If his new reign was developing in the manner that King Charles III must have hoped, the main royal news of the week would have been his visit to the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday. There, the king did the kinds of things that British monarchs do, and received the kind of tributes they are accustomed to receiving. He talked to staff, met political leaders and unveiled a bronze plaque commemorating Elizabeth II’s lying in state as well as two ornate beacons, gifts from the two Houses. In the words of the Commons speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the new beacons symbolised “the enduring and guiding light [the queen] has been to our nation – and indeed, the whole world – for the past 70 years”.
Sadly for the king, this highly traditional visit to Westminster, with its deferential rhetoric of continuity and stability, was not the main royal news of the week at all. Instead, that was provided by Thursday’s release of the final three distinctly undeferential episodes of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix documentary series.
The new episodes do not hold back. In one, Prince Harry lifts the curtain on a 2020 royal summit at Sandringham on the Sussexes’ future at which, by his account, Prince William “screamed and shouted”, and King Charles said “things that just simply weren’t true”, while the queen sat quietly thinking about how to safeguard the institution. In another, the duchess and her mother describe how Meghan’s despair with the royal world – with its echoes of Diana, Princess of Wales a generation earlier – led her to think “all of this will stop if I’m not here” and to consider taking her own life.
These are shocking allegations. Along with the racism and misogyny detailed in the earlier episodes, they cast a miserable light, to put it mildly, over the way the British monarchy conducts itself. It is true, as the late queen put it in a statement, that “some recollections may vary” about some matters. It is also true that the greatest villains of this whole saga are not King Charles, Princes William or Harry, or any of the individual royals, but the relentlessly intrusive and hyperbolic British tabloid press and the lying and abusive world of social media. Nor do any of the main players, including the Sussexes themselves, emerge free of questions and perhaps criticism from these televised assaults. Saddest of all, surely, is the sight of so many unhappy people inside such a dysfunctional institution. Few of the principals appear undamaged, often seriously, by the pressures of the roles they play in front of an audience of sometimes infantilised millions.
Damaging though the Sussexes’ campaigns are for Windsor family relations, they may not have much impact on the standing of the monarchy itself. A Savanta opinion poll this week finds 59% of the British public think that the documentaries are a bad idea, against 33% who think they are a good one. These figures mirror public attitudes to the institution itself, where 55% favour the monarchy against 31% who favour an elected head of state. That these figures are unchanged from the reign of Elizabeth II may cause King Charles to feel his own reign is settling in well. But with Harry’s book due to suck up fresh oxygen in the new year, the new king is on probation. He is still only feeling his way towards the levels of public approval that, under his mother, provided such a bulwark to the monarchical system.
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