The two faces of the new King
King Charles III is perfectly placed to bridge the divides in today’s Britain. Emily Hohler reports
Against a background of strikes and a cost-of-living crisis, Britain will be “pulling out all the stops” for the coronation of King Charles III this weekend with a “threeday jamboree” that is expected to cost taxpayers at least £100m, says Yasmeen Serhan in Time. Though a “more scaledback affair” than the late Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, it is estimated that the event will cost roughly double that of his mother’s, which set a record for the “most expensive ceremony ever held by the monarchy”. Post-war rationing was still in place at the time, yet the “huge spectacle” was deemed a “vast success”. However, “history is unlikely to be of much comfort for many Britons”, more than half of whom believe that the coronation shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers, according to a recent YouGov poll, with some even suggesting that the royal family should “foot the bill”.
The bigger picture is that another YouGov poll finds that two-thirds of Britons currently support the monarchy and “doubts” over whether the King will be good for the institution have “faded away”, says Ben Clatworthy in The Times. In all, 62% think he will be a good king, up from 39% in March last year, and according to Ipsos, the King’s personal approval ratings have also risen, even if Princess William remains the most popular royal.
The radical aristocrat
“The case against Charles” will be well known to anyone who’s watched The Crown, read Prince Harry’s memoir or picked up a tabloid in the past 50 years, says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. “He was cold to his first wife, distant to his second son… And he used to have an aide to squeeze his toothpaste onto the brush.” Nonetheless, this “descendant of nearly 1,000 years of mildly inbred aristocrats is less frothingly anti-woke than the average Fox News talking head”. Buckingham Palace officially supports academic research into the family’s links with the slave trade and Charles attended a 2021 ceremony where the new republic of Barbados “formally dispensed with his mother’s services as head of state”. Charles’s worldview “blends eco-radicalism with deep traditionalism”, springing as it does from an “aristocratic sense of merely passing through the world, of being a custodian for the next generation”.
His attempts to “reconcile old and new” are “everywhere in the ceremony”, from the “vegan-friendly” oil that will be used to anoint him, to his refusal to allow cameras to film the anointing, “which he considers to be a moment of connection with God”. At the same time, he has previously defined himself as a “defender of faiths” as well as “defender of the faith”.
The “sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning,” says Aris Roussinos in Unherd. As Charles is anointed, we will “witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe”. The King, “mocked” for decades as a “weirdo who talked to his plants”, “represents two divergent paths for Britain”.
Take agriculture. The “collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security”, and those who “believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways” while not even keeping our farmers in business or the nation “fed and healthy”. Charles, a longstanding advocate for small family farms, can “bridge this gap”. His choice of the Green Man as the symbol on the coronation invitations is a symbol “intentionally rich in opposing meanings”. Fate has placed Charles at the “nation’s apex”. To “heal the new divisions of the coming age” there are worse options than “embracing the sheer weirdness” of our Green Man King.