Destined from birth to reign, the eldest son of Elizabeth II accesses the throne at 73 years. This complex figure, engaged on environmental or social subjects, should become a very different monarch from his mother.
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Charles III, prince of Wales and eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II, became the King of the United Kingdom and fourteen Commonwealth countries at the time of the death of his mother, Thursday, September 8, at the end of the day, at the age of 96. A painful personal event that this man with a cut -off complexion and delicious ways waited and dreaded for years. His biographers have repeated it a lot: now 73 years old, Charles Philip Arthur George is one of the most enduring King in Waiting (“King Pending”) that the country experienced. A complex figure, sensitive and often mocked, intended from birth to reign but remained in the anteroom of the throne and in the shadow of her mother for decades, the latter having refused until her last days to give up her charge and to organize a regency.
How to succeed without disappointing a sovereign so darling of the British, a global icon, such a symbol of continuity, endurance and sense of duty? It is probably the fate and the drama of Charles III, an already elderly king, whose reign will necessarily be much shorter than that of his mother, but probably also very different: more modern, more committed, especially on the Environmental subjects, an ancient and sincere concern of the new monarch.
“Poor Charles! [” Poor Charles “] I never stopped hearing this reflection,” explains Sally Bedell Smith, one of the biographers of the Prince of Wales. He certainly experienced an incredibly privileged existence, a life of palaces in the proper sense of the term, but it was also an existence of frustrations, punctuated by the scandals, dissected by the tabloids. A failed first marriage, mourning nationwide – with the death of Diana -, not to mention family dissensions which have so often tainted the image of the Windsor, the last episode in date being the “Megxit”, the departure of His son Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, in 2019.
a mother often absent
Charles III was born on November 14, 1948 in Buckingham Palace, the huge official Windsor residence in London. Her mother, Princess Elizabeth, was 22 years old. She lived a relatively preserved childhood of general attention: she was not intended to reign until the abdication of her uncle, the ephemeral king Edouard VIII. This is not the case with his eldest son. It is already heard, from an early age, that he will be king one day and his existence is immediately public.
Charles is 3 years old when his mother accesses the throne in June 1952 and automatically became Prince Charles of the house of Windsor, inheriting from a handful of other hereditary titles. This chubby and reserved little boy does not often have the opportunity to see his mother, absent from long months to join her husband, a naval lieutenant in Malta. Having become queen, Elizabeth will not hesitate to be absent for long official trips in the Commonwealth, leaving Charles (and his little sister Anne) to the care of their governers.
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