The King is known to love poetry and I’m sure he is familiar with the opening lines of William Wordsworth’s Ode To Intimations Of Immortality.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It’s a sad poem, and a great one, recounting how, even from childhood, we can recognise the fleeting nature of human life. Its elegiac tone feels particularly apt for today’s troubled Royal scene.
A deep and spiritually inclined thinker, it would be surprising indeed if Charles’s current enforced seclusion didn’t lead him to ponder at length not just his own future but that of the very monarchy he embodies.
On February 6 Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles had been diagnosed with a form of cancer
Many of the rest of us certainly are. I’m an optimist but the guarded messaging of palace medical bulletins is far from reassuring. While our hearts go out to the stricken monarch and with him our afflicted future Queen Catherine, our minds drift unwillingly to more practical concerns.
The crowning glory and enduring symbol of British nationhood doesn’t look quite so enduring at the moment and not, for a change, through any self-inflicted embarrassment.
Instead, it’s the great leveller, mortality itself that stalks the palace corridors.
The historian Hugo Vickers shared my view that the last years of Elizabeth II were the sunset of a golden era for the monarchy, one that began with empire and closed on a diminished but contented realm, a model to the world of stability, humanity and common sense.
At first the transition from her reign to this seemed uncannily smooth, a perception encouraged by pomp and circumstance that appeared virtually unchanged from Victorian times – theatrics designed for the Empress of India but still somehow soothingly in keeping with the Carolean age.
Now we have been uncomfortably reminded that the golden era is over.
That patina of continuity faces its first real test, unfairly soon you might argue. But fate and fairness only co-exist with a lot of luck.
The monarchy has been steadily drawing down its reserves of luck ever since the King and his first wife divorced; as his second wife presides over the Royal party at tomorrow’s Commonwealth Day Service, we can’t ignore the gaps in the ranks nor the question, how much luck do they have left?
Even if, God willing, the King is granted remission from his current cancer, its shadow will remain, psychologically if not physically.
Up and down the Royal food chain, from Canberra and Christchurch to Ottawa and Holyrood, consumers of every variety of Royal patronage will sniff a change in the wind and trace it back to Kensington Palace, where the Heir’s court (with every show of reluctance) will be beginning to think the unthinkable.
It’s called succession planning and I bet it just moved up a gear. This has always been the way with monarchs and their eldest offspring and this time will be no different.
And I speak as one who worked for eight years in the household of the prince who had to wait longer for the throne than any of them.
Remember, Royal dynasties ultimately have only two things they absolutely have to do, of which reproduce comes a distant second to the prime directive: at all costs, they must survive.
Prince William has delightfully fulfilled his reproductive obligation but now it’s safe to assume the continuation of the Royal project is looming larger in his concerns.
Looming almost as large, perhaps, as the climate crisis and hopes of Middle East peace – subjects on which he has recently spoken from the heart.
He also knows that his platform is provided by the goodwill of the British people, thanks to the accident of his birth into their ruling family.
The dangers of well-meaning Royal intervention in matters of public policy need regular emphasis.
On January 7 Kensington Palace announced that Princess Catherine had undergone a planned abdominal surgery which she has been in recovery from since
Our habit of projecting superior wisdom on to indulged Royal folk isn’t just irrational, it’s becoming dangerous, for them and us.
‘Smile and wave’ is still the safest policy for any ruling family dependent on the good nature of hard-pressed taxpayers, most of whom get all the lectures they want from politicians and bishops.
It probably riles advisers intent on making their Royal bosses ‘relevant’ but it’s the smiling, visibly compassionate and famously seldom heard Princess Catherine who is the family’s superstar.
Her absence from events such as the Windsor memorial service for King Constantine of Greece last month made that point very effectively.
The less photogenic Yorks somehow managed to appear front and centre in the accompanying pictures, starkly reminding us that the Royal Family no longer has the comfort of quality in depth.
It’s a reminder repeated every time Harry and Meghan insert themselves into the news cycle.
The visible bad blood between the Prince of Wales and his brother is a fracture in the spine of the monarchy.
Every day, it looks increasingly like a permanent rift.
Played out in social media campaigns, stealthy briefings and competitive compassion, it poisons the routine work of the institution and threatens its future happiness as much as any cancer.
How much nicer it would be to remember a time when the Royal Family, if not actually ‘apparelled in celestial light’ did at least fill the Buckingham Palace balcony with smiling faces and what looked like healthy and splendidly attired specimens of rude Windsor vitality.
It wasn’t that long ago. And yet, at the same time, it feels like a different age.
Back then, the abundance of Royal folk grinning down at us was widely seen (including by some on the balcony) as unsustainable, undesirable and unwise in our meritocratic, straitened post-imperial times.
Patrick Jephson believes that ‘the visible bad blood between the Prince of Wales and his brother is a fracture in the spine of the monarchy’
The King (as Prince of Wales) was sometimes praised for wanting to modernise, streamline and generally slim down the organisation of which he would eventually be head.
A few attempts were duly made to restrict the population of the balcony to just the top people but the effect was more egotistical than economical.
Now the Royal rose garden has been brutally pruned, not through a careful process of shrewd and measured rationalisation but arbitrarily by bad luck and bad judgment.
Now, perhaps to compensate, there’s talk of how effectively the Windsors can mingle with their people virtually. But that’s just whistling past the cemetery. As I learned with Princess Diana, enduring popularity can’t be skimped. It has to be earned, over years and in very unglamorous duty, consistently and authentically delivered.
This is a world unfamiliar to practitioners of digital wizardry.
A healthy monarchy needs more than classy websites and ever-expanding comms teams.
There really is no substitute for the magic of thousands of Royal handshakes and a sunny presence at hundreds of rainy factory openings and in struggling sink estates. And to do it properly, reliably and with conviction takes a fully staffed palace balcony.
The unfashionable reality is that modernisation through decimation for an institution that is supposed to define unchanging continuity is just flirting with suicide.
And, incidentally, as the numbers shrink and there’s no parallel reduction in splendid residences, people start to notice.
But we are where we are. The Royal Family may be too small to do all the tasks we ask of it while at the same time being too big to suit current tastes in hereditary institutions.
Either way, short of a revolution, we have no choice but to make the most of what we’ve got.
From their current medical issues both the King and Princess Catherine hopefully will emerge with public affection justifiably enhanced.
Suffering borne stoically is a universal virtue, reminding us that royalty or commoner, illness and ageing are just part of being human. So are difficult family relations. But they too must be encouraged to heal. Is folly or malice to blame for the Sussex schism?
Whatever, it’s hardly on a scale to match the treason of the King’s great uncle Edward VIII and even there, eventually, a degree of reconciliation was achieved.
‘God Save the King’ will no doubt be sung with extra feeling in tomorrow’s Commonwealth Day Service. We could yet look back on this season of Royal infirmity as a turning point. Charles may have long or short to reign over us but, however long he is given, a restored ruling house would be a precious legacy for his sons and his people.
Royalty is a very human business, after all, so the remedy will likely be found far from the public eye, in humility, honesty and painful compromise.
In King Charles, history may have given us just the man to do it.
Patrick Jephson was equerry and private secretary to HRH The Princess of Wales 1988-96