Christopher Andersen - The King: The Life of Charles III

The King

The Life of Charles III

Christopher Andersen

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author

For Graham, Charlotte, and Teddy

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

The king in Henry IV by William Shakespeare

The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon.

The King and the Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.

Thursday, 8th September 2022

Buckingham Palace

S hes gone. A colossus clutching a purse, standing astride eight decades and five generations, she was arguably the most famous person of the modern age. Her reignby far the longest of any British monarchspanned fifteen prime ministers, fourteen US presidents, and seven popes. By one estimate, fully 98 percent of the Earths population had known only a world with Queen Elizabeth II in it.

For her entire time on the throne, a son and heir waited in the wings. From the first moment he drew breath, his fate was preordained. Like only a handful of people on the planetthose others destined to inherit a crownhe was born to do one job and one job only. There was no way of knowing that he would have to wait a lifetime to actually do it.

In the meantime, the world watched as Charles, Prince of Wales, grew from gilded infancy to dignified middle age and beyondcaught up along the way, as the unfaithful husband of the idolized Princess Diana and father to princes William and Harry, in scandal, tragedy, and heartbreak.

Yet for all the pomp and pageantry and spectacle and palace intrigue and history in the makingnot to mention the millions of words written about him and his celebrated familyKing Charles III remains an enigma. This is his story.

Prince Charles is the loneliest human being on earth.

Charless friend Patti Palmer-Tomkinson

W estminster Abbey is filled with ghosts. Little wonder. More than three thousand people are interred here, in elaborately carved tombs or beneath the cold marble floor. Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Darwin, George Frideric Handel, Laurence Olivier, and Sir Isaac Newton are among those buried at Westminster Abbey. Knights and their ladies also rest in peace within the abbeys hallowed walls, along with adventurers and poets and prime ministers and military heroes. They all share the honor with no fewer than seventeen British monarchs, including Edward V (who as a boy was smothered to death in 1483, along with his younger brother the Duke of York, on orders of their uncle Richard III), the headless (or at least not attached) Mary, Queen of Scotswhose body lies within feet of the cousin who had her executed, Queen Elizabeth Iand Elizabeths tormented and terrifying half sister Bloody Mary Tudor.

The ghosts Charles might sense on the day that he prepares for his own coronation are of a more recent vintage. It was in this spot that in 1953, as a boy of only four, he sat squirming between his granny the Queen Mother and his aunt Margaret while Mummy was being crowned queenthe climax of historys first televised coronation. It was in this spot in 1997 that Earl Spencer, delivering the moving eulogy at his sister Dianas funeral, blamed the press for killing the Princess of Wales while at the same time chastising her in-laws, the royal family, for their lack of compassion. It was in this spot that five years later, after donning his naval uniform as part of the Vigil of Princes watching over the Queen Mothers coffin as she lay in state in nearby Westminster Hall, Charles bade a final farewell to his beloved Granny, dead at the age of 101. And it was on this spot in 2011 that his son and heir Prince William wed the beautiful, stylish, and infinitely patient Kate Middletonwho had waited a full decade for a marriage proposalin a ceremony watched by two billion people around the world.

It is now the spot where Elizabeth IIs eldest child and heir will at last be crowned King of Englandthe job he was promised from birth, and has grown old waiting to do. Charles has known all along that when it came, this moment would be bittersweet if for no other reason than his mother would either have died or become too frail to continue in the role she had played on the world stage longer than any of her predecessors. It is better not to have to think too much about it, he once said, struggling to find just the right words to describe his peculiar dilemma. I think about it a bit, but its much better not to. This is something that, you know, if it comes to it, and regrettably it comes as the result of the death of your parent, which is, you know, not so nice, to say the least.

For all the spectacle, ritual, and pomp, for all the prayers and planning, most coronations have not gone smoothly. Amid rumors that her uncle was planning to kill her and grumbling in Parliament over the cost, Victorias 1838 coronation was interrupted briefly when eighty-two-year-old Lord Rolle tripped while attempting to greet the new queen and, to Her Majestys horror, rolled backward down the steps.

Just two days before his scheduled coronation in 1902, the famously libidinous Edward VII, Victorias eldest son, was stricken with appendicitis, an illness that at the time had a high mortality rate. The new king might well have died had his physician not performed what was then a radical new surgical procedure, allowing him to be crowned six weeks later than originally planned.

George V, Edwards son, was coronated in 1911 amid murmurs of alcoholism and rumors of bigamy that ended in a sensational libel trial; the French journalist who alleged in print that King George had secretly married an admirals daughter in Malta wound up going to prison for a year.

Edward VIIIs accession to the throne on January 20, 1936, proved so thorny that he had no coronation at all. His insistence on marrying the American divorce Wallis Simpson precipitated a full-blown constitutional crisis that ended only with his abdication for the woman I love after just eleven months, on December 11. Edward was supposed to be crowned on May 12, 1937, so it was decided to keep the date for the coronation of his younger brother Bertie as George VI. S-s-s-s same date, Charless painfully shy, stuttering grandfather said. D-d-d-d different king. This time it was the Dean of Westminster who fell down the steps while carrying St. Edwards crownwhich the Archbishop of Canterbury then fumbled as he tried to place it on the sovereigns head. With his wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, crowned the Queen Consort beside him, the accidental king was convinced that he was not up to the job; as it turned out, he was wrong. Elizabeth worried that the burden of leading a nation through the Great Depression and World War II would take too great a toll on her husbands health. Sadly, she was right. After a reign of fifteen years, one month, and twenty-five days, George VI died on February 6, 1952, at the age of fifty-six.