The Man Who Is King

Charles Philip Arthur George, patriarch of the Royal House of Windsor (formerly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), was officially crowned King Charles III of Great Britain.

When his mother was crowned queen seventy years ago, there was no satellite television and few people owned television sets.  A film of Elizabeth's coronation ("This house is entirely surrounded by film!")  had to be flown across the ocean to be aired on American television, and a TV news crew was actually stationed in Boston when the plane with the precious coronation footage touched down at Logan Airport.  This time, with streaming, the Internet, and the 24-hour news cycle, there was no way to miss King Charles' coronation . . . but a lot of people still managed to do so.

This pretty much underlines how irrelevant the monarchy seems these days. Charles is a sincere man, and he has taken his official installation as king of Great Britain to heart and as a call to lead and to serve, but not to rule, his nation. He has a strong sense of values, particularly with regard to the environment and the way the human habitats of cities and towns is designed.  Charles will spend his reign adapting the monarchy to the environmental and social realities of the twenty-first century (it will be a smaller monarchy, with a smaller court and a more modest public persona), and he will mostly be a transitional king, as he is 74 and is not likely to last long on the throne.