himself from his distant position in the succession to marry a Catholic, while Peter Phillips’s wife converted to the Anglican faith so he could keep his eleventh place.
Overturning the Act of Settlement outright could challenge the legitimacy of the Queen and all other descendants of the House of Hanover, whose right to the throne was created by the law. (Several Stuart descendants live in Germany and could conceivably lay claim to the throne.) Even altering the Catholic exclusion would call into question the requirement that the sovereign be Anglican, since a central tenet of Catholicism is a pledge to raise children as Roman Catholics. A further complication is the prerequisite under the 1931 Statute of Westminster that any change in the act must have the consent not only of the British Parliament but of the other fifteen realms for which the Queen is head of state.
Primogeniture, which is based on common law dating to the Middle Ages, requires the firstborn son to inherit a family’s hereditary title and estate. In the monarchy, it means that males take precedence over females in the succession regardless of their position in the birth order. Among the Queen’s children, Charles became heir to the throne, followed by Andrew and Edward, with second-born Anne in fourth position. All three siblings were superseded by Charles’s two sons.
The marriage of Prince William gave new impetus to proposals that the crown go to the eldest child of the sovereign, whether a boy or a girl. Despite concerns that pulling out one strand from the laws of the monarchy could provoke additional constitutional questions, in October 2011 at the biennial conference of Commonwealth leaders in Perth, Australia, David Cameron secured the agreement of the Queen’s fifteen other realms to join Britain and introduce legislation to change the law of primogeniture to one of “gender equality.” Cameron also proposed amending the Act of Settlement to permit members of the royal family to marry Roman Catholics.
The Queen subtly signaled her approval in her speech opening the Commonwealth summit, urging the fifty- four nations to “find ways to allow girls and women to play their full part.” However, she has taken no official position on changing the laws, largely because the hurdles are high and the constitutional questions complex. “This is a matter for the government,” said a senior Palace official. “The monarchy is an institution which is great and solid and long-lasting. The framework has endured for centuries. It is not personal to her. She is a female monarch ironically as have been other great monarchs.”
Charles has said little publicly about his vision of kingship in the twenty-first century, but he has dropped some tantalizing hints. In 1994 he declared that rather than being the Defender of the Faith, he wished to be the “defender of faith,” in itself a difficult notion for a king pledged to uphold the Church of England as the legally established religion. Sixteen years later, he went further and said he was “absolutely determined to be the defender of nature.… That’s what the rest of my life is going to be concerned with.”
He has avoided discussing what if anything he would do to change the trappings of the monarchy, although he has indicated he would like to see the number of working members of the royal family decreased. There have been suggestions as well that he could keep Clarence House as his residence and use Buckingham Palace as his office, setting a more low-key tone. Courtiers have said he could cut back some of the ceremonial parts of the coronation while keeping its historical and religious elements intact, and that he might have a second service that would embrace other cultures and faiths. As for his closely tended charities, “obviously it would be nice if some things were taken on by my sons,” he said in 2008, “but I don’t know. It all depends on their interests.”
When Charles turned sixty in 2008, his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote that he wanted to be an “active” king, ready “to speak out on matters of national and international importance in ways that at the moment would be unthinkable.” It would be a “waste of his experience and accumulated wisdom,” Dimbleby added, “for it to be straitjacketed within the confines of an annual Christmas message or his weekly audience with the prime minister.” When commentators in the press raised alarms, Clarence House officials hastened to say that Charles “fully accepts that as king, his power to discuss issues close to his heart would be severely curtailed.”
Yet Charles has signaled that he intends to do things “in a different way than my predecessors … because the situation has changed.” He has said he would use his “convening power”—the allure of a royal invitation to gather important people to discuss big issues and mobilize to solve problems. In an interview with
Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air.
“One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades.
Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.”
Even if as sovereign he continues to advocate his views in what he considers a less provocative way, he still runs the risk of alienating some portion of the population. If that number approaches half or more, he could chip away at the consent necessary for the survival of the monarchy. He could come into conflict with government policy as well, politicizing his position and creating a constitutional crisis.
Many of his supporters hope that by the time he takes the throne—likely in his seventies if not late sixties, which would make him the oldest new monarch, superseding King William IV, who was sixty-four when he succeeded his older brother George IV in 1830—he will have had his fill of controversies and made his points, and will be ready to embrace his constitutional obligations. “With a bit of luck, he will be old enough not to be tempted down less wise paths,” said Robert Salisbury.
Veteran courtiers expect that the very act of becoming king will be transformative for Charles, instilling the solemn recognition that he can no longer act as an individual but as an institution representing the nation. “Life changes overnight when you inherit the throne,” said David Airlie. A diplomat who once worked with Charles on a government speech found that he was “not spoiled or stubborn” when it came to taking official advice. “When you tell him what he can’t do, he doesn’t like it but he will listen,” said the diplomat. “If you take out sections saying you can’t say this, it is not government policy, he gets cross but he goes along with it.” As Prince of Wales he has had the luxury of declining to shake the hand of a Chinese leader because of his poor human rights record, as he did when he refused to attend the banquet President Jiang Zemin had for the Queen during his state visit in October 1999. But as king “he will have to shake the bloody hand of murderous leaders if it is in Britain’s national interest,” said historian Andrew Roberts.
That task would include some heads of Commonwealth governments. Charles will not automatically inherit the job of head of the Commonwealth when the Queen dies. He must be voted in by the fifty-four-nation membership, which is by no means certain. A survey published in March 2010 by the Royal Commonwealth Society reported that fewer than 20 percent of those polled thought Charles should be the next head, and that many favored rotating the position among member states. “Whilst the vast majority of people greatly admire the role Queen Elizabeth II has played in uniting and guiding the Commonwealth,” wrote the authors of the study, “there is a significant debate about whether this role should be passed on to the next British monarch when the time comes. Many people are vehemently opposed to the idea.”
Charles considers heading the Commonwealth an important part of the monarch’s job, and he has cultivated his own relationships with member countries, visiting thirty-three of them since he became Prince of Wales. But he has attended the biennial heads of government meeting only twice, most recently in 2007 in Uganda when he joined his mother at the opening session. The Commonwealth’s director of political affairs, Amitav Banerji, indicated in a memo leaked in November 2010 that Charles did not “command the same respect” as his mother, but that the
