Monarchy as Public Awareness Campagin

Or, The Sickness of King Charles

By a fateful coincidence, last weekend I watched a film about a sickly monarch.

It was, of course, The Madness of King George—the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s masterful play depicting George III’s bout of madness. This caused the Regency Crisis of 1788-89, when parliament was in disarray over the Head of State’s inability to rule and the unprecedented question of whether or not to make his son, the future George IV, Regent.

Just a few days after my viewing, it was announced that our current monarch, King Charles III (great-great-great-great-great grandson of George III), has been diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer.

No constitutional crisis yet, though. The King is resting at Sandringham. The Prince of Wales and Princess Royal have been in action in state duties. The King will continue his weekly meeting with the Prime Minister as Head of State. The machinery of government has continued to move along. And, were His Majesty to become as mentally indisposed as his ancestor became a couple of centuries ago, one suspects that it would be a rather less dramatic affair. (A mentally incapable Head of State seems to be an American problem these days).

And yet. It is worth pondering the differences between The Madness of King George and the sickness of King Charles.

In the penultimate scene of Bennett’s play, once the King has recovered his wits, all the servants who have witnessed his madness are dismissed. Greville, the King’s equerry (himself one of the dismissed), tells the servants “Forget what you have seen. Majesty in its small clothes. Wipe it from your memory.”

We can understand the thought. Even with the regicide of Charles I a century and half behind them, those few who saw the indecency of George III’s condition were shaken. It is a mistake to think the post-Civil War monarchy held no mysticism for people—that is precisely why they couldn’t do without it.

And this mysticism persisted even into the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. If she ever had any health problems, we never knew about them. It was only after she died that royal expert Gyles Brandreth revealed that she apparently suffered from bone marrow cancer in her final days. No official source has ever confirmed this, however—her death certificate simply gives her cause of death as “old age”. 

Yet, within the last couple of months, the King has made public two health problems: first, his short stint in hospital to treat a benign enlarged prostate, and now his cancer diagnosis. His “openness” has been lauded by the likes of Stephen Fry as being good for the country—a supposedly positive sign of a modernising monarchy. After the Palace announced the King’s prostate problems, the NHS website’s page on “prostate enlargement” received eleven times its normal amount of traffic.

Of course, we should be thankful if, as a result of these headlines, people whose illnesses would have otherwise gone unnoticed end up receiving life-saving treatment. Yet we seem to have inverted Greville’s advice. The wisdom now is “Remember what you have seen. Majesty in its small clothes. Keep it in your memory.”

Of course, we have not seen the King in the indignity to which George III’s servants were privy. My suspicion is that the King is suffering from testicular cancer, and that, even though last month the Palace was happy to talk about what was going on up the King’s backside, they are not yet happy to discuss his testicles in public. And yet the contrast between the King and his ancestor George, and even with his late mother, remains a stark one.

Under our new monarch, we are witnessing the inevitable slide of monarchy into little more than a public awareness campaign.