King Charles III’s secret kingdom

 

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

https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2023/05/lies-beneath-crown-royal-family-history-britain-romania-traditionalism

 

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.