The time has come for Carlos III, the king who has had the longest time to prepare for his coronation, always waiting, until Queen Elizabeth, his mother, died last September at the age of 96, after breaking all the records of a reigning monarch. In England. Carlos III has spent his life training to be king and has had all the time to think about what his reign, which has just begun at 74 years of age, would be like. Kings do not retire. In any case, they abdicate or are overthrown.
No one knows what an ordeal it means to be the Prince of Wales, he said in a speech at Cambridge, his university, on his 30th birthday. He also stated on that distant date that "my big problem in life is that I don't really know what my role in life is." He had to find one and he did not take refuge in the hobby of horses that his mother practiced so much, but he spread his own ideas about modern architecture, organic farming, climate change and alternative medicine. He always bordering on politically correct and raising frequent controversies. He has been described as a philosopher king, lover of rural life, who would like to manage a corral with chickens and a flock of sheep. A king of pre-industrial society who could build bridges with the environmental trends that are coming.
He is a king with his own ideas who must already know that he will have to keep them to his personal thoughts because his institutional role has to stick to tradition, to what the governments on duty say and to represent a country that mostly accepts the monarchy as the cornerstone of its political system. A king who reigns but does not govern no matter how well informed he is. It is the monarch who asks to form a government in a simulation of power that consists of accepting the candidate who can muster a majority in the House of Commons.
It is worth asking why the British are mostly monarchists being such a practical people and so inclined to defend their individualism and their particular interests. Precisely because they have known how to make changes and revolutions that do not attack the principle of legitimacy. King Farouk of Egypt, a great playboy and a creation of British imperial diplomacy, said that only five kings were assured of the throne: the four in the deck and the king of England.
The monarchy has an essential theatrical component. The politicians who have dealt more closely with three emblematic queens in the country's history -Isabel I, Victoria and Isabel II- know of her weaknesses, hobbies, virtues and hobbies. But since they are great actors, all the pageantry, pomp and circumstance, which they masterfully exhibit their crowned heads, is already going well for them. Don't forget that
one of the most notable cultural heritages is the philosophy, poetry, drama and comedy that Shakespeare's work contains.
The problems of the kings do not affect governance. They are humans who do not command but who represent an apparently neutral institution and who, in addition, the sovereign is the head of the Anglican Church. It is ironic, considering that the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is a Hindu and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is a Muslim of Pakistani origin and his father was a bus conductor for the capital. The reign of Carlos III will not be like that of the supremacism that Victorian England embodied nor the one that Elizabeth II inaugurated in 1953.
The British monarchy manages complexity with the experience that comes with the passage of time. That is why they last and overcome crises despite their personal miseries. Tradition is not a problem but rather an ancestral habit in a society that is more conservative than adventurous. So much so, for example, that Scottish separatists would remain tied to the British crown in the event that Scotland one day became a state. It has been known that Queen Elizabeth was not a supporter of Brexit but not a critical word came out of her mouth against those who have led the United Kingdom to an inoperative isolation.
Few peoples are as sensitive as the British to the beauty with which time adorns things. There are many
old statesmen, worn and polished by the contradictions that have been dwarfing what had been a great empire for more than two centuries to its fair dimensions. They like the old, cold universities, without facilities, where hot water has practically just been introduced. There are many Britons who consider the monarchy an absurd and outdated institution. The percentage of young people who are carefree or opposed to a king who is by birth and not by merit is higher than in mature Britons. In any case, the acceptance of the monarchy is majority with more than 65 percent supporters. But since the political class also shows signs of deficiencies and frivolity, the English are left with what they have, a system of appearances, color, representativeness and the formal but practical functioning of politics.
The history of the British monarchy has heavy loads of accidents. Carlos I, predecessor of the king crowned yesterday, had his head cut off on the scaffold. Queens like Maria Estuardo spent years in jail before finally being sentenced to death. Marriage troubles, chain divorces like those of Henry VIII, forced abdications like those of Edward VIII under the pretext that he had fallen in love with an American divorcee when it became known that he had flirted with the Nazis, scandals that still feed the press of the heart. There was a
Before and after the mysterious death of Princess Diana in an accident under a Seine bridge, accompanied by an Arab billionaire.
Carlos III's relations with his brothers are complicated. And those maintained by Guillermo, the heir, and his brother Harry are few if not non-existent. The specter of his mother, the people's princess Lady Di, has conditioned the relationships of the hard core of the royal family. Camilla Parker Bowley, the crowned queen, has come to the throne after a long period as the lover of the current king. Carlos III is attributed to a reflection shared with friends when some years ago he would have said that "they want him to be the first Prince of Wales in history who has not had a lover!".
I think the British are too lazy to change the monarchy to a republic. After all, the king is the ornament at the top of a constitutional system, without a written Constitution, but with a jurisprudence that settles all the political conflicts in the country without the monarch being able to interfere because he reigns but does not govern.
All monarchs have a personality that they try to adapt to the times in which they live. Carlos III will have to preserve the British national identity that his mother symbolically represented with prudent but effective professionalism. His links with the Commonwealth of Nations will be discussed and the integrity of the United Kingdom
it will have to go through the test of Scottish independence and the challenge of Northern Ireland deciding one day to push to join the Republic of Ireland.
The fortune of the new king is not limited to the possessions of the castles of Windsor, Balmoral or Sandringham House but in immense properties and values that are estimated at more than two billion euros. He does not pay estate or inheritance taxes. The works of art of the monarchy are invaluable. But the properties of the monarchy do not enter the public debate unless they make an ostentation that goes beyond what is considered the representativeness of the State at the highest level.
I remember the month of July 1981 covering the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer for this newspaper. They passed through Fleet Street, the street of the press, with a carriage to St. Paul's Cathedral. The festivities of that wedding lasted several days. The people and the tourists surrendered to their passing with balloons, confetti, streamers and commemorative flags. A lot of water has passed down the Thames and the British will now continue to sing “God save the king”. I can't imagine a republican England.
