What do we expect of a modern king?

Perhaps we have not focused enough on the fact that we are crowning a king, rather than a queen, as monarch. It is nearly 90 years since this last happened, so no one alive today has an adult memory of what was expected. There is a further difficulty, in that the coronation of Charles III occurs in circumstances almost diametrically different from those of the coronation of George VI. In 1937, what was happening had not been foreseen before December of the previous year. It was Edward VIII’s coronation that everyone had been expecting, and although those in the know were aware of Edward’s inadequacies, these had been kept from a public most of whom found him very glamorous. With the shock of Edward’s abdication came the arrival of the shy Duke of York, George VI. Could he be an adequate replacement? Five days before the ceremony, he addressed a great luncheon given in Westminster Hall. There was a ghastly pause as, faced with the microphone and suffering from his speech impediment, he was unable at first to utter a word. ‘Many people must have thought how much better Windsor would have been,’ recorded the admittedly biased Chips Channon, who was present. In 2023, Charles III is our best-known new king ever. This moment has been expected since his birth in 1948. As the Princess Royal put it this week: ‘He’s been practising for a bit.’ George VI succeeded a tragic might-have-been. Charles III succeeds an embodiment – the embodiment – of stability and service. I am not sure which task is harder. 

And then comes the cultural question: ‘What do we expect of a king, as opposed to a queen, in modern times?’ People forget that Elizabeth II came to the throne in an era when women were discouraged from having interests beyond domestic life and charitable good works.