Charles III of the United Kingdom
Charles III became king of the United Kingdom in September 2022 at seventy-three, after the longest wait of any heir in British history. Born in London in 1948, the eldest child of Elizabeth II, he was created Prince of Wales at nine and invested in 1969, and was the first heir to the throne to be sent to school rather than tutored — Cheam, then Gordonstoun in Scotland, which he disliked intensely — and the first to take a university degree, in archaeology, anthropology and history at Cambridge. He served in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, qualifying as a helicopter pilot and commanding a minehunter. He spent five decades using the position for causes that were unfashionable when he adopted them. He founded the Prince's Trust in 1976, which has assisted around a million disadvantaged young people; he attacked modernist architecture in 1984, calling a proposed National Gallery extension a monstrous carbuncle, and built the model town of Poundbury; and he argued for organic farming, against plastics and for action on climate change from the 1970s, positions that moved from eccentricity to consensus. His memos to ministers, published after a legal fight in 2015, showed him lobbying on those subjects. His marriage to Diana Spencer in 1981 and its collapse, her interviews and her death in 1997 dominated public perception of him for two decades. He married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. He acceded on his mother's death, was crowned in May 2023 in a shortened ceremony, and announced a cancer diagnosis in February 2024. He is the oldest person ever to accede to the British throne.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: king, head_of_state
