The public doesn’t get to CHOOSE THEIR SOVEREIGN, which is just as well for Charles, whose popularity has been in decline for decades.
When queen elizabeth ii ascended to the throne in 1952, Harry Truman was in the White House. Joe Biden, who would become president 13 administrations later, was in elementary school, and around 85 percent of Elizabeth’s 68 million present-day subjects weren’t even born yet. If the 95-year-old queen—whose mother, the beloved “Queen Mum,” lived to the age of 101— remains on the throne for another 30 months or so, she will surpass Louis XIV of France as the longest-reigning sovereign in recorded history.
As it happened, Louis was also one of the last Bourbon kings of France before the Revolution swept away his great-great-great-grandson Louis XVI. When the last chorus of “God Save the Queen” is sung, the British throne will pass to Elizabeth’s first-born son, Charles, the brooding, diffident Prince of Wales, who has never escaped the shadow of his sainted ex-wife, Diana.
Charles is a senior citizen himself. He turned 73 on November 14, which also was the day his mother was scheduled to make her first public appearance since a brief, and unexplained, overnight hospital stay three weeks earlier. The occasion was an important one for her, the laying of a wreath to commemorate Britain’s war dead on Remembrance Sunday, the British equivalent of Veterans’ Day in the U.S. But on Sunday morning, the Palace issued a statement that “having sprained her back,” the Queen “has decided this morning with great regret that she will not be able to attend today’s Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph. Her Majesty is disappointed that she will miss the service.”
That explanation inevitably fueled speculation about her condition. “There’s something we’re not being told about the Queen’s health,” the
commentator Piers Morgan tweeted. “It’s clearly a more serious situation than the Palace is saying.”
The Palace staff, an insider told Newsweek, is still “hopeful” that Elizabeth will continue to pursue her “light duties,” including video meetings. But on this increasingly frail elderly woman, a widow since the death of Prince Philip in April, rests the fate of a monarchy that over the course of 10 centuries has survived innumerable wars, scandals, rebellions and a cataclysmic abdication, but now faces a future in which its strongest assets—tradition, pomp and pageantry—count for less and less in a world dominated by the finger-flicking power of social media.
The public doesn’t get to choose their sovereign, which is just as well for Charles, whose popularity has been in decline for decades. In 1991, 82 percent of Britons thought Charles would make a good king, according to the international polling firm
Ipsos MORI. Five years later, after the revelations about his adultery with Camilla, the tearful testimony from Diana about his dismissive treatment of her, and the scandal of their divorce, that number had been cut in half, and it has continued to decline: in May, a Yougov poll pegged it at 31 percent, compared to 35 percent of his future subjects who thought he would be a bad king—a situation that in American political discourse would be described as “underwater.” (Elizabeth herself had an overwhelming approval figure.)
Not that it matters; quite a few of Charles’s ancestors and predecessors undoubtedly would have polled even worse, had techniques for sampling public opinion existed at the time. (“Nearly twothirds of respondents said they opposed the beheading of Anne Boleyn by King Henry VIII, and more than half described him as ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ tyrannical…”) As if to underscore the Palace’s determination to carry on as usual, someone in a position to possess the details of the contingency plans for the Queen’s death and funeral (codenamed “Operation London Bridge”), and for Charles’ accession to the throne (“Operation Spring Tide”) leaked them to Politico, which published the documents in September.
All this is happening at what should have been a satisfying time for Charles. Britain hosted the just-concluded COP26 conference on climate change in Glasgow, at which Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed on to Charles’ signature issue, the environment. Years of mockery of him as a plant-talking loon have given way to respect for his lifelong, and prescient, commitment to protecting the planet. But the year has also been shadowed by his father’s death, by allegations that his brother Andrew was a participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, and by the estrangement of his younger son, Harry, and his wife, Meghan Markle, from the rest of the royal family. On July 1, a fan’s account tweeted what it described as “a beautiful picture of Prince Harry and Prince William looking at the wonderful statue of their mother on what would of [sic] been Diana’s 60th birthday.” The photo showed William and Harry, shot from the back and sporting near-identical male-pattern bald spots, standing about as far apart