After waiting 74 years to become king, Charles has used his first six months on the throne to meet faith leaders across the country, reshuffle royal residences, stage his first overseas state visit and hold a sleepover at Windsor Castle that included the coach of the England soccer team. Then there was the big news: He opened the royal archives to researchers investigating the crown’s links to slavery.
“We are already surprised by the Prince Charles who was turned into King Charles and who we still call Prince Charles, because that’s how we think of him,” quipped royal historian Robert Lacey. “But, actually, he’s become a monarch quicker than people expected.”
With the coronation just weeks away, Charles and the Buckingham Palace machine are working at top speed to show the new king at work. And the public is seeing a new kind of sovereign as he tries to slim down the monarchy and show that it is still relevant in a modern, multi-cultural nation where reverence for Queen Elizabeth II muted criticism during her 70 years on the throne.
Out is the matronly decorum that characterised Elizabeth’s reign. In is a more human monarch, who held back tears as he addressed the nation after his mother’s death and threw a mini-tantrum when a pen leaked on his fingers while signing a book in Northern Ireland. The public had a good laugh. The king now carries his own pen for signing emergencies.
While Elizabeth progressed grandly through meetings with subjects who bowed and curtseyed before her, King Charles sat on the floor with the congregation during a visit to a gurdwara, or Sikh house of worship, in Luton, some 30 miles (50 kilometres) northwest of London.
“Charles, the monarch, with his faults and virtues, has become a subject of more genuine interest,’’ said Lacey, the author of “Battle of Brothers: William & Harry and the Inside Story of Family in Tumult.’’
Charles continues to fend off criticism from Prince Harry, whose memoir “Spare” painted his father as distant and unsympathetic toward a son who struggled with the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and then had to fight for the royal family to accept his wife, Meghan, a biracial American.