Carlos III, warm up that you go out: why it is impossible for this king to even emulate his mother

Floats, crowns and music hide in the acts celebrated since the death of Isabel II in Great Britain that kings, heirs or princes are really people of flesh and blood who sin daily under their titles, their uniforms, their mourning, their medals and their jewels. Two thousand guests, 500 world leaders, representatives of royal houses and millions of Britons in the streets bid farewell to the sovereign on Monday, whose death marks the end of an era and marks the beginning of the reign of Charles III. The splendor of the funeral is over and the new king goes out into the arena now, without pomp, without the moral anchor of his mother, who is now resting in Windsor Castle.

The work of the new Monarch begins today, after the parenthesis provided by the funeral. The sensation of solemnity has preserved the head of state from the harsh reality. These days he has been performing with the unsurpassed theatricality shakespiriana, and with magnificent and ancient settings as decorations, the farewell to an exceptional woman, but who has turned out to be human, because she has left after 96 years among mortals, despite having been, for almost a century, a kind of daughter of a god, the closest thing to a pharaoh of the first dynasties of Ancient Egypt that could be in Western culture today. In fact, Elizabeth II was the head of the Anglican church.

This veneration of death and of the person fascinates billions all over the planet, spectators who fall in love with the monumental performance performed with the best means, colossal budgets, paid to the neckline by the deceased’s subjects. The money spent on these funerals has been criticized at a time when families face the worst inflation in four decades and face a winter of impossible energy and food bills. The trick has worked for centuries and now technologies allow magic to be amplified to the entire planet.

Will Carlos III preserve the Monarchy like his mother?

But today we know that magic does not exist and that the kings are the sons. At least, in the case of Spain and Great Britain. In our case, by abdication, and in the case of the British, by the death of the Monarch. Magic doesn’t exist but show yes, and that is what has protected Charles III of his weak popularity if we compare him with his mother. The king of the Tampax is human, like his mother, but in the case of the husband of Camila Parker Bowles becomes very obvious. It is precisely her human condition that makes her complicated love affair with the woman she has made Queen Consort understandable. Her feelings prevented her from accepting the marriage arranged by the Crown with Diana Spencer, because it was love and perhaps desire that twisted his destiny with the mother of his two children, one of them, the brand new Prince of Wales.

Queen Sofía, on the other hand, has remained firm in her position despite the continuous humiliations to which she has been subjected for decades by her husband. When the mother of Felipe de Borbón caught in fragants for the first time to don Juan Carlos hunting on a farm in Toledo, in 1976, he took his three children and went to India, where his mother, Queen Federica, was. But the queen consort of Greece (from 1947 to 1964), by birth Princess of Hanover and Duchess of Brunswick, told him that “A queen is never cheated on by her husband, and if he cheats on her, she never finds out. Your place is Madrid and the Zarzuela”. And he forced her to go back without unpacking. Isabel II and the Duke of Edinburgh tried something like this with their son Carlos but they did not succeed and that ended badly, perhaps the worst stain on the unblemished resume of the deceased queen.

The sins of Carlos III are immensely more known than his virtues, and although his careful and permanent elegance help, it will be difficult for his subjects to forget his vulgar instincts for more medals, crowns, uniforms and ermine mantles with which to disguise his more earthly personality. the one that equals him, at least, with every son born of a woman, queen or not.

He travels with his bed and his toilet

The new Sovereign has a reputation for maniac. Paul Burrell, the old butler Princess Diana, He assures that every morning he demands that his pajamas and shoelaces be ironed, which they have to tie when he puts them on. Carlos III has to sleep with the windows open, he travels with his articulated bed, and his own toilet, and he forces his assistants to keep the shower temperature at exactly 20 degrees.

But, hobbies and privileges aside, Carlos III has a good brown ahead. This Monday the 20th century was buried and we are suddenly at the gates of 2023, in a context of maximum instability, and of course Great Britain is infected with this evil.

With four prime ministers in seven years and without a solid leader since Tony Blair, the most stable thing there now was the queen’s presence. In contrast, the acceptance rates of Carlos III (50-55% compared to 90% of his mother) are far from the deceased and below those of his own son. But, as we have seen, the leap in succession has been ruled out, an issue that was heard on more than one occasion. Today we know that this was never in the head of the Queen, aware that dynastic preservation is part of the essence of the Monarchy, as Don Juan de Borbón explained on her day. Isabel II did what she could to whiten her son and even Camilla, whom an excellent image operation has helped to raise whole. She was Isabel II who wanted her to be Queen consort, a privilege that the Duke of Edinburgh did not enjoy.

The mother of Carlos II was undoubtedly one of the best witnesses of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. Since she became Queen in 1952, Her Majesty has served 15 Prime Ministers, from Churchill to the possibilist, populist and changeable Liz Truss, and 170 prime ministers of the countries of the Community of Nations, so important to the queen, something incomprehensible to, for example Margaret Thatcher (with whom he did not get along at all), but essential to help the British digest that the greatest empire in the world had ceased to be. Now we will see which countries of the Commonwealth they go over to republicanism, and the rout has already begun in the British Caribbean (Barbados has already done so), in New Zealand they are considering it and a string of defections may arrive.

Internally, the queen helped British Labor understand that the Monarchy was compatible with socialism. Of her 15 prime ministers, eleven have been Conservatives and four Labor. Until 1964, the United Kingdom did not have a left-wing head of government, Harold Wilson.

Elizabeth II was never tainted with political issues. On the other hand, the secret letters of Charles of England to the Government of Tony Blair They show that the current Monarch meddled where his mother never wanted to. And if she did, it was not known. Elizabeth II since she was crowned she has visited more than one hundred countries. She had traveled the equivalent of 22 times around the world until she decided to stop traveling abroad, aged 89, in 2015. She was the first British monarch to visit China, or to speak before the US House of Representatives. And she met with 13 of the 14 US presidents elected during her reign, and with four popes. She shared the most dramatic moments of the British during World War II, she accompanied them in the postwar period, when they entered Europe and when they left after Brexit. Perhaps that is why millions of flowers have accompanied her in her last days on Earth.

But there won’t always be flowers on the gates of Buckingham, and if there are, the queen’s mourning sentiment won’t be enough to sustain the new king. The bills and coins with Isabel II will coexist with the new ones of Carlos III and the memory of the great sovereign will endure but it will not be enough to keep Carlos on the throne.

The pillar of stability Security and solidity that for seven decades has held firm even the most Republicans for seven decades, is no longer there. The gap that remains in British society and politics comes at a time when someone like Elizabeth II was most needed to maintain that stability, after Brexit, with the problem of the Northern Ireland border, the pandemic, the price electricity, with Scotland asking for a referendum in October 2023, with a war in Europe, with terrible economic uncertainty and with a newly arrived prime minister, and what is worse, with a conservative party that has gone over to populism, changing great statesmen for clowns, italianizando a country that was a model of stability.

In his own family, Carlos III also inherits many problems. The Monarch himself was splashed last June in a great controversy after the newspaper The Times published that he accepted a briefcase containing a million euros in cash from a Qatari billionaire sheikh, in addition to other payments. In total, Carlos received three million euros in cash for his Charitable Foundation from the Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jaber Al Thani, former Prime Minister of Qatar, in payments made between 2011 and 2015.

But the House of Windsor is also facing accusations of harry and meghan racism and the controversy of prince andrewwho was Elizabeth II’s favorite son, removed in January this year from the agenda and stripped of all military honors and treatment of His Royal Highness after a New York civil court judge rejected the arguments of the Duke of York, who had asked to file the lawsuit against Virginia Giuffre, who denounced him for having had sexual relations with her while still a minor, when she was exploited by a network controlled by the pederast Jeffrey Epstein. The out-of-court settlement forced Isabel II to pay (out of his pocket) 12 million pounds sterling, about 14 million euros, but Andrés has been marked for life and that bull will now have to be dealt with by his older brother.

Carlos III comes to the throne at the age of 73, with these problems but without the charisma of her mother, “one of the best queens of all time”, according to Felipe VI. She, without a doubt, was a figure of a fabulous extent, not only in her country but in the world. She consecrated her life to permanence, to continuity. Another thing is that her efforts to perpetuate her dynasty are enough to support the new King.

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