HOW MONARCHS SUCEED...

[Michael Grove]

  

  The death of a sovereign provokes hyperbole and anxiety.

  Initial press reactions to Queen Elizabeth II’s death have

  credited her with assuring the stability of the British state

  or successfully dissimulating the violent end of the British

  Empire. They have speculated, feared or hoped that

  Charles III will not command her inscrutable authority

  either within the United Kingdom and across the

  Commonwealth. Charles looks like an unlikely object for

  ‘British Shintoism’, the almost religious devotion she

  attracted, not least because the media has long feasted

  on his foibles: his failed first marriage, his brother’s

  misdoings, his children’s quarrels and his opaque finances.

  These shortcomings look the more dangerous as energy

  prices and social inequalities spike. ‘When the smoke

  clears from the gun salutes and the queen is laid to rest at

  Windsor Castle’, the historian David Armitage told the New

  York Daily News, ‘it will be painfully evident that the

  national cohesion she embodied has gone forever.’

  Past disclosures of Charles’ attempted interventions in

  policymaking raise the spectre of an activist king, unable

  to keep the silence expected of constitutional and

  democratic monarchs. His ‘missteps’, wrote Armitage,

  may well end the monarchy.

  HISTORY TODAY •  Michael Ledger-Lomas