Just as Queen Elizabeth II always did, King Charles will spend his Accession Day privately with a trip to church for prayers and reflection, on what is also the second anniversary of his mother’s death.
It is a day of contemplation. And even more so when you consider the year the royals have had and the questions over what’s to come for the rest of 2024.
The second year of the Carolean era should have been one of opportunity.
The palace like to do these things subtly, but with the coronation done, the diary was clearer for the new monarch to really start to show what he wants to achieve through his reign.
Instead it was a year where his very ordinary physical frailties have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds, not his credentials as a relatively new head of state, as he wanted us to know he too had fallen victim to the indiscriminate nature of cancer.
The palace won’t say how much of his diary had to be changed, or cancelled, I simply got a wry response that “logistically it’s been difficult”.
And that’s not surprising when you have a man like King Charles, whose own wife, Queen Camilla, publicly calls a workaholic.
One person who knows him well told me it was “inconceivable that he’d just be laying in bed with a book” when doctors advised him to stop public engagements following his diagnosis.
“The household would have paid for it,” they said, as behind the scenes he would have had more time to ponder and tell them the things he wanted them to act on.
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I was told there was a sense of frustration from him when he was initially told that he was unable to do the public engagements he thrives off.
But then, while mindful of not contradicting or going against the advice of his doctors, he soon got used to how his treatment plan was affecting him on a weekly basis and in essence worked out how he could get back to doing more visits.
“He got his mojo back and more,” was how it was described to me.
Very soon the palace will reveal details of what I’m told is a “packed schedule” for the upcoming royal tour to Australia and Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.
A tour which some doubted he would be well enough to carry out, but another display of his determination to keep going, in no small part helped by how he has felt significantly “buoyed up” by the public’s caring response to his diagnosis and his decision to be so open about it.
The King with his mother in 2009. Pic: PA
It has not been a wasted 12 months, some would say we’ve seen more of him than we anticipated earlier in the year.
There were overseas trips at the end of 2023, he spoke at COP28 and most recently he held a gathering at St James’s Palace with young people and the prime minister to talk about knife crime.
He hasn’t totally abandoned his charities that he established as heir, and he has still been able to show his commitment to the four Cs that remain the core pillars of his philanthropic work – community, commonwealth, climate and culture.
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Inevitably a fifth C, cancer, has also loomed large and will continue to be an area where he will personally want to shine a light.
His treatment is still ongoing but inside the palace they believe the King “has found opportunity from setbacks”; while his wings may have been clipped temporarily, as he enters the third year of his reign those who have worked with him insist “his commitment to serve the public will always be paramount” whatever personal challenges he continues to face.
Source Agencies
