Essays in Idleness

As I am not into statistics, I find it difficult to think of my new monarch as “Charles III.” But he is not only the son of his mother, who was our Queen, and became so even before my birth. He is also the son of his father, who exhibited all the characteristics that Her Majesty loved in a man, starting with being unambiguously a man. Of course, this was an easier prejudice to master, when she married in 1947. Charles, born in the fashion of those times (after the marriage, and “legitimately” as it were), came into a world where such conventions, together with other traditional proofs of sanity, would be set aside.

Not having been born so long after Charles, however, and of loyal parentage, I became aware of the heir in my own childhood. I still think him a bit young for the job — monarchs must need at least a century of training — and, quite inevitably, subject to the notions and whims that decorate or deface our common generation. This cannot be entirely to his credit, or to his fault. There is what the clever Germans call a Zeitgeist, a spirit of the times, for better or worse (mostly worse). We are all brainwashed in this stream of consciousness. Only a tiny fraction, of each generation, swims free of the great sinking wreck of ages. They have what my physician has diagnosed as “attitude problems.”

Charles, more than any other member of the Royal Family, clearly earned most of his eccentricities. Glancing in the amusing comic book, entitled Harmony (2010), written by Charles with a committee of his friends, I found many signs of this. It is, as one might guess, against the Disharmony we have created under the guise of “revolutionary progress.”

By coincidence, reading in the century-old tiny volumes of my Edmund Burke, especially from his last few years, I find him a spokesman for the same harmonies. That is what makes him a conservative — a radical conservative, like our new, gracious King.

He (Charles, like Edmund) has a preternatural attachment to reason. Also, a discernment of the limits of reason, not only in the present, but through all time. Still a third eccentricity is his characteristic modesty, with instinctive courage, for he does not impose his views but presents them for discussion, and listens as well as speaks. (My generation forgot how to do this, and the generation after mine is, for want of a better term, “Woke.”)

Charles is unlikely to make a fool of himself as our monarch; though judging by the careers of most politicians, this will be hard for him to achieve.

The reader will know I am a “constitutional monarchist,” who would keep the Royals in their — current, illustrious — positions, but eliminate the rest of our — incompetent, and generally malignant — bureaucracy. Having witnessed (through the BBC) how brilliantly the British can manage an unprecedented state funeral, with millions of voluntary guests, I am the more convinced that Charles and his advisors can be trusted in command.

Let us sing with heart and voice, all five stanzas: Long live the King.