Posted on 03/12/2005 7:06:27 PM PST by NZerFromHK
Prince Charles' visit to New Zealand inevitably provokes questions about his future suitability as King of this country.
Charles is an unusual personality, not easy to pin down. There is a lack of clarity about him; a certain hesitancy. As the heir to the throne, he is in a perennially impossible situation; damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
As he once said, plaintively, "There is no set-out role for me. I'm really rather an awkward problem."
That awkwardness has eased somewhat since the death of his erratic wife and the decision, finally, to marry his first and real love, Camilla Parker-Bowles.
But the knives have been sharpening. There has been some talk of installing Prince William after the death of the Queen; jumping a generation as it were and leaving Charles to Camilla and his plants.
Even if Charles wanted to turn the throne over to William, the choice of succession is not his to make. Parliament would have to agree to allow Charles to leave, then pick a new King - as it did when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 - and that would cast the entire idea of monarchy out into open, rancorous and possibly fatal debate.
Charles has prepared and is still preparing to assume the throne. It has been a lifetime vocation and he is not going to give it up now.
It might be a bit of a wait, however, because his mother is unlikely to give it up voluntarily either and she, like her mother, is in this business for the long haul.
Prince Charles is not a glamorous, compelling personality but he is much more balanced and astute than the poisonous British press chooses to project him.
Charles has never been greatly interested in the Commonwealth. He is not an internationalist by nature or experience and he confines his initiatives and his interests within a relatively narrow range in Britain. In the absence of any reputation for anything else he is saddled with the image of someone who talks to vegetables and denigrates modern architecture.
As and when Charles does become King his main preoccupation will be consolidation at home. There is no coherent republican movement in Britain yet but that would change rapidly if Charles III gets off on the wrong foot.
Much the same goes for the wider Commonwealth connection. Because the Queen is such a hard act to follow it may be impossible for Charles to preserve that tenuous loyalty and stem what might turn out to be an irrepressible ebb tide of support for keeping the sovereign at the top, if at all.
Thus, the future of the sovereign as the titular head of the Commonwealth rests largely on next the King's PR performance.
Fortunately, Charles is no Canute. He is not going to try to preserve the monarchy as a gilded anachronism, a glorified theme park offering more pomp than circumstance.
He is very well aware of the fine line between solemn respect and high farce. He has personally tiptoed along that line and been deeply hurt by the consequences of stumbling on the way.
He knows that the monarchy will probably survive. It has, after all, endured devastating wars and spectacular divorces, abrupt beheadings and humiliating exiles and come up smiling benignly over its subjects, who have shown a remarkable capacity to put up with all this.
His lengthy affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles is something that has had to be managed with infinite patience, not just by him but by the Palace establishment as a whole. The Windsors are not fast movers when it comes to such matters.
Everything is weighed, grocer-like, before the ancient machinery of change is activated. The last time this kind of thing happened it all ended a bit messily with Edward VIII opting for a divorced commoner over duty, and all the catastrophic consequences that followed for the collective solidarity of the monarchy.
That affair left a mass of scar tissue on the delicate Windsor corpus. It's no wonder the palace is distinctly bashful when it comes to reconciling the absorption of a divorcee mistress with defending the faith.
There has never been much clarity as to Charles' attitude towards countries like New Zealand - older Commonwealth dominions which are still ostensibly loyal to the Crown - but which are increasingly seeking their own identities out from under the old British cultural blanket.
An opportunity arose to talk to him about this when he visited New Zealand early in 1997.
A dinner had been arranged in Christchurch for him to meet a variety of outdoor-oriented people, mainly Canterbury farming grandees and captains of local agro-industries. I was included as a conservationist.
The conversation was not scintillating. Not even the best of Canterbury's new pinot noir could liven it up, although I noticed the Prince of Wales was downing more than his fair share.
Pretty soon I was able to engage Charles in what amounted to a private conversation and I steered the subject round to constitutional matters.
Because he seemed to be particularly open and affable I asked him what his reaction would be if, as King, he was told that New Zealand wished to remove him as Head of State and become a republic. One eyebrow shot up. Had I gone too far?
"I take it you assume that will inevitably happen," he replied, with just the hint of a wry smile.
"I do, and I support it," I said.
"Well, to be frank, I think it would come as a great relief to all of us," said Charles. "It would remove the awful ambiguity we have at the moment. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for everybody if you all had your own completely independent head of state.
"I certainly never want to be dragged into any constitutional disputes in New Zealand or anywhere else. I simply can't imagine how difficult it would be to be faced with having to dismiss a New Zealand Prime Minister."
Perhaps he sees the writing on the wall already. Certainly he will have felt the colder winds of rejection as a future King while in Australia.
In New Zealand the reception may be kinder, more muted. But he will know it is only a matter of time before the rupture occurs and that there may never be another King of New Zealand.
Don't think that's correct.
" . . . at present it is virtually impossible to be sure whether the Royal name is Windsor or Mountbatten-Windsor. . . "
- Debrett's. That's the last word on this sort of stuff, like the Almanach de Gotha for the Krauts.
Blinkin' Royals just have to do everything differently . . .
I agree with you about Diana, and then some. I loathed her, honestly. However, I was just making an innocent comment about how good looking Prince William is. So calm down. ok?? :)
I'm quite sure that the actual House name is still Windsor, but the surname is Mountbatten-Windsor now. In other words, they have now differentiated between the surname and royal family name.
Technically it is correct, but here we are talking about royal house name and not surnames of royals. In George V, let alone Queen Victoria's time, surnames are of very limited usage for royals. :)
Well, Debrett's doesn't seem to agree with you that it is all that clear. The expansive use of the hyphenated name has apparently called this into some question. Read the article.
I depend on Sarah Bradford and Wikipedia. My sources say otherwise though.
Aha, we are referring to different concepts here! I was talking about royal house/dynasty name, and you were talking about surnames of members of royal family. The 1960 order-in-council doesn't affect the royal house name.
BTW, Debrett's Peerage is the authority on the British royalty, nobility, and gentry, and has been since the 18th century. Wikipedia is not even in the running. Bradford as a writer of historical bestsellers probably gets HER info from Debrett's.
Although Prince Charles is not my favorite person in the world, it is worth remembering that the monarchy is bigger than Prince Charlie. For me, New Zealand (or Australia, or Canada, or Britain etc) dropping the monarchy would be the same thing as the U.S. deciding that the Constitution is old and out of date, so just scrap it.
I love it when any politicians, particularly socialists, have to recognize someone else as being "higher" than they are and there's nothing they can do about it. I also like the fact that, on paper at least, sovereignty comes "by the grace of God".
Personally, I think that the English-speaking world (aka the British Empire) should be sticking together particularly now, having certainly much more in common that all of the groups like the UN, EU or ASEAN ever could. Countries that share a common culture should work together to preserve it, not buy into the liberal mentality of self-hatred.
You mistake my tone. I was being rather sarcastic. Who gives a rat's ass about William or his looks? I sure don't. But, you are right, it was a simple innocent comment. Lol. Looks are so important to people. I guess it just bothers me to see grown women still so locked into it. People DROOLED over Diana for the same reason. She was, as it turned out, SUCH a loser. So what was all the drooling about? Just her looks. And, in the end, they were so meaningless and showed NOTHING about her character.
This prince william drooling (STUNNING STUNNING) is Diana redux. Let's hope he has more character than his mother. He might and it would come from his not-good-looking father. At least Camilla drools over his looks. Lol.
Sorry if I offended you. :o):o)
If that is your position, then no matter how "conservative" you claim to be, you are joining with the forces of Leftism. There is nothing the Left hates more than Monarchy; that has been true since its inception at the French Revolution. The battle over the Crown in Australia and New Zealand is nothing less than the modern continuation of the historic battle between tradition and "progress," hierarchy and equality, monarchy and republicanism that began with the English Civil War in the 1640s. There was no "Left" then, but the evil Oliver Cromwell was its grandfather, and the ancestor of today's republicans.
Perhaps you imagine that becoming a republic would give New Zealand a chance to elect a conservative, Christian, Americanist president. But I doubt very much that this is what most New Zealanders have in mind.
If New Zealand were to abandon the monarchy, no one would see this as a "conservative" move. It would be universally interpreted, correctly, as a victory for the revolutionary forces of Change At All Costs that have been destroying the world since 1789. New Zealanders who are proud of their British heritage and look back fondly on the days of Empire would be cruelly deprived of their last surviving link with that identity.
New Zealand, Canada, and Australia have an obligation to accept the fact that they owe far more to Britain and its culture than to any other country. The monarchy is a living reminder of this and one of the last surviving obstacles to the total triumph of the pernicioius doctrine of multiculturalism which would declare all cultures equal.
It's too late for my country; Americans with my views (the Tories/Loyalists) lost, and fled to Canada, where their descendants remain staunch supporters of the monarchy. But Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, by retaining the Crown in their constitutions, continue to share in one of history's grandest and most colorful stories, that of the ancient and glorious British monarchy.
There are already far too many republics and far too few monarchies in the world already; currently the latter constitute only about 7% of the world' s population. Why tip the balance even further, abandoning the world's noblest form of government and most recognizable sovereign for a political hack, yet another holder of that tiresome, uninspiring, ubiquitous, and overrated title "president"? The French writer Anatole France wisely observed, "every monarchy abolished is a star fallen out of the sky. Republicanism is ugliness triumphant." God Save the Queen!
It was King George V (1865-1936), not his father King Edward VII (1841-1910), who changed the name of the royal family to Windsor in 1917.
The accusation that Prince Christoph of Hesse was involved in the bombing of London has not been proved. And I have never read that he expressed a wish to kill the King and Queen. What is your source for that quote?
Prince Philip was bitterly disappointed that his three sisters could not be invited to his wedding in 1947. After the war, however, the British royal family re-established their relationship with their German relatives. Prince Charles often visited his aunts and cousins in Germany and became close to them. There is certainly no bitterness now.
The Jacobite claimant to the British throne is Duke Franz of Bavaria (b. 1933), great-grandson of the last King of Bavaria. Since the Stuart male line died out in 1807, none of the Jacobite "claimants" have had any interest in pursuing their claim.
This website is an exhaustive and fascinating resource on Jacobitism:
http://www.jacobite.ca
I am sympathetic to the Jacobite cause in theory, but loyal to the House of Windsor in practice.
Following Germany's defeat in the first World War...Prince Christoph [1901-1943]...considered Hitler to be Germany's saving grace. But by...1942, 'Cri' Hesse's views had radically changed. Although he was unable to speak publically, Prince Christoph no longer believed in Adolf Hitler...After the war, Christoph had planned to leave the Nazi party and his job...Prince Christoph of Hesse did serve in the Luftwaffe, but he never took part in bombing raids over London. [my emphasis]
Louis II (Ludwig II) is the king famous for building castles.
Maximilian's younger brother Otto was king of Greece from 1832 to 1862 but was forced to abdicate, after which the Danish line which Prince Philip is descended from took over.
King Otto (1848-1916), who was mentally ill and unmarried, was forced to abdicate in 1913 in favor of his cousin Ludwig III (1845-1921), son of the regent Luitpold (1821-1912).
Ludwig III was the last King of Bavaria (1913-18). His son and heir was Crown Prince Ruprecht (1869-1955), father of Albrecht (1905-1996), father of Franz (b. 1933). See http://pages.prodigy.net/ptheroff/gotha/bavaria.html
The Jacobite claim came through Ludwig III's wife Maria Theresa (1849-1919).
Thanks. Langer's chart did not show Ludwig III as having been king. The direct line from James VII & II died out in 1807 with the death of Cardinal York...I believe the Wittelsbach claim goes back to an earlier Stuart woman who married Philippe, the younger brother of Louis XIV of France.
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