King Charles III’s secret kingdom
What does Charles’s decades-long infatuation with
rural Transylvania tell us about the kind of king he will be?
By Will
Lloyd
Illustration
by André Carrilho
A few
months ago I realised that the King of the United Kingdom was having another
affair. The story of his first affair with Camilla Parker Bowles is well known.
The King loved one woman, then married another. It took several decades for him
to work this problem out, when, for most people, a visit to a solicitor, a
court fee and six months of wrangling might have solved the issue.
Yet King
Charles, even stacked alongside the other Windsors, really is not most people.
He’s been called a dabbler and a meddler, a decent watercolourist and an expert
plantsman. He’s compared himself to a tampon, and been likened to Arjuna, the
mythic hero of the Bhagavad Gita. His attempts to publicise the benefits of
eating mutton were less blockbuster than his televised admission, in 1994, of
adultery. No figure in British public life has been as mocked, pilloried and abused
as Charles. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm from an
anointed king,” Shakespeare has Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough
sea tried. And tried.
Now, as his
coronation beckons, that tide is going out. The King has been slowly
rehabilitated. Call it the “He Was Right All Along” theory. Unlike the heirs
apparent who litter England’s history with their whoring, gambling and
drinking, Charles dedicated his time away from the polo field to service. Part
of that service was issuing warnings. He warned about climate change; he
condemned aerosols; he lamented the illegal methods used to catch the
Patagonian toothfish; he presumed that the Iraq War was a grave geostrategic
error. “How on Earth did Mr Blair take us to war knowing what he knew?” Charles
reportedly asked his closest aides.
Initially,
all these opinions earned him a reputation as a crank. To the left, he sounded
like some purple-faced country buffer; to the right, he sounded like a hippie
academic moping in the Guardian. Yet the King had an intuitive feel for
underground national currents that conventional politicians and commentators
rarely understood. Time, so the theory goes, often proved that Charles was
right.
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