King Charles at 75: It’s Time He Made His Reign Mean Something

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Fourteen months on the throne, and today the king reaches the age of 75—but is his age an issue for the reign of King Charles III? In one sense it is. It’s now clear that the 60 years he spent as an understudy to his mother were not an advantage. He became so much a captive of the established order that its familiarity to him is more a comfort than a task to be confronted.

This may, on first glance, seem odd since there were so many times when Charles as the Prince of Wales was looked upon as the rebel-in-waiting, respectful enough of mother not to make a fuss but already clear-sighted about the excess baggage, all the faux-medieval rituals and wardrobes, all the free-loading relatives, and all those bloody palaces that cost so much to maintain. Basically, all the stuff that was, like the sets and cast of a soap opera that was lost in another century, increasingly hard to defend in a country on its uppers and polling that showed a demographic vector likely to soon produce a majority of subjects who did not want to be subjects any more.

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But no. This is not the king to overturn the apparatus, cut the rackets. It’s all still there: in the hands of a self-perpetuating court bureaucracy that collects its automatic knighthoods, enjoys its many privileges, micro-manages the family history to make sure the bad bits get lost, grooms leading cast members and, most important of all, makes sure the king toes the party line—no matter how egregious the party line is to him and to a majority of his subjects.

Thus it was last week as we watched a ritual that, more than any other in the royal calendar, underlines the ordained political powerlessness of the monarch in the British system: the speech that the monarch has to read at the opening of a parliament, outlining the future policies of the party in power. During her 70 years and 214 days on the throne, Elizabeth II had to intone the plans of “my government” with a poker face no matter how inimical they might be to her. Since nobody ever had the slightest clue about her political beliefs the degree of any discomfort was equally unknowable.

This time, the pain was obvious. Charles became the mouthpiece for policies that could not have been more in conflict with his own well-known beliefs. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government will be the last in a line of increasingly rotten and profane Tory administrations, doomed to certain defeat at the next general election. Under Sunak they now appear to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry.

We know, for example, that Charles agreed with many environmentalists that the world target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 was far too late, a piece of international fudging that, after the hottest year for our planet on record, is fatally inadequate.

Sunak had already been backsliding on agreed goals, like ending the sale of gas-powered cars by 2030—he moved it to 2035. (Bear in mind that means all the gas guzzlers already on the road will still be out there for years afterward.) Then he decided to reopen oil and natural gas fields in the seas surrounding the U.K.

This required the king, visibly emetic, to say that the policy involved “decisions to change the country for the better” and “This Bill will support the future licensing of new oil and gas fields” wrapping up with classic Tory doublespeak that they were “helping the country to transition to net zero by 2050 without adding undue burdens on households.”

Charles has recognized that he cannot speak his mind. He has, however, apparently complained that he cannot show his real self and beliefs as long as this government survives.

But what commentators missed about just how much at odds the king is with “his government” on these policies is that, by pure chance, his own income has been vastly inflated by—very literally—a windfall from assets owned by the crown that become more valuable when (or if) the oil and gas fields are closed down.

The Crown Estate manages all the royal wealth and, due to an archaic endowment, owns the rights to most of the seabed surrounding the United Kingdom extending many miles from the shoreline. This suddenly moved from a dormant asset to a mother lode when it caught the eye of companies wishing to develop offshore wind farms.

In January, the estate licensed six new offshore wind farms in a deal worth $1.3bn, such a sudden gusher that Charles announced that the profits would go to “the wider public good.” He has yet to reveal how that will work.

Any audit of the king at 75 should consider whether taking the throne has changed him in any way or whether, in temperament, he remains who he always was. Sometimes a fleeting incident with Charles can diagram a great deal. This happened in Belfast shortly after his accession, when he was signing the visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle, a moment preserved on video.

The fountain pen he was using sprang a leak and ink oozed over his hands. “Oh God, I hate this” he blurted, “…I can’t bear this bloody thing, every stinking time.” With that he thrust the pen into Queen Camilla’s hands.

One intimate of the family said to me, “There will be many leaking pens.” Certainly he’s always had a short fuse, and one of Camilla’s gifts is to metaphorically receive with grace and resignation the leaking pens, whenever and wherever.

Charles remains subject to mercurial moods and his ego is always to be reckoned with. For example, from the days with Princess Diana he’s always become testy if he thinks he’s being outshone in public and he needs the limelight to remain on him—as Prince William has discovered as he and wife Kate wrestle with how they can counter his age problem with their golden halo effect, and how far they cannot.

The audit must record this as a continuation of the parenting problem with both William and Prince Harry, where each of the sons, in very different degrees, want to keep on Dad’s good side but is never sure where to find it. Harry is showing that distance does not make the heart grow fonder, while William is a good deal more understanding.

Charles also remains tormented by Prince Andrew, who will never disappear and whose lurking priapic record and general caddishness and greedy sense of entitlement serves as a permanent hangover to the king.

These family issues are, however, just a continuation of the old narrative. As king, there are far more serious tests, and among the most testing will be how he maintains his hold on the remnants of empire.

Much of this involves the interests of the British government as much as it does the prestige of the king. In Africa, for example, Britain is competing with China and Russia to retain influence and—more substantially—valuable markets for trade.

The king’s first foray into this tricky territory, as head of the Commonwealth, to Kenya, came off far better than many feared. As The Daily Beast reported in depth, the harsh repression of the rebel Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s and ’60s—with its echoes of the way the Victorian rulers of India carried out numerous barbarities—is creating a very vocal movement for Britain to acknowledge its imperialist record and repent.

In this case, however, the House of Windsor is the wrong target—and many Kenyans seemed to get this. Reactionary colonial administrators, obeying the interests of the long-established white settlers, which in Kenya included the notoriously dissolute Happy Valley crowd, were supported by successive governments in London, under both the Labour and Conservative parties (including Winston Churchill’s final administration), in violently suppressing African independence movements.

However, the young Queen Elizabeth, very much a novice in colonial politics, managed to remain untainted by the actions of her governments. In 1952, when King George V died and Princess Elizabeth became queen, she was in Kenya on holiday with Prince Philip, and for the rest of her life Queen Elizabeth was fond of the country and was always welcome there. A residue of that goodwill was evident during the king’s visit.

It’s important to know how hard the queen had worked to earn that respect. In the late 1950s the Conservative government, under Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, finally conceded to reality in a speech that talked of “a wind of change blowing through Africa” and began granting the African colonies their independence. As that went ahead, the queen was an indispensable asset to Macmillan in charming new African leaders into joining the Commonwealth.

But it could at times be risky for her. In 1957 there was civil unrest as the new state of Ghana took shape. Officials warned that the situation in Accra, the capital, was too volatile to ensure the queen’s safety. Nevertheless she went, and famously wooed the prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, away from the arms of Soviet Russia and into the fold.

King Charles will surely never be called upon to take a risk like that—but can he ever measure up to his mother’s example? She set a towering example of great statecraft as the Commonwealth grew into an alliance of 56 mostly former colonies, embracing leaders of many different stripes and temperaments.

Now the most pressing test of the king’s statecraft has a different location. Charles faces rising tensions in the former Caribbean colonies over the lasting imprint of slavery on their political and economic development.

This presents a different level of royal accountability because, unlike the African history, it involves the direct role played by the monarchy in establishing the slave trade in the 17th century, and all the iniquities of white supremacist rule that followed, as well as the spoils of the plantation industry that, over at least two centuries, flowed directly into the royal coffers and funded much of the priceless royal art collection.

It will be impossible for the king to ignore the evidence from a cascade of new research into how much the British Empire (and the finances of the monarchy) prospered directly as a result of trade underwritten by slavery—not just the actual commerce but its broader political and economic importance.

Charles II sought a big chunk of the slave trade in 1666 when he gave a charter to the Royal African Company that went on, for nearly two centuries, to ship slaves in diabolical conditions from Africa to the Caribbean. In April a researcher discovered a document from 1689 revealing the transfer of a large block of stock in the company to king William III, demonstrating that the monarchy was cashing in on a booming trade that would go on to produce a new plutocracy, which built large houses and estates in Britain and would become an influential merchant class.

Charles has made no response to this but a palace spokesperson said: “This an issue that His Majesty takes very seriously,” adding that the king “supported further research.”

That is coming, in spades. New revelations this month from the group Black Beyond Data, at Johns Hopkins University, are salutary. They exposed the central role played by the 335-year-old London insurance marketplace, Lloyd’s—thanks to the collaboration of Lloyd’s whose archives, they said, are “the only of their kind in the world” and that they “shed light on the wider economy of slavery, its importance to British society and the British Empire.”

They estimate that in the 18th century as much of two-thirds of all the marine insurance market was based on the shipping of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and the American colonies. The Royal African Company was a significant player in that trade.

When this was announced Bruce Carnegie-Brown, the chairman of Lloyd’s, immediately pledged nearly $50m in donations to the affected regions.

He said, “We asked ourselves how we could have the greatest impact. We can’t change the wrongs of the past, but we can make a difference today.”

If King Charles III really wants to establish himself as a respected and consequential monarch he should begin, right now, by following that example and acknowledging the terrible legacy of the investments made by King Charles II and subsequent monarchs and stop retreating behind the barrier of empty, rote pieties coming from the palace. Unless he can summon the will to do this the judgment on his reign will be unforgiving.