After the death Queen Elizabeth on Thursday afternoon, her son Charles has ascended the throne as King of England He will be addressed as King Charles 3..
Already, the new Prime Minister of England, Liz Truss was said to have referred to him as King Charles 3.
The queen died Thursday, at Balmoral, a royal estate in Scotland. She was 96 years old.
King Charles coronation — the crowning ceremony for the new sovereign — won’t happen for a number of months, but his status as king is already set.
As king, Charles is also Britain’s head of state, as well as the head of state for other countries in the “Commonwealth Realm” who still recognize the monarch, including Australia, Canada, and the Bahamas.
In 2018, the queen also named Charles the head of the Commonwealth of Nations, which is the United Kingdom plus a group of 53 countries that have cultural or political ties to it, including as part of its former empire.
Charles is the longest serving heir-apparent. Though Charles has taken on more royal duties in recent months, it does not change the momentousness of this succession.
“There will be moments of uncertainty, and those uncertain moments will be in every field where the monarch has a position,” said Onyeka Nubia, a historian at the University of Nottingham.
“There will be uncertainty politically, uncertainty perhaps culturally, perhaps uncertainty socially.”
And Charles will begin his reign at an uncertain time for Great Britain, and the world. The United Kingdom has left the European Union, and is trying to establish its position in the world in the aftermath of Brexit. Brexit is testing the unity of the kingdom itself, just as a new prime minister, Truss, has stepped into office amid inflation and energy crises and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The British monarchy has always been a tool of soft power, both within the country and without. Charles, after waiting 70 years in the wings, is likely to have his own views on how he can use his soft power and influence.
His public record may offer some clues as to how he will rule, but so might the institution of the monarchy itself.
“The reason the monarchy has survived is by constantly searching out new roles for itself,” said Ed Owens, a historian of the modern British monarchy.
And this, according to analysts, may be the guiding principle for the new king: making sure the monarchy survives.
Prince Charles, the “environmentalist king-in-waiting”
Charles’s succession is considered monumental, in part because it took so long for it to happen.
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