King Charles Has Done What Others Never Did
The most surprising thing about the disclosure that King Charles III has been diagnosed with cancer after less than two years on the throne is the fact that it has been disclosed at all.
Cancer is common; candor about the British royal family’s health, not so much. Over the centuries, like many royal families, it has gone to great lengths to hide the condition of the sovereign’s body. Charles’s honesty, as far as it goes, seems to be a sign of his desire to be a different kind of monarch.
A ruling monarch has always been the embodiment of the state, a living metaphor of its health. Just look at Hans Holbein’s 1537 portrait of Henry VIII, a robust giant bestriding the world at the peak of his powers. Healthy king, healthy country. It works in reverse, too. Shakespeare — never above a little Tudor propagandizing — turned Richard III, the king from whom Henry’s father grabbed the throne in 1485, into someone with a hunchback, a man so ugly that dogs barked when he passed. Examination of Richard’s body, discovered in ruins under a car park in the English city of Leicester in 2012, showed he simply had scoliosis.
When your body is the state, how do you speak of its inevitable weaknesses and frailties? Historically, you did not. Four hundred years after the Tudors, in 1859, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, was born with a withered arm (and probably some brain damage) as a result of a complicated delivery. Desperate attempts were made to make the limb work. At the age of 4, as his mother wept, he was regularly strapped into a machine to try to stretch the muscles. Nothing worked. Wilhelm grew up to be anxious and resentful, though ironically he adapted very well to having only one functioning arm.
Wilhelm’s cousin, Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia, went to extreme lengths to hide the hemophilia of his son and heir, Alexei, and refused to explain the presence of the notorious faith healer Rasputin.
Such suppressions almost always came at personal, emotional and political costs. The source of Alexei’s hemophilia gene is believed to be none other than King Charles’s greatgreat-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Victoria passed the gene on to her son Leopold, who died at 30 in 1884, after suffering a brain hemorrhage after a fall, and to two of her daughters. As a result of Victoria’s energetic royal matchmaking, the gene passed into the royal family of Russia, through her granddaughter Czarina Alexandra, and some of the royal families of Germany, through her daughter Alice. After the queen’s death it passed into the Spanish royal family, through her granddaughter Victoria Eugenie, known as Ena, who married King Alfonso XIII in 1906. Her husband’s discovery that she was a carrier helped to destroy their marriage, and her oldest and youngest sons would both die young of bleeding after minor car accidents.
Victoria may also have been a carrier of porphyria, the illness to which some historians have attributed George III’s madness and which produces physical symptoms including agonizing abdominal pain, skin rashes and purple urine. The queen’s eldest daughter (also named Victoria, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II) may have had porphyria, too; DNA testing on the exhumed body of her daughter, Charlotte, found a gene mutation related to the disease.
That both illnesses may well have run in the British royal family were closely guarded secrets at the time, and the question has still never been publicly acknowledged by the monarchy.
One might have expected that as the British royal family became a ceremonial institution without power, it would become more open. In fact, the opposite was true. If appearance is the only power you have, appearance matters very much. Just before midnight on January 20, 1936, the royal doctor Bertrand Dawson injected George V’s “distended jugular vein” with a cocktail containing enough morphine and cocaine to kill him at least twice. Lord Dawson gave the ailing king a comfortable exit, but just as important, guaranteed his death would be reported in the reputable morning papers, rather than in the “less appropriate evening journals.” The story finally came out 50 years later in 1986, not via the royal family but through Lord Dawson’s biographer.
George VI, the current monarch’s grandfather, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and had undergone the removal of his whole left lung by the time he died. Nonetheless, the cause of his death was reported as coronary thrombosis, a disease with less social stigma than the cancer that claimed him. According to a recent biographer of Queen Elizabeth II (Gyles Brandreth, a close friend of her husband’s), even her stated cause of death — “old age” — was a euphemism for multiple myeloma, a kind of bone-marrow cancer.
So there has been widespread sympathy and praise for King Charles’s honesty. “His Majesty has chosen to share his diagnosis,” the official statement explained, “to prevent speculation and in the hope it may assist public understanding for all those around the world who are affected by cancer.”
It was, however, arguably the minimum amount of disclosure that the king could get away with, given that any withdrawal from public duties would be noticed. Moreover, it did not specify which cancer he has or how advanced it is. As Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, wrote, the king might “be either right as rain or dead in a few weeks.”
That said, it is probably asking too much to expect full candor from any head of state. American presidents are just as prone to keep their medical information to themselves: Franklin Roosevelt hid the effects of his polio; John Kennedy’s perma-tan distracted the world from his Addison’s disease. A president’s physical and mental condition has a tangible effect on both American politics and those of the rest of the world. There will continue to be intense speculation about this question for the septuagenarian and octogenarian candidates in the coming U.S. presidential election, but no one expects either of them to tell the full truth.
The King’s illness is unwelcome news. But at least British citizens can take comfort in the fact that the monarchy is a ceremonial institution with a clear line of succession.
Leaders often go to great lengths to keep their health secret.