What will Charles do now?

BEING A MONARCH is an odd job. A king does not apply for his position or interview for it; he may be entirely unsuited to it; he may not want it. King Charles III has not always sounded enthusiastic about the role that he has now assumed. The realisation that you are to be king, he once said, is “something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense”. As with any job, it is hard to know whether the new incumbent will thrive. Princess Diana once suggested not: she said Charles would find being king “suffocating”.

Precisely what the new job is that Charles has begun is unclear, however. Royal roles are often strikingly ill-defined. When Prince Philip became consort he asked courtiers what he should do with himself, to little avail. The queen battled the same uncertainty. When she, while in Kenya, found herself monarch at the age of 25, she asked: “What’s going to happen when we get home?” Edward VIII, Charles’s great-uncle, who reigned for less than a year before abdicating, described the feeling after his father’s funeral as the “uneasy sensation of being left alone on a vast stage”. Accessions are so nerve-wracking for states that British law once pretended they did not happen. “The King never dies,” as the old legal maxim had it. Rex nunquam moritur. One monarch breathes out; another breathes in.