With Charles, Kate and Harry absent, we can't ignore the gaps in the royal ... trends now
The King is known to love poetry and I’m sure he is familiar with the opening lines of William Wordsworth’s Ode To Intimations Of Immortality.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It’s a sad poem, and a great one, recounting how, even from childhood, we can recognise the fleeting nature of human life. Its elegiac tone feels particularly apt for today’s troubled Royal scene.
A deep and spiritually inclined thinker, it would be surprising indeed if Charles’s current enforced seclusion didn’t lead him to ponder at length not just his own future but that of the very monarchy he embodies.
On February 6 Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles had been diagnosed with a form of cancer
Many of the rest of us certainly are. I’m an optimist but the guarded messaging of palace medical bulletins is far from reassuring. While our hearts go out to the stricken monarch and with him our afflicted future Queen Catherine, our minds drift unwillingly to more practical concerns.
The crowning glory and enduring symbol of British nationhood doesn’t look quite so enduring at the moment and not, for a change, through any self-inflicted embarrassment.
Instead, it’s the great leveller, mortality itself that stalks the palace corridors.
The historian Hugo Vickers shared my view that the last years of Elizabeth II were the sunset of a golden era for the monarchy, one that began with empire and closed on a diminished but contented realm, a model to the world of stability, humanity and common sense.
At first the transition from her reign to this seemed uncannily smooth, a perception encouraged by pomp and circumstance that appeared virtually unchanged from Victorian times – theatrics designed for the Empress of India but still somehow soothingly in keeping with the Carolean age.
Now we have been uncomfortably reminded that the golden era is over.
That patina of continuity faces its first real test, unfairly soon you might argue. But fate and fairness only co-exist with a lot of luck.
The monarchy has been steadily drawing down its reserves of luck ever since the King and his first wife divorced; as his second wife presides over the Royal party at tomorrow’s Commonwealth Day Service, we can’t ignore the gaps in the ranks nor the question, how much luck do they have left?
Even if, God willing, the King is granted remission from his current cancer, its shadow will remain, psychologically if not physically.
Up and down the Royal food chain, from Canberra and Christchurch to Ottawa and Holyrood, consumers of every variety of Royal patronage will sniff a change in the wind and trace it back to Kensington Palace, where the Heir’s court (with every show of reluctance) will be beginning to think the unthinkable.
It’s called succession planning and I bet it just moved up a gear. This has always been the way with monarchs and their eldest offspring and this time will be no different.
And I speak as one who worked for eight years in the household of the prince who had to wait longer for the throne than any of them.
Remember, Royal dynasties ultimately have only two things they absolutely have to do, of which reproduce comes a distant second to the prime directive: at all costs, they must survive.
Prince William has delightfully fulfilled his reproductive obligation but now it’s safe to assume the continuation of the Royal project is looming larger in his concerns.
Looming almost as large, perhaps, as the climate crisis and hopes of Middle East peace – subjects on which he has recently spoken from the heart.
He also knows that his platform is provided by the goodwill of the British people, thanks to the accident of his birth into their ruling family.
The dangers of well-meaning Royal intervention in matters of public policy need regular emphasis.
On January 7 Kensington Palace announced that Princess Catherine had undergone a planned abdominal surgery which she has been in recovery from since
Our habit of projecting superior wisdom on to indulged Royal folk isn’t just irrational, it’s becoming dangerous, for them and us.
‘Smile and wave’ is still the safest
