Charles Windsor is to be thought of as a pitiable man. As he indicated in his inaugural speech, he lost his last freedoms when he ascended the throne. The activist prince, who was already campaigning for green agriculture when it was still considered slightly eccentric, has to be known as King Charles III. bridle his tongue and put on a good face to any evil game that “his” government devises.
Two small incidents on the edge of the enthronement made it clear that self-restraint will be difficult for him. Once Charles motioned impatiently for a servant to move an inkwell; another time he scolded a spilled writing implement: “Stupid fountain pen!”
The outrage at this “arrogance” was great. Millions of housewives would probably treat their cleaning lady much worse if every manager had found completely different words for a defective fountain pen. Charles, however, should be a model of bourgeois restraint and not show any aristocratic airs. Too bad actually.
The royal family as a bourgeois model was invented by Queen Victoria. Before her, kings and queens, along with the aristocracy, believed that bourgeois morality was for—well—citizens. Of course you kept mistresses, women kept lovers. “Honi soit qui mal y pense” is the motto of the exclusive Order of the Garter – not, as they say in this country: “Order of the Garter” – to this day. So: dishonor be whoever thinks evil of it.
The last Charles to inherit the throne, Charles II, had countless mistresses and illegitimate children. When he was introduced to his bride-to-be who asked for some tea, he replied: ‘We don’t drink tea in England. How about some beer?” Of course, alcohol didn’t help either: Charles could not sire an heir to the throne with Catherine of Braganza.
His predecessor Charles I – father of the “merry monarch” Charles II – was beheaded by fierce Puritans and established a decidedly unmerry moral dictatorship. One wonders what Elizabeth II was thinking when she gave her first son that name.
In any case, Charles wanted to do him justice: “Am I to be the first Prince of Wales who has no mistress?” he scolded when his fiancée Diana took offense at his relationship with Camilla. Admittedly, he couldn’t do anything against the Victorian prudery. As early as 1858, Friedrich Engels complained in a letter to Karl Marx that “this most bourgeois of all nations” wanted “to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie”.
In real life, the greats of show business have long been the aristocrats of the country, they buy country estates and riding horses and cultivate the traditional aristocratic morality; sex, drugs