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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Chris Trotter
God Save the… King?
Elizabeth II, of happy memory, has departed the political stage she graced for 70 years, leaving only questions. History was kind to Britain in setting a dutiful young woman of 25 upon the throne in 1952. The sort of country Britain was becoming would not have taken to a young king reeking of testosterone. The United Kingdom of the NHS, council estates and vastly expanded welfare services needed a queen. Never was this more true when those same services were weakened or withdrawn. In Elizabeth II, the shadow, if not the substance, of service and compassion endured. Will her successor, King Charles III, have what it takes to revivify hope? Does he even dare to dream of glory?
That the new king is an old man (73) is probably a good thing. Having a less-than-distinguished youth and middle-age, Charles Windsor now has no sensible choice except to cultivate the persona of Britain’s slightly eccentric grandfather. Like his mother, he should aim to build unity around those issues upon which his subjects are still in agreement. Unlike his mother, the times into which his reign is being launched are distinguished by their lack of consensus. Finding issues upon which all Britons are agreed in the 2020s will test King Charles III to the limit.
He will not be helped by the deeply-rooted customs of British culture. It is, for example, unusual to see women in authority challenged with the same ferocity as male leaders. The chivalric code, which still permeates the aristocracy out of which monarchs emerge, elevates the feminine principle high above the muck and blood of masculinity. Queens are not challenged; queens are indulged. Elizabeth II understood this and used it to considerable effect. British politicians and world leaders, alike, were surprised by the Queen’s political astuteness. A king of equal political dexterity would have affronted them and aroused their competitive instincts. Charles, simply because he is a man, will struggle to keep his high-and-mighty subjects happy.
He will also struggle to keep his opinions to himself. His parents dinned duty into him so hard that developing a rebellious streak (or what passes for one in the heir to the throne) became more-or-less essential to his psychological survival. Charles Windsor has a horror of being effaced. Unfortunately, reducing himself to a harmless constitutional cipher is precisely what those wielding genuine political power will expect of him. Everything that makes Charles Charles will, however, impel him towards doing what is not expected of him. Internal voices will urge him to play the king – for real.
This is, of course, the problem with kings – even those supposedly bound by the conventions of constitutional monarchy – they will insist on taking their title seriously. Edward VII, the monarch whose life-story is most analogous to Charles III’s (he was 60 years old when he became king), took it upon himself to (informally) facilitate what would become known as the Entente Cordiale. Given that this unspoken alliance with the French drew Britain into World War I, it is difficult to decide whether his unofficial diplomacy was a good thing, or a bad thing, for his subjects.
Edward’s son, George V, was so shocked by the toppling of ancient royal houses – the Romanovs in particular – that he revolutionised the Royal Family’s relationship with the British public. He was the first British monarch to avail himself of the electronic media, speaking by radio to the peoples of Britain’s far-flung empire. More importantly, he contrived to present the House of Windsor as a dull but respectable middle-class family, a transformation that almost certainly saved the British monarchy from historical oblivion.
It is after George V that matters took a decidedly dangerous turn. There is little doubt his son, Edward VIII, harboured political views that came perilously close to fascism. So concerned did his father and the British Government become at the company Edward was keeping that they had MI5 bug his telephone! Had Edward VIII been a less enthusiastic sybarite, and a more enthusiastic Nazi, things could have turned very ugly for Britain and its empire. Edward VIII toyed with the idea of reaching out over the heads of the politicians to his subjects and asking them to install him as their King-Dictator. If he’d had more of a head for politics, and less of Mrs Simpson’s head, world history might have taken a very different course.
The late Queen’s father, George VI, never, ever, wanted to be king – it was his saving grace. An unwavering sense of duty drove him forward to shoulder the burdens of a wartime monarch, and it was this, along with his unfeigned devotion to his wife and family, that so endeared him to his subjects. His early death from cancer – he was just 56 years old – in 1952, is what made the 70-year reign of his daughter possible.
But Charles III is not much like his grandfather. In the decades he has waited, he has devoted considerable thought to what a 21st-century monarch might look like. Part of him would like to transform the British monarchy into something lighter and less ponderous, along the lines of the Scandinavian royal houses. Another part of him, however, longs to leave a grander epitaph than: “His reign was short and uneventful.”
But, Charles should be careful what he wishes for.
The Britain of 1952 was a battered and bombed-out nation still in the grip of rationing. But, as poor and broken as it was, its people were acutely conscious that they had just lived through their country’s “finest hour”. Britain had faced fascism alone, and shot it out of the skies, in 1940. Yes, it had bankrupted them, and yes, their empire was disintegrating, but there were still a great many things that the people of Britain could agree about – and their young queen would go on reminding them of those things for the next 70 years.
Those 70 years were both a blessing and a curse. Elizabeth II held her country together by simply refusing to believe it could come apart. But the force of that belief acted like a dam, behind which the waters of discontent and division mounted ever higher. The danger now is that, with the Queen gone, the dam may give way. Should that happen, then Charles’s wish will be fulfilled. His reign may well be short, but it will not be uneventful.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Claudius declares: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Prince of Wales no more, King Charles III may discover more of what it means to be a constitutional monarch in the 21st century than he ever dreamt of learning.
As another of Shakespeare’s characters laments: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
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