddenly found herself on the throne, the world got to know Elizabeth gradually. The strange alchemy of Elizabeth’s reign lay in the conundrum that despite knowing her for 70 years, her subjects never really penetrated her character at all. She brilliantly exemplified what Walter Bagehot called the “mystery and magic of the charm of royalty” by saying exactly what she was supposed to say at all times, and never anything significant or controversial.

Charles, by contrast, is an altogether more jagged and interesting character, and we know him well (or think we do): his likes and dislikes, the turbulence of his first marriage, the scandals, the family fights, the things that annoy and inspire him, and the causes which, during his 59 years as heir apparent, he has carefully nurtured.

As Prince of Wales, Charles was remarkably outspoken on a wide array of subjects: inner cities, architecture, education, and homoeopathic medicine. He bombarded ministers with the so-called “black spider” letters, written in his oddly scuttling hand, politely but insistently lobbying on such subjects as illegal fishing of the Patagonian toothfish, inadequate supplies for troops in Iraq, and badger culling.

He lobbied Tony Blair in an unsuccessful effort to preserve fox-hunting. More recently, he lobbed veiled criticism at government plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, publicly calling for refugees to be made “welcome” and privately describing the policy as “appalling”.

The key imponderable of the new reign is the extent to which Charles is willing – or even able – to rein in his opinions, to keep his own counsel and resist the temptation to influence government policy. There is no space in the British constitution for a controversial campaigning king. In theory, the role of the sovereign is merely to “encourage and to warn”; it is a short step from there to hectoring and meddling, a word the king rejects in favour of “motivating”.

In an interview on his 70th birthday, Charles insisted that, as monarch, he would not be interventionist. “I’m not that stupid. I do realise that it is a separate exercise being sovereign. So, of course I understand entirely how that should operate. The idea somehow that I’m going to go on exactly the same way, if I have to succeed, is complete nonsense. Because the two situations are completely different.”

But he may not be able to hold back. As he told his friend and biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself.”

Historically, when a king’s conscience collides with his subjects’ expectations, it spells trouble. Both the earlier Kings Charles discovered the danger of overreaching: when Charles I entered parliament to arrest parliamentarians, he triggered a revolution; the Bill of Rights, passed in 1689 as that Carolean era ended, states that a king cannot make law without the consent of parliament, and forced the Crown to accept the will of the democratically elected parliament of the day.

If Charles III is perceived to be interfering in political business, his critics will pounce. He therefore faces a difficult balancing act: how to appear neutral and politically unbiased, but at the same time relevant, engaged in the real world. He needs to discover a new role, or risk being seen as an elderly caretaker king.

But there is one issue on which King Charles will not remain silent, and that is the natural environment.

A champion of rewilding and wildlife conservation, an early advocate of recycling and organic farming, Charles’s environmental ideas once seemed cranky, and now appear remarkably foresighted. He began worrying about the planet’s future as a teenager, and he has repeatedly warned of the “catastrophic” impact of man’s impact on nature: “We have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing,” he declared recently.

In 2018, he said: “With the current rate of biodiversity loss now running at 1,000 times the natural rate, we appear to have managed to initiate the planet’s sixth great extinction event and still seem utterly hell bent on destroying what little we have left.”

Charles III may well make climate action the battle cry and leitmotif of his reign, an issue on which the royal family can take global leadership without the appearance of political meddling, and one that chimes with the concerns of his younger subjects.

If the future of the planet is one issue that will define the new Carolean era, then the nation’s past is another.

Queen Elizabeth presided over the dissolution of empire; her son must deal with its historical aftermath, and the bitter legacy of colonialism. The human misery that underpinned imperial power is increasingly the subject of political conflict and demands for economic compensation. As Prince of Wales, Charles was already confronting the issue of slavery, telling a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting: “I cannot describe the depths of my personal sorrow at the suffering of so many, as I continue to deepen my own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact.” Prince William went further in Jamaica last year, declaring: “the appalling atrocity of slavery forever stains our history.”

King Charles recently signalled support for research into the British monarchy’s links with transatlantic slavery after documentary evidence emerged showing a predecessor’s stake in a slave-trading company.

That tone of contrition and investigation is likely to colour his entire reign, at a time when the bonds of the Commonwealth are already loosening, or snapping altogether. There are now just 15 Commonwealth realms left, sovereign independent states recognising the king as monarch and formal head of state. Of the 54 members of the Commonwealth, 34 are already republics. Jamaica will soon follow Barbados in renouncing the monarch as head of state. Republican movements are gaining strength in former colonies. Managing the royal future in Australia, Canada and New Zealand will be a central feature of the Carolean Age.

Elizabeth spent much of her reign celebrating Britain’s history in the wider world; Charles may find himself apologising for it. But there is opportunity here too. The human rights records in some former dominions is, to say the least, patchy. One way to find new relevance in the Commonwealth would be to support change in those countries, promoting tolerance, environmentalism, gender equality, freedom of expression, the rights of small states and the rule of law.

Again, it is a fine balance: acknowledging the sins of the past while urging better behaviour in the present, without sounding patronising and hypocritical.

A similarly tricky performance will be needed to maintain the union of his kingdom, ensuring that he is perceived as the monarch of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as England. That requires presenting the monarchy as a new, rather than a merely a traditional, form of Britishness.

The cultural tone of the new reign will also contrast with the previous one. The queen’s tastes extended not much further than musicals and show tunes, the horseracing crime novels of Dick Francis, and the jazz music of Duke Ellington. Prince Philip loathed being dragged to the opera, and found ballet excruciating. In the royal box at Covent Garden, courtiers would slip a Penguin crime novel inside his program, so he could spend the evening ensconced in a whodunit.

The new king and queen are likely to embrace a higher brand of culture. Charles reads widely and voraciously, and always has. He has written the foreword to some 31 books, and wrote his own book, for children: The Old Man of Lochnagar. He is a keen water colourist, played trumpet and cello, sang in the Bach Choir and supports a wide variety of classical music ensembles. The Queen’s Reading Room, a charity established by Camilla to celebrate literature in all its forms, will hold its inaugural literary festival on June 11.

The new king also has a sense of humour, albeit of a somewhat antique sort. He is a patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society, and was not only a fan of the late Barry Humphries, but his friend. In his recent speech to the German Bundestag, he worked in a Monty Python reference, something his mother would never have attempted.

But there is also the gloomier side to his character.

The privacy that Bagehot considered vital to royal mystique was stripped away from him long ago. The grimness of his schooldays where anyone befriending him was mocked with slurping noises, the trauma of his first marriage, the horror of Princess Diana’s death, his extramarital relationship with the future queen, the perennially embarrassing brother, and the ongoing estrangement from his younger son: all of these have been pored over in lurid detail by an avid press and public.

But that very exposure may work to his advantage on the throne. He does not seem to feel the need to conceal his emotions, as his mother did (almost entirely). A few days after his accession, he was filmed angrily complaining about a leaking pen: “Oh god I hate this!” Charles declared, as ink squirted over his fingers during the signing of a visitors’ book. “I can’t bear this bloody thing … every stinking time.”

Some saw that as a gaff, an arrogant man sounding off at his underlings. But it may also be a sign that there will be a spontaneity, whether in anger or laughter, that will seem fresh after decades of repressed royal feelings.

Even at the darkest moments of her life, Elizabeth II always gave the impression that the throne was where she wanted – and ought – to be. Charles is more reluctant, in a way that may also flavour his reign. As Dimbleby noted, he has always been “far more aware of the prospective burdens of kingship than its pleasures”; he once described the realisation of his royal destiny as dawning with “the most ghastly, inexorable sense”. When the king met former prime minister Liz Truss after his mother’s death, he remarked: “It’s a moment I’ve been dreading as I know a lot of people have … But we’ll try and keep everything going.”

How long he will keep everything going in person is, of course, unknown. For Elizabeth II, the very word abdication was anathema, recalling the upheaval when her uncle, Edward VIII, stepped away from the throne. But Charles may be less fearful of precedent. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, King Albert II of Belgium, King Juan Carlos I of Spain and emperor Akahito of Japan have all abdicated in recent times.

Charles may not want to rule into old age, as his mother did, preferring to pass the crown on to William while the Prince of Wales is still young(ish).

The royal family’s popularity has always rested, in part, on the power of its story; as a novel-reader, King Charles will understand the power of narrative.

The tale of the Carolean Age may run like this: King Charles III emerges from his coronation more popular than anyone (including him) thought possible; he organises a semi-public and poignant reconciliation with his younger son, while training up the elder one to take his place; he embraces higher culture, steers away from overt politics, make a few good jokes, complains when the pens leak, and devotes much of his reign to travelling the world, as carbon-efficiently as possible, campaigning for its preservation.

And then he stands down while he can still stand up, and spends his final years as a cherished national treasure.

It may seem odd to imagine how King Charles III’s reign might end when it is just beginning, but as his mother so clearly demonstrated, a dignified exit can be as magnificent as a glorious entrance.

THE TIMES