Charles III will reign in an age where feeling trumps duty

Charles III’s first address to the nation as King began by speaking of sorrow – and went on to speak of love. He used ‘love’ or its cognates eight times in that short speech. He spoke of his ‘darling Mama’ and ‘dear late Papa’, of love for Harry and Meghan, love for his people and for tradition, and the loving support of his ‘darling wife’. He spoke, too, of grief and consolation.

In setting out his stall as King – if that’s not too vulgar an expression for what he has been doing over the past few days – Charles III has done so in terms of feeling. He has not spoken just about his devotion to duty, but about his heart. He has been King, but also chief mourner – the visual focus of a huge historical event. He has walked solemnly behind his mother’s coffin just as, decades ago, his sons walked behind that of their mother. It hasn’t hurt, in symbolic terms, that his mother died in Balmoral and that his progress to the throne began in Scotland. The tenebrous image of a kilted King in conversation with a respectful Nicola Sturgeon will, perhaps, give a little emotional fibre to the webbing that binds the Union.

The tenor of all this will seem, to some, intolerably touchy-feely. They will note that ‘service’ rather than ‘love’ was the keynote of Elizabeth II’s speech on her 21st birthday. But autres temps, autres moeurs: Charles must work with what he’s got. Whether he likes it or not – and I suspect that he doesn’t like it one bit – His Majesty comes to the throne not only in a more emotionally unbuttoned age, but as a monarch whose emotions have been part of the public conversation. We think we know him.