But Diana’s death proved a turning point: Charles worked with Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, to nudge his mother into honoring Diana’s memory, amid a national outpouring of grief, and then set about rehabilitating his own image.Ĭharles, he said, fought to carve out an identity as the Prince of Wales, a role that he held longer than anyone but that comes without a job description. The seamy tabloid stories, the tell-all TV interviews (“There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana said to the BBC, referring to her husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom he later married), the bitter divorce and Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris in 1997 - all of it crystallized the image held by many of Charles as an oafish cad and his family as unfeeling in-laws.įrom 1991 to 1996, the percentage of people who said they thought Charles would make a good king plunged to 41 percent from 82 percent, according to the polling firm MORI. Nothing, of course, compared to his marriage to Diana. Thrust on to the throne at 25, Elizabeth reigned for longer than most Britons have been alive, anchoring her country with stoic dignity as it made a turbulent passage from globe-spanning empire to reluctant member of the European Union to an uncertain future after Brexit.Īt the nadir of Charles’s public life, in the mid-1990s, some critics went so far as to say that the scandal-scarred heir had forfeited the right to be king and that the crown should skip a generation, going to his elder son, Prince William, who was untarnished by public blemishes. Whether Charles will ever enjoy the respect or affection showered on his mother is another question. Having aged from an awkward, self-doubting young man into an unhappy middle-aged husband, Charles has become, at 73, a self-assured, gray-haired eminence, steeped in causes like climate change and environmental protection, which were once quirky but now seem peculiarly in sync with the times. As King Charles III, he will become sovereign of the world’s most important constitutional monarchy, head of the most storied royal family, and a symbol of continuity in a storm-tossed country.

LONDON - Never, perhaps, has an heir been more ready for the crown.Ĭharles, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and a man born to be king, acceded to the throne on Thursday after being the designated successor for longer than anyone in the history of the British monarchy.

A prince on paper reluctant royals