Poor King Charles!
He’s damned if he intervenes too much in public life and damned if he doesn’t.
For decades, as Prince of Wales, he was attacked for his public pronouncements – and his “black spider” letters to government ministers. In those days, he defended himself by saying that, when he came to the throne, he would stop his so-called meddling.
And that is exactly what he’s done in the year since the death of the Queen: carry out his public duties, maintain his government commitments and do all that is expected of him as a monarch in a constitutional democracy, where his wriggle room for intervention is necessarily limited.
And yet that hasn’t stopped his critics – many of the same ones who took against his meddling as Prince of Wales – for keeping a low profile. They have also bashed him for staying quietly at Balmoral for the actual anniversary of his mother’s death on Friday 8 September.
That is exactly as it should be. The King isn’t being a standoffish caretaker-monarch. He is doing what is expected of him as the Queen’s successor – as well as being her son, mourning a much-loved mother.
There used to be very severe mourning codes in the Royal Family – and in senior aristocratic families – for months after a monarch’s death, with black-edged writing paper and black clothes, like some widows still wear for life in Greece. The King’s behaviour, a year on, is an echo of this.
Even though the official mourning period is over, Charles is reflecting centuries of precedence. He’s nowhere on the scale of Queen Victoria, attacked by some critics as the “Widow of Windsor” as she largely retired from public life (although she maintained her government duties) after the death of Prince Albert in 1861, aged 42.
In 1864, a protester hung a notice on the Buckingham Palace railings, declaring, “These commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.” In her absence, republicanism became increasingly popular.
For the next 40 years, until Queen Victoria died in 1901, she remained in a form of mourning, dressing in black. Charles III can’t live that long but, in any case, he won’t be emulating his great-great-great grandmother in continuing his dignified mourning for much longer.
After this first anniversary ends, he will return to what is expected of him. There will be modest interventions in the years to come – like his campaign against food waste, building on the Coronation Food Project, designed to counter waste, as well as food insecurity – but nothing to frighten the horses.
He is doing what he should do to avoid any charges of absolute, overarching monarchy. In 1867, the constitutional expert Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution, “The sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.”
More than 150 years later, that remains the position for King Charles. It may not sound very inspiring. But monarchs aren’t there to push an agenda.
Can you remember Elizabeth II – one of the greatest monarchs in our history, as well as the longest-serving – ever pushing an agenda? Her genius came in her modesty. Her power came in the rareness and brevity of her interventions, such as over the Scottish referendum (“Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future”) and Harry and Meghan’s racism accusations (“Some recollections may vary”).
At the shakiest moment for the monarchy in her reign – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 – she calmed down the nation with the simplest, most moving of words: “So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.”
The King is by nature a more emotional, expressive figure than his mother but he has inwardly absorbed from her the great ruling maxim of a modern monarch: less is more.
Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English
