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Britain's crisis of succession: Charles and the story behind

the royal wedding

If you wanted to choose a time and place when the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton

transformed itself from mere nuptials into the signature tactic in a full-scale crisis of succession,it was Nov. 2, 2009, in the seaside town of Cupids, Nfld.

Williams father, Prince Charles, and his stepmother, Camilla Parker-Bowles, launched theirmuch-heralded Canadian tour with an inaugural appearance in this town, a short drive from St.Johns, that managed to attract a crowd of exactly 57 people. The last time Charles had gone toNewfoundland, with Williams mother, Diana, in 1983, it had been standing room only. This

time, fewer than one-10th of local residents bothered to show up, and almost no one travelled tosee Canadas future head of state.

The rest of the visit was a tableau of angry protesters, riot police, empty bleachers and public

indifferencea shocking reaction from a country whose people are generally the mostfavourable to the monarchy of any major Commonwealth country.

Ten weeks later, a bold experiment was attempted, initiated by a secretive committee within theHouse of Windsor. Prince William, the untested grandson, was sent as a substitute for the Queenon a late 2009 tour of Australia and New Zealand, where as much as 60 per cent of thepopulation favoured an elected president in place of the monarchy.

The result was stunning: Thousands of people attended his every appearance, and he seemed towin over skeptical Antipodeans with his informal calm.

British papers, and even some parliamentarians, began to discuss openly something that only hadbeen whispered before: the possibility, constitutionally feasible but rare in practice, of skippingCharles and passing the line of succession to William. Behind this speculation lay a mountingfear that Charless tenure on the throne could ruin the institution unless something dramatic were

done.

The Windsors committee, the Way Ahead Group, was launched in 1994 by the Lord

Chamberlain, the Earl of Airlie, and it includes the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and theirprivate secretaries, as well as Princess Anne and Princes Andrew and Edward.

Its mandate revolves around constitutional issues surrounding the monarchy, such as the question

of royal marriages to Roman Catholics or the end of precedence for male heirs (both, ultimately,parliamentary subjects), says Katie Nicholl, a London-based Royal Family expert with contactswithin the committee.

But increasingly, she says, it has become obsessed with the larger question of the monarchyssurvival after Elizabeth IIs death.

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And by the end of 2009, Charles was becoming a serious threat to that future: Even as he wastouring Canada, the London media were revealing that in the previous decade he had become acompulsively outspoken political actor, lobbying more than a dozen British cabinet ministers,including the Prime Minister, with his infamous black-spider letters so-called because of hisdistinctive penmanship and his persistenceat least fortnightly, demanding meetings and

seeking changes to legislation.

His role as a political lobbyist and owner of a $50-million-a-year business empire was eclipsinghis role as a future monarch. And there was increasing evidence that he intended to maintain andeven amplify it.

We cant underestimate Charless belief in himself, said Graham Smith, the head of the anti-monarchist group Republic. He has a genuine messianic complex. Hes been on a lifelong

mission to reshape the country in his image. In this, Mr. Smith says, the republican cause hasreceived its brightest gift: a potential monarch who doesnt shake hands and fade into the

background, one who gets in the way.

When the Way Ahead Group met in the summer of 2009, chaired by Prince Philip, the corequestion was how to prevent the monarchy from fading into irrelevance or distrust, and keep itrevered and respected in the eyes of a new generation. Charles, according to witnesses, dismissedthis talk as impertinent, and tried to steer the agenda, as he generally does at such meetings,

into ecological politics.

But by years end it was apparent to everyone except perhaps Charlesthat the monarchy wasfacing a larger threat, from a hostile Parliament and an indifferent public, after the Queens

demise, unless its elite was able to shift the playing field by doing something dramatic. And then,in the late months of 2010, something dramatic materializedor, rather, something pleasantly

ordinary, involving a grandson and a pretty girl, that could be engineered into something more.

One wedding and one funeral

William had asked his family that his marriage to Kate be a humble and low-key event. But thatrequest was vehemently overruled by his grandmother and her committee. Indeed, the event thatmost royal watchers had expected to be the monarchys big splash, the Queens 2012 DiamondJubilee, was scaled down to what one commentator called a low-key, village-fete-and-street-party affair, while the grandchilds wedding was upgraded to a shower of opulence on a scale

not seen since Elizabeths coronation in 1953.

The hope is that this great blast of royal love will be sharply etched in the publics memory, for a

decade or more, as the matter of succession becomes uglier.

Behind it all, of course, lies another royal event that is the subject of intensive planning andanxiety in Londonthe eventual death of Elizabeth II.

She is 85, her mother lived to be 101 and the Queen is in good health, so the worries arent

imminent. But her funeral is not only fully planned out, but regularly rehearsed. On a secluded

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military airfield just outside London, as journalist John Arlidge discovered last year, soldierspractise carrying the royal coffin. A Royal Air Force jet is on permanent standby, at ready for herserious illness or death. The 710-year-old Throne of State, used only for coronations, wasrecently refurbished at a cost of $157,000, in case of a sudden change of Crown.

The Queen herself, reportedly obsessed with the matter, recently switched funeral-planning firmsto Leverton & Sons from the venerable Kenyons because the latter had been purchased by theFrench government.

The wedding and the funeraltwo events, possibly many years apart, that have become tightlyintertwined in the minds of the Queen and her backers: Together, they are meant to formspectacular parentheses around that far-less-encouraging event, the coronation of King CharlesIII.

From Victorian mystique to black-spider letters

A princely marriage, the great Victorian constitutional thinker Walter Bagehot wrote, is thebrilliant edition of a universal fact, and as such, it rivets mankind. Just so, a royal familysweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events. He was speaking of just

the sort of pomp we will witness on Friday.

Indeed, he was explaining its precise political purpose, which he argued helps to justify aconstitutional monarchy, despite its flaws: By creating an air of mystery and remove, it can keeppoliticians and public focused on the state and its laws, not hierarchy and power, unlike a systemwith an elected or Parliament-appoin-

ted head of state. A constitutional monarchy has a comprehensible element the king or queen

for the vacant many, as well as complex laws and notions for the inquiring few.

For this division between the efficient state and the dignified Crown to work as aconstitutional whole, Bagehot added, the monarch must be a person capable of maintaining thatmystiqueelse the entire system cannot work: He should not be brought too closely to realmeasurement, he wrote. He should be aloof and solitary.

The Crown, in fact, seems to order, but it never seems to struggle. It is commonly hidden like a

mystery, and sometimes paraded like a pageant, but in neither case is it contentious. The nationis divided into parties, but the Crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from business is thatwhich removes it from both enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which

enables it to combine the affection of conflicting partiesto be a visible symbol of unity to thosestill so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.

Those words, everyone agrees, describe Queen Elizabeth II perfectly. She has remained aloof,been of no party, separated herself from business, avoided contentionin short, she haspreserved the mystery. She is the embodiment of Bagehots political ideal, and has reigned forsuch a long time that we came to assume this was the natural and easily reproducible character ofa constitutional monarch.

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And then came Charles.

The heir to the throne has spent the past decade transforming himself from the morose face ofregal indifference into a powerful businessman, outspoken political activist and aggressivelobbyist. The black spider letters and meetings with ministers are only the beginning. Laws

that have apparently angered him into action, according to official records, have involved health,education, the national budget, foreign policy and the military; for a lengthy period, he attemptedto have the Labour government abolish or radically reduce the powers of its 2000 Human RightsAct.

Much of his anger seems to be directed at legislation directly related to his military regiment orhis $50-million business empire, which includes nationally marketed and distributed lines offood, alternative medicines and housing developments.

His business activism came to a head a year ago, when he used his lobbying might to stop theredevelopment of the Chelsea Barracks in west London into an architecturally acclaimed housing

project (Charles is the owner of a housing charity that builds projects in more conservativestyles). Specifically, he got on the phone to the Qatari royal family, who owned the site, andtalked them into cancelling the project just as construction was beginning. It has emerged that hehas intervened in at least four other major London projects by acclaimed architects, successfullystopping at least one.

This history of activism was enough for some observers, including members of government, tosuggest that Charles had become unsuitable for the succession.

Sovereign sabotage

Insofar as the constitution defines any duties, there is a clear duty to stay away from areas ofpolitical controversy, Lord Lester QC, then a constitutional adviser to the British government,

told The Guardian newspaper at the time. It is not the constitutional function of members of theRoyal Family to seek to take advantage of their public position to influence planning or otherdecisions affecting private rights and the public interest.

Others suggested that it was not so serious, because Charles surely would step away from hisfinancial and political obsessions once the crown had been placed upon his head. But he himselfsays his political intervention is not something he really can moderate or reduce, because it is inhis nature.

Last year, he told Vanity Fair magazine that he is driven by annoyance to get involved inpolitics: I dont know why I mind so much. But I always have done. So I can only assume itssomething thats sort of inherent.

As if to prove it, last year Charles published, to surprisingly little public notice, his personalpolitical manifesto, under the titleHarmony. Perhaps because it was attractively packaged withmany photos, few noticed the future kings urgent message.

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This is a call to revolution, Charles begins, adding: Revolution is a strong word and I use it

deliberately. He calls it a revolution in right action and right thinking, a return to spiritual

faith and a way of life founded in nature rather than in science. He launches a lengthy attack onmost of the ideas of the Enlightenment and all of what he describes as the deliberate demolition

job carried out on traditional culture by what became known as modernism in the 20th century

not just in architecture and art, but in the entire edifice of thought of our age.

His is a fascinating sort of agrarian arch-conservatism that leads him to detest, and seek toreverse, much of the past two centuries of history.

While Charless ideas about politics, urbanization and aesthetics alarm many liberals, he alsoholds ideas that offend many traditional Tory supporters of the monarchy: He is an ardentbeliever in radical ecology, not just in his commendable awareness of global warming but in hisoutspoken support of such thinkers as Wendell Berry, who advocate a turn away fromtechnology and economic growth.

A deeply religious man, Charles is also a great defender of Islam; he uses his School ofTraditional Arts in East London to promote the living traditions of Islamic art, architecture andcraftsmanship, as well as those of other great religions and cultures.

Scientists and doctors have been horrified by Charless lavish advocacy of pseudo-medicalpractices such as homeopathy and aromatherapy as alternatives to medicine. Many remedies withno proven medical or scientific value are part of the Prince of Waless business empire: HisDuchy Originals firm makes herbal and homeopathic supplements, and has persuaded the Bootspharmacy chain to carry them in all its stores.

It also extends to his political advocacy: His Foundation for Integrated Health successfully

lobbied the Northern Ireland government to introduce remedies such as homeopathy andaromatherapy for the treatment of such serious ailments as musculoskeletal problems,depression, stress and anxiety.

Whether you happen to enjoy or abhor any of Charless ideas (and those who embrace all of

them are a small community), the important message ofHarmony is that he considers them hiscalling. His ideology is not just a personal faith but a mission, and he intends to use all hisresources to make it everyones ideology, not just in Britain but throughout the Commonwealth:

This will involve our taking all sorts of dramatic steps to change the way we consider the world

and act in it, he writes, but I believe we have the capacity to take these steps.

It is a job description that happens to collide violently, in numerous unpredictable ways, with theone he has been waiting his whole life to carry out. While it remains to be seen how Charlesintends to reconcile political activist, supermarket entrepreneur and radical philosopher with thealoof mystique of constitutional monarch, his extended family and their political supporters arenot taking any chances: Fridays wedding is a bright flash of light intended to keep eyes awayfrom the larger problem.

Could the father be eclipsed by the son?

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But if Fridays spectacle is a vastly expensive experiment in image management, it also happens

to be a highly risky one. Its aftermaththe crucial months afterward when William takes thepublic stage as figure recognized around the world, perhaps more than his fatherwill bewatched with careful attention by the other members of the Way Ahead Group, the Britishgovernment and the leaders of the Commonwealth states.

The worry is not that the wedding wont succeed. It is that it may prove to be all too successful.

What if it draws attention to what is not being said aloud? What if it reveals William to be aplausible constitutional monarch but his father as something else entirely?

There have been several historic cases where the will of the people, or Parliament, has overruledthe official line of royal succession. The most dramatic was when the heir to the throne, James,Duke of York, was enormously unpopular for his political and religious interference (he was aRoman Catholic) and was subject to three parliamentary exclusion bills, from 1679 to 1681, allof them designed to skip a generation.

The public preferred a young, charismatic prince who had risen to popular attention: The Dukeof Monmouth, son of Charles II, the heirs brother. Parliament preferred Mary II. The result wasa decade-long dynastic and political battle, the Glorious Revolution and the establishment ofmodern parliamentary control of royal succession. The exclusion bills were largely a failurebecause Scotland, which James also ruled, had different opinions.

There would be a similar issue today with changing the succession, says Tim Harris, a

historian at Brown University who specializes in the Stuart succession crises. We now have aUnited Kingdom, but we also have the Commonwealth, and so the whole of the Commonwealthwould have to agree.

But perhaps a more useful example occurred in 1936, when the British public and Parliamentbecame convinced that the personal interests of the chosen heir, Edward VIII, had got in the wayof his job as monarch. In this case, those interests were not political but romantic, but the resultwas the same: Parliament persuaded the king, against his will, to step down and hand the crownto a more popular young prince, his brother, George VI. When the people want the monarchy tomove along, it usually does.

This time around, the British people have been clear in their response. On the day William andKate announced their engagement last year, 64 per cent of Britons told pollsters they wantedWilliam to succeed Elizabeth, skipping a generation; fewer than 20 per cent said they wantedCharles to be the next king. Those numbers have narrowed only slightly, with 59 per cent tellingThe Daily Telegraphs pollsters last week they wanted the monarchy to skip a generation. The

wedding could well make this view even more popular.

Commonwealth complications

However, it is not simply a matter of British opinion: The Queen is the head of state in 15countries, and the head of the 54-member Commonwealth. To shuffle Charles out of the deckwould be a difficult operation: It is a decision that could be made only by the parliaments of the

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countries where he would be king. And if they were willing to change the monarchy from one ofhereditary succession to one of parliamentarily chosen succession, how far would that be from anelected head of state?

The House of Windsor is gambling that parliaments will see it this way, and will endure Charles

if the more stable and appealing William seems hard on his heels.

Fridays wedding is a crucial volley in this campaign, but it does not obscure the fact that

Charles could alienate large parts of the realm. Australias Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, hasalready said she would support having her country become a republic after the Queens death.

An embarrassing or unlikeable monarch could quickly disillusion Canadians as well, and ifpublic opinion could be transformed in monarchy-loving Canada, then anything, anywhere in theCommonwealth, might be possible (although such structural change would be dauntinglycomplex).

How much will Canadians endure Charles now that the more appealing promise of William hasbeen so tantalizingly dangled? We may start to learn the answer this summer, when it will beWilliams turn to visit Canada, this time with his photogenic bride.

If he sets foot on the shores of Newfoundland and attracts an audience not in the dozens but inthe thousands, will that be read as a vote against his father? Or it could be a vote, as hisgrandmother may well hope, for a historic bait and switch: an era during which a prince is in ourhearts and a king, otherwise ignored, is on our money.

Doug Saunders is a London-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.

Charles has not really had a good press. He has not only been promoting organic food stuffs and

sustainable farming for decades, even before it became a popular political soundbite, but he also pours

a lot of investment into The Prince's Trust which helps disadvantaged inner city children. Having met

him, he's actually a really nice guy. A lot of people think that because of his background and his accent,

that it's okay to knock him. That actually says more about your standards than his.

The chances of a republic in the UK are about zero percent. The chances of Canada becoming a republic

probably more like 60%. Now, given the current regime and its predilection for stuffing crooked senators

into office as well as bullying/lying their way through parliament ... you take away the last 'safety valve' ,

the G.G. who effectively represents the monarchy ... and you'll have some banana to go with your

republic.

The Yanks have been a republic for far longer, see how they go all gooey eyed over royalty. Other mans

grass is always greener.