“The king (or queen) is dead, long live the king (or queen).”
Britons last heard those traditional words about a monarch’s death in 1952 when Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, King George VI. No one today under 70 can remember her glittering coronation of Westminster Abbey the following year, Britain’s 39th since 1066.
Like most Britons, I have never known another monarch. It was Queen Elizabeth II, a seemingly immortal fixture like Big Ben.
But the era of Queen Elizabeth II has come to an end. At 96, she was Britain’s longest-serving monarch. Illness prevented her from making some engagements. Britain is now faced with the unthinkable: that Queen Elizabeth II is no more. And that King Charles III will be the new monarch.
Most want the British monarchy to last
King Charles III is not the monarch most Britons want, according to opinion polls. As of May, 6 in 10 wanted the monarchy to continue, but 37% were in favor of skipping a generation to Prince William, while only 34% preferred Charles.
Opinions in your inbox: Get exclusive access to our columnists and the best of our columns every day
It’s easy to see why. William and his photogenic wife, Duchess Kate, and their children appear to have been molded to be the perfect monarch and family – at least as defined during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Like the Queen, their popularity ratings are consistently high. Unlike her, they are young and more in touch with modern times. Prince William even sang on stage with Taylor Swift in 2013. But they reflect the apolitical softness that is key to Queen Elizabeth’s popularity.
Skipping a generation is of course not the way the system works. A future King Charles will be a difficult figure for Britons and the world to warm to. At 73, he has passed normal retirement age. Britons have firm, often unfavorable, opinions about him. Especially after the wildly popular Netflix series “The Crown” reminded viewers of Charles’ infidelity to the hugely popular Princess Diana.
This doesn’t feel right: Why do Americans love Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee so much?
Prince William, on the other hand, seems to have understood the unspoken rules by which Queen Elizabeth II maintained respect for the British monarchy. She took to heart what Walter Bagehot, the editor of the respected British Economist magazine in the late 1800s, claimed: the British monarchy was the ‘dignified’ branch whose job was to symbolize the state through pomp and circumstance. . The “efficient” branch was government; it governed the country by passing laws and providing public services.
Queen Elizabeth II was the example of a monarch. The cycling monarchies – so called because their monarchs often cycle and behave more like ordinary people – of Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands were not for her. And she remained scrupulously apolitical until 15 prime ministers. No one, at least not publicly, ever knew where she stood politically.
Elizabeth was my father’s 4th monarch
The bottom line is this: will a King Charles III have what it takes to maintain the British and world’s respect for the monarchy, even as a warmer place for King William?
Queen Elizabeth had many more advantages when she took the throne. She was young, just 25. No tabloids fixated on royal scandals, real or made up.
Warning Story: I suffered government revenge for my coverage from Moscow
More from Louise Branson: Vladimir Putin’s biography makes this dictator, and the war in Ukraine, particularly dangerous
Respect for the monarchy was also in the DNA of the British at the time – as my father embodied. Born in 1913, he was 39 when she became his fourth monarch. Growing up in British colonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, he would gather us every Christmas in the blistering heat around a blaring radio in the blistering heat to listen to the Queen’s Christmas Day speech broadcast on the BBC World Service. It would have been unthinkable for him and most Britons at the time to miss it.
“We listen to our queen; this is what it means to be british,” he would say.
Of course, it was also a very different, “Downton Abbey” kind of Britain in its day. It still had an empire, the largest in history, that ruled over 20% of the world’s population. The sun, as the saying goes, never set in the British Empire – meaning it was always daytime in any of its territories, be it Canada, Australia, India, Barbados or elsewhere. Britannia, a song of the time, rules the waves.
Fall of the British Empire
The decline of Britain during Queen Elizabeth II’s long reign was dramatic: the collapse of the empire; the transformation from a rigid class society to today’s more secular, multicultural model; a country rocked by such identity-challenging events as Brexit. Not to mention insider allegations of malfunctioning of the royal family, first from the late Princess Diana, now from Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
More opinion: Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee, ‘Downton Abbey’ Movie Gives Americans a Necessary Escape
The test will be what polls say after Prince Charles has been the monarch for a year or more. Some of the things he says he plans to do are commendable on their faces. He reportedly wants to reduce the number of royals on taxpayers’ payroll. Recently, when Barbados voted to abolish Queen Elizabeth as constitutional head of state, Charles delivered a speech lamenting past slavery, a clever nod to today’s more awake Black Lives Matter world.
But can he follow his mother’s Bagehot rules that have preserved monarchy status? Perhaps history has a lesson.
King Louis XV of France is famously, albeit apocryphally, quoted as saying what Queen Elizabeth may fear: “Après moi le déluge (after me the deluge).” The French Revolution eventually abolished the French monarchy. Could the British monarchy take the same path as Charles and his unpopular wife, Duchess Camilla, fail to be sufficiently dignified and apolitical?
On the other hand, the monarchy did survive after a previous King Charles – King Charles I – had his head chopped off in 1649.
Louise Branson, former editor of USA TODAY, was a (London) Sunday Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe. She is a biographer of the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Her latest co-authored book is “The Inconvenient Journalist”, an international memoir.
You can read various opinions from our board of contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily opinion newsletter. To comment on a column, send a comment to [email protected].
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Queen Elizabeth’s death ends popular reign, the era of King Charles
