There is some reason to doubt, however, whether such loyalty will persist once the Queen’s son, now sixty-eight years old, ascends the throne. Last year, to honor her ninetieth birthday, legions of British townspeople and villagers turned out to paint walls and pick up litter, in a national effort known as “Clean for the Queen.” But, almost twenty years later, roughly three-quarters of Britons believe that the country would be “worse off without” the Royal Family, and Queen Elizabeth II, who recently beat out Queen Victoria to become the longest-reigning monarch in British history, continues to command something approaching feudal deference. In the wake of Princess Diana’s death in 1997, when the reputation of the Windsors was said to have reached its nadir, the Scottish writer Tom Nairn sensed that the crowds of mourners lining the Mall had “gathered to witness auguries of a coming time” when Britain would at last be freed from “the mouldering waxworks” ensconced in Buckingham Palace. Despite successive royal scandals and crises, support for the monarchy has remained robust. The threat of a Jacobin-style insurgency in modern Britain would seem, on the face of it, rather remote. In order to minimize the potential for such rabble-rousing, they propose to speed things up as much as decorum will allow: in contrast to the stately sixteen-month pause that elapsed between the death of King George VI, in February, 1952, and the anointing of the Queen, in June, 1953, King Charles III will be whisked to Westminster Abbey no later than three months after his mother’s demise. One of their chief concerns, apparently, is that republicans may try to use the interval between the death of the old monarch and the coronation of the new one to whip up anti-royal sentiment. Illustration by Floc’hįor at least a decade, senior aides at Buckingham Palace have been quietly finessing arrangements for the moment when the Queen dies and her son Prince Charles becomes sovereign. Charles has become unpopular trying to carve out a role while waiting longer to reign than any previous Prince of Wales.

Far off things arthur machen