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Charles as King

September 15, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

When you have spent the whole of your life and you are 73 years old; when you have basically been training for your life’s career for so long, what do you do meanwhile? You have your own life while you wait for your intended life. You lay down roots connected to doing the things that mean something to you. Your life is completely one of privilege and wealth. So, you dig into who you are and maybe you find a person who cares about people with little or nothing and you create charities and associations that set up ways and means to help them.

Chances are the Establishment from which you spring objects to your humanitarianism, warning about optics over royal meddling or encouraging you to trust other organizations traditionally dealing with the poor and underprivileged.

What about a concern for the climate crisis, expressing your views in the strongest terms for world leaders to do better, stop talking and start doing something about it?

Will you give up that and a life time of working on matters that have come to matter to you? At the age of 73?

The newly acclaimed King Charles III of Great Britain and the Commonwealth reckons he will. And yet, I have to wonder if he can.

Used as he is to a liberty that is quite beyond his Monarch’s station, it will be interesting to watch him settle in and stick with the regiment he has watched his mother maintain, she who was Queen from the tender age of 25. A big difference. 

Charles has been rightly faulted for much of the way he conducted his personal life, his disastrous marriage to Diana and whether her ghost will follow him is also to be seen. There is always the fact of her two sons, especially Harry who has dumped the whole procession while still admitting to his need for good security.

Because Queen Elizabeth II herself insisted that Camilla be crowned Queen Consort, that issue was settled for the most peaceful compromise and she has been accepted by the British public and the sometimes brutal British press.

Could be, whereas Charles might find the restrictions of Kingship hard to manage, Camilla will be the glue that keeps his act together. All appearances tell us their relationship is solid, a grand companionship.

Queen Consort Camilla is putting her time and position of influence to good in ways her husband is not allowed. She is involved in the research about osteoporosis from which her mother and grandmother suffered. She is interested in the matter of helping abused women. A Royal, a Queen Consort involved in the concerns of people who are badly off…

Perhaps, her liberty to influence for good will be a salve to her husband’s limited role. As king, Charles is not permitted to express his opinion about politics nationally or internationally and we may one day see Camilla standing in the limelight that once shone on him at podiums, urging nations to do better, to do something besides talk about the climate crisis.

Monarchy, a tradition that goes back many thousands of years in human history – all over the globe. There have been chiefs and kings and queens living lives of unlimited luxury over populations, some of whom benefit and do well under the reign of this chief or that monarch; measurably more who do not, who are kept down as people and as workers whose worth is historically and forever disrespected.

Now the “colonies” of the once British Empire and now the Commonwealth eternally with a British monarch as their head of government, are beginning to question the value of such an arrangement. To accept a King is not necessary to trade. The trading treaties that exist now could easily continue unchanged should any one of those colonies become republics and let go the umbilical cord of monarchy.

Then what will replace royalty? Everywhere we look, we see the turmoil in the mis-use of democracy: threats, lies, intimidation to influence voting results, the altogether imbalance of elected power.

At least with an albeit powerless figurehead of a monarchy, there is the continuity of person and an elegant, reasonable figure to represent the nation to the world.

In truth, most of us like the pomp and ceremony in our own mainly unembellished lives. It is why we love to dress up for the grand events we organize.

It is fun to watch the Monarch’s gentlemen in ancient–design uniforms or see a queen driven in a solid gold carriage of considerable antiquity – it is fun to imagine those lives and hope they make a difference somehow.

Personally, I think, in a few years, King Charles III will abdicate to his son and heir, William, Prince of Wales. Pass the honour and the burden to a younger man with his young wife and children, who has not given so many years to waiting and will have the energy and vision to do the job. 

Then Charles can step back to speaking his mind and making the differences he hopes to.

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