When his mother Elizabeth II died on the evening of September 8, 2022, Prince Charles became King Charles III and everyone, in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, wonders what his reign will be.
This benevolent man is hardly popular, especially if we compare him to his mother, who was unanimously appreciated, when deep down she was the great mute of the kingdom. Apart from her televised messages of good wishes at Christmas, always embellished with a little touch of religiosity, she only addressed her subjects five times in seventy years of reign. No one except those close to her ever really knew what she was thinking, because she played by two rules. The first, that of the Windsors: “Never complain, never explain”, never complain, never explain. The second is a matter of tradition: the monarch should not speak out on politics.
Trained from an early age to become king, Charles III had time to think about his future. He promises to be a good Anglican defender of the faith while remaining open to other faiths. And he pledges to “serve with loyalty, respect and love”. No doubt he will keep his promises, but only one thing is certain, he will be more talkative than his mother, and more sentimental too.
Savings at Court
Many thought that Charles would never be king. He had neither the fabric nor the dignity during what was called the “Wales War” which announced with great media noise his separation and his divorce from Diana. When she dies, Charles discovers that his future as king is in question. We then talk about his withdrawal in favor of his son William, beloved by the English. But that is to forget that no monarchy touches on the rules of succession. And it is also to underestimate Charles, a stubborn and constant man, whose destiny imposed on him to succeed his mother and to be worthy of her.
Charles III ascends the throne at a complicated and uncertain time, between the exit of Boris Johnson and the arrival of Liz Truss at 10 Downing Street, while the Kingdom is impoverished under the blows of inflationthe fall in the pound and the consequences of Brexit.
He will have to manage two priorities that can mark his reign. The first is to demonstrate the new frugality of a monarchy hitherto spendthrift, while the purchasing power of the British is collapsing. Charles III will shake up “the Firm”, the nickname his father Philip had given to the Court, by reducing the workforce and the royal entourage. Charles wants a monarchy that only includes him and Camilla, William, Kate and their children. However, he spoke of the importance of a family reunited in the face of the death of the queen. We will see the limits that the king will draw with regard to the other Windsors.
Even if a YouGov poll in May 2022 announced that only 27% of Britons are in favor of the end of the monarchy, it is nonetheless fragile and its future uncertain. Another study from the same institute published in 2019 shows low interest in royalty among young Britons aged 18 to 24. Only 41% of them want to keep it. The others are indifferent.
But the reconquest of young people is not excluded. Charles has always worked hard for them, especially the most disadvantaged. He made it through The Prince’s Trust, an extraordinary charitable organization that is also growing in several Commonwealth countries. Charles founded it in 1976. It is dedicated to saving young people who have dropped out of school, helping those looking for work or setting up their own business. Each year, on average, the Prince’s Trust contributes to the employment, education or apprenticeship of nearly one million young Britons. Charles III may perhaps, despite his age, but thanks to his past, reconcile youth with the monarchy.
The specter of the disunited kingdom
The king’s second challenge will be to reunite an increasingly disunited kingdom. Scotland, which wanted to remain in the European Union, recently revived the idea of a new referendum on its independence, and one can wonder why Queen Elisabeth, sensing the end of his life, chose to end in his Scottish castle of Balmoral. Was it a personal reason or a signal to remind us that the crown remains very attached to Scotland? This would then be Elisabeth’s last political gesture.
Northern Ireland is another concern. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 suggested that the conflict had ended, with the British government’s agreement in principle that the people of the Irish island as a whole can solve problems between North and South by mutual consent, without outside intervention. Four years later, the Queen visits Ireland to show her desire to build peace, and she shakes hands with a former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness. “Used well, a gesture or a visit from a monarch can have a powerful effect,” notes the editorial in the Financial Times, this September 11, 2022. Brexit has reignited tensions between Unionists and Republicans. Charles III will have to worry about it, but without taking care of it.
To anticipate what we might expect from the reign of Charles III, we must mention two traits that characterize his personality: his constancy in love and his intuitive, but very un-Cartesian, intellectual path. Charles fell in love with Camilla when he was young. After Diana’s death, he had two priorities, caring for his sons and publicly reinstalling Camilla in his life. It took him ten years. The queen finally gave in, undoubtedly moved by so much perseverance, and authorized the marriage, celebrated discreetly in 2005, with Harry and William alongside the bride and groom. The prince, who for years had been dragging the air of a beaten dog, becomes a happy and laughing man again. Camilla reveals herself, on Charles’s arm, to be a warm, efficient and joyful person. Even the queen ends up liking him.
Charles III, the antimodern
After his studies and his military training, around 1977, Charles, a shy and introverted young man, is looking for himself. He relies on his intuition and his feelings to guide him towards a better understanding of himself. This quest will lead to a coherent, but questionable system, which he expresses in a book, harmony, published in 2010. Charles sings there the harmony of nature which presents, he writes, a “grammar and a geography”. He finds them in plants, music or religious architecture.
At the same time, he became interested in holism, which the South African Jan Smuts, botanist and former Prime Minister, defined as “the tendency in nature to constitute wholes greater than the sum of their parts”. Then the prince reads Carl Gustav Jung, pioneer of “depth psychology” and the concept of “collective consciousness”. In short, we are far, with him, from Descartes or the spirit of the Enlightenment. But through these fads, a system remains based on harmony. Charles did not become an organic farmer, an Anglican prince loving the religions of others, a lover of “alternative” medicines, a fierce critic of modern architecture and a great philanthropist by chance.
It is today an old pioneer of ecology, a defender of the circular economy, a fighter against climate change. He enchants environmentalists and shows in Davos, in 2020, his sympathy for Greta Thunberg. He even manages to make her smile. On the other hand, he stirs up the anger of doctors and the indignation of architects who treat him as an amateur. But we will never hear Charles acknowledging a mistake.
Charles III will continue to love Camilla, he will try to remain the friend of his children and the entertainer of his grandchildren. He will always be the antimodern ahead of his time in ecology, and will seek ways to be a good, serious, open and sentimental king who will serve his subjects, as he promised.