Following the recent, and much-lamented, passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, Prince Charles automatically succeeded to the throne as King Charles III, ending a long period spent waiting patiently in the wings, as the longest-serving heir apparent, and also initiating the third Carolean period of the British monarchy.
As befitting the heir to the throne, Charles made a suitably regal entry, via Caesarean section, in the specially converted Buhl Room at Buckingham Palace, at 9:14 PM on 14 November 1948, minus the hitherto customary presence of either Home Secretary or Prime Minister at a Royal birth. Charles Philip Arthur George was christened a month later, on 15 December, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Music Room at the palace. Four years later, upon the accession of his mother as Queen, Charles acquired an impressive portfolio of hereditary titles, becoming Duke of Cornwall and also taking on the Scottish peerages of Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. He was to add to this already weighty list in 1958, when he became Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, and Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.
After early home schooling, Charles attended Hill House School, a preparatory school in London’s Knightsbridge, before boarding at another prep school, Cheam School, near Newbury in Berkshire. He then followed in his father’s footsteps and went in May 1962 as a boarder to Gordonstoun School, a puritanical institution on the Moray Firth in north Scotland, which focused on character building through the pursuit of outdoor activities. Despite reports of unhappiness and bullying at the school, Charles still made it to head boy (School Guardian) upon his return from a six-month Australian interlude in 1966 at Timbertop, the outback section of Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. After taking five O-levels (English language, English literature, history, Latin, and French) and a sixth (mathematics) on the second attempt, he became the first Royal to sit for A-levels, securing a B in history and a C in French. Charles then rounded off his formal a 2:2 degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had started out studying archaeology and anthropology before switching over to history, becoming the first Royal heir to graduate from university.
Charles was formally invested as the 21st Prince of Wales on 1 July 1969 at Caernarfon Castle in North Wales, when he received the usual insignia of coronet, gold ring, gold rod, mantle, and sword. He had prepared for the occasion by spending nine weeks learning Welsh at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he was repeatedly exposed to nationalist protests. That same year, he also became Colonel-in-Chief of the new Royal Regiment of Wales.
As part of his inevitable military training, Charles received his RAF wings at Cranwell in August 1971, and immediately thereafter embarked upon a six-week course at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He subsequently qualified as helicopter pilot in December 1974 at the Royal Naval Air Station in Yeovilton. His final tour of duty, in 1976, was with the Royal Navy was in command of the coastal minesweeper HMS Bronington.
As a highly eligible bachelor, Charles’s name was romantically linked in the media with a succession of nubile young women. It has been claimed that he may have first met Camilla Rosemary Shand, the future Queen Consort, after a polo match in 1972. She was at the time a friend of one of his female companions- Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the Chilean ambassador-who he had met while at Cambridge.
During his especially long incubation period as Prince of Wales, Charles developed various interests in environmental protection, climate change, organic agriculture, alternative and complementary medicine, the advancement of the country’s youth, and the delicate matter of reconciling religious faiths, with his special appreciation of Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the Greek Orthodox Church, among others. He delivered his first speech on the environment at a conference in Cardiff on 18 February 1970, when he presciently drew attention to the problem of plastic pollution. Over the years that followed, he has targeted agribusiness (herbicides and pesticides, genetically modified crops, use of fossil fuels in fertiliser manufacture), and has vigorously campaigned for organic farming as part of his desire for a more sustainable and environmentally friendly food supply chain. In 1990, he even founded his own organic brand, Duchy Originals, supplied initially by his Duchy Home Farm in Gloucestershire.
Charles’ views on architecture, driven by an antipathy to modernism and post-modernism, have ignited a culture and style war against the architectural establishment, pitting classicists against modernists. His ten key principles of architecture, enunciated in The Architectural Review in December 2014, notably includes “developments must respect the land”, “scale is also key”, and “materials also matter”, alongside an emphasis on “harmony” and a denunciation of alienating and isolating high-rise tower blocks . His condemnation, in a May 1984 speech, during the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), of a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London as “a monstrous carbuncle on the much loved and elegant friend”, lead to the project being abandoned. Other major projects have had to be similarly given up in the face of his strident opposition, just as some prominent architects, including Richard Rogers have been sidelined for their ideas of architectural design. Many previously erected buildings have similarly been subject of his criticism, including Birmingham Central Library (since demolished) and the British Library (still standing). To provide focus to his ideas, The Prince of Wales’ s Institute of Architecture was established in 1986, only to gradually evolve through a series of mergers and splits into the Princes’ Foundation for Building Community by 2012. His ideas of vernacular architecture, municipal planning, and an eco-friendly environment were to find expression in the model “urban village “of Poundbury, a mixed-use, mixed-income development on Duchy of Cornwall land, just outside the town of Dorchester in Dorset.
As president of the British Medical Association, during its 150th anniversary in 1982, Charles expressed his unhappiness with mainstream medicine for its “objective, statistical, computerised approach to the healing of the sick”, advocating instead what he believed was a more holistic approach to healthcare. His views advocating such forms of alternative treatment as aromatherapy, chiropractic, detoxification, homeopathy, iridology, osteopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, proved controversial with the medical establishment. Charles established a Foundation for Integrated Health in 1993, to promote alternative medicine, which was forced to close in 2010 amid allegations of misdoings, and much more recently became a patron of the Faculty of Homeopathy in 2019. Over the years, he has remained a particularly staunch advocate for the medicinal properties of herbal preparations.
On his 21st birthday, Charles became the 24th beneficiary of the Duchy of Cornwall, a private landed estate founded in 1337 to fund heirs to the throne, which he has since expanded and diversified. The duchy’s assets include arable and livestock farms, residential and commercial properties, quarries, rivers, forests, and coastline, which amount to 52,449 hectares spread over 20 counties in England and Wales, although mainly concentrated in the South West of England. The holdings, which include around a third of Dartmoor National Park and the Oval cricket ground in Kennington, made Charles one of the largest private landowners in England.
Charles has for long taken an interest in the welfare and career development of young people (between the ages of 11 and 30) and in developing ways of putting their energies to good use. The Prince’s Trust was officially launched in June 1976 to serve as a vehicle to provide mentoring, training, and financial grants to disadvantaged youngsters, including those without a job and those in trouble with the law, so that they could make a fresh start in life. To encourage volunteering in community projects, the Prince’s Trust Volunteers was formed in 1990, followed by his Step Up to Serve campaign in 2013.
Outside of the activities listed above, Charles has served as patron or president of over 400 organisations. In the precious little time left over, his recreational interests have included playing polo (ended by injury) and skiing in the Alps, while he had to give up riding out with his local hunt, the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt in Gloucestershire, after fox hunting with dogs was banned in 2004. Outside of sports, his more serious interests have included gardening and hedge laying, and he is also an accomplished watercolourist.
Charles’s two marriages have been extensively chronicled by the media and by serious authors. Suffice it to say, his first wedding, on 29 July 1981 to Lady Diana Spencer, whom he had first encountered in 1977, appears to have been doomed from the start, although this may not have been apparent to the jubilant crowds who turned up in person or followed the event on television. Two sons, William Arthur Philip Louis (1982), now Prince of Wales, and Henry Charles Albert David (1984), aka Harry, Duke of Sussex, were the products of this short-lived union. The Royal couple’s separation was announced in December 1992, and the ensuing publication of the “Camillagate tape” in January 1993 and Princess Diana’s own infamous BBC Panorama interview on 20 November 1995 inevitably led to their divorce in August 1996. Charles was thereby freed up to embark upon a much happier second marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles, as she then was and herself a divorcee, at a civil ceremony in Windsor in April 2005, in a belated union of like-minded spirits.
Although King Charles’s public performances since taking over as King have been widely approved, the abrupt announcement of the redundancies of up to a hundred household staff at Clarence House, his official residence until now, has unfortunately cast a cloud on the earliest days of the monarchy. King Charles is well-known for his strongly held views on a range of matters of public interest, with a particular penchant for good and worthy causes, and also has a reputation for impatience and not tolerating fools lightly. It may be that his interactions with the new Prime Minister, behind closed doors at their weekly audiences, turn out to be more robust than was the case with his more diplomatic mother, but we will never know for sure. Whatever transpires over the weeks and months ahead, one can only hope that the new monarch achieves a happy and fulfilling innings.
Ashis Banerjee