We no longer correct ourselves as we sing the first line of the national anthem. ‘Prince of Wales’ no longer means ‘Charles’. As we mark the third anniversary of his accession this week, it is possible to attempt useful comparisons between the reigns of Charles III and Elizabeth II. Set aside age and medical matters and the principal differences are pace and expectation. It was nearly a year before the UK heard a speech from the new monarch in 1952; in 2022, it took a day. Court mourning went from 16 weeks to one. Three years in, the late Queen was still on her first prime minister. The King is on his third. Family-wise, her main distraction was Princess Margaret’s passing passion for her late father’s equerry. The King has ongoing, long-term problems with both his younger son and his brother. On Elizabeth II’s shoulders, though, fell hopes of a dazzling era of British rejuvenation, epitomised by that coronation headline: ‘All This – And Everest Too!’ Charles III is spared all that. No one expected the Carolean Age to herald a new dawn. The young Queen also had to travel far, undertaking the longest round-the-world royal tour in history over six months, much of it by sea. The King’s first Pacific round-trip took ten days. However, Elizabeth II did much less entertaining at home. She’d hosted just two state visitors by this point. The King and Queen have welcomed five so far. A sixth arrives next week.
Commentators have focused more on Donald Trump’s differences with the King, notably net zero, than on what they have in common. Both have an ancestral love of Scotland, and both eschew lunch. They are also of the same age, which is important. When I was writing my biography of the late Queen, William Hague and George Osborne recalled the banquet for the 2011 US state visit. Barack Obama, 35 years younger than his host and with his body clock on US time, was still buzzing long after dinner. The Queen finally asked Osborne, then chancellor, to nudge the president off to bed. ‘I was thinking: What do I do?’ he told me. ‘I couldn’t just interrupt and say, “Oh, the Queen wants you to go to bed.”’ The then private secretary to the monarch, Sir Christopher Geidt, came to the rescue. It’s unlikely that Sir Clive Alderton will need to do the same next week. When Obama did finally retire to Buckingham Palace’s Belgian Suite that night, there was further comedy. A footman suddenly appeared in pursuit of a mouse. Obama was unfazed and even amused, though he implored the footman not to alert the First Lady. Trump, on the other hand, is a self-proclaimed ‘germaphobe’. Note to the Windsor Castle pest controllers: trap, baby, trap.
Sir Ed Davey has declared he will not dine with the Donald. His snubbing of the boeuf Balmoral is unlikely to derail bilateral relations any more than the boycott of the last US state visit by then Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable. But it does raise questions about the party’s world view. In recent years, Lib Dem leaders have gladly attended state banquets for, among others, Vladimir Putin, Robert Mugabe and three Chinese presidents. Most liberal-minded of all was David Steel, who not only dined with Nicolae Ceausescu in 1978 but presented the Romanian psychopath with a labrador puppy called Gladstone. Ceausescu renamed the dog Corbu and gave him the honorary rank of colonel.
President Trump will almost certainly issue a reciprocal invitation to the King and Queen to visit Washington D.C. next year, when the USA celebrates the 250th anniversary of independence and dumping George III. The King greatly admires his great x5 grandfather, the last monarch with a matching passion for music, architecture, agriculture and Shakespeare. Just like Andrew Roberts’s superb biography, he believes that ‘mad’ George remains woefully misunderstood. America is revising the ‘tyrant’ tag too. Two and a half centuries after his statue was melted down for bullets to fire at the Brits, a new one has gone up in Philadelphia. George also has the best song in the musical Hamilton: ‘You’ll Be Back!’ Next year, to a certain extent, he could be, too.
The late Duchess of Kent set so many royal precedents – the first untitled woman in modern times (and first descendant of Oliver Cromwell) to become HRH; the first to set aside her royal status without fanfare or fuss, as she devoted her later life to teaching music. Now the duchess, who was received into the Catholic Church in 1994, will be honoured in style with what the Palace is calling ‘the first royal Catholic funeral in modern history’. But is it? Ten years ago, 400 of us sat spellbound in Leicester Cathedral watching the burial of Richard III, following the discovery of his remains beneath a car park. Preceded by a requiem mass and compline, with a homily from Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the service was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury but it also involved Catholic clergy, plainsong, censing, Richard’s original Book of Hours, the ‘asperging’ of the coffin with holy water and a rosary. How best to describe that funeral? Given that Richard had died half a century before the Reformation, it certainly wasn’t Anglican.
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