Robert Hardman is no stranger to royal biography, having already penned quite a handful about Elizabeth II in the last decade or so of her life, including Queen of Our Times which came out in March 2022 as part of her Platinum Jubilee season and then in December of the same year was released again in a “commemorative edition” to update for the fact that she’d died. Now he moves into the present reign with a biography of her eldest son. I am a little confused about the title of this one as the British publication is called “Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story”¹ but on Google Books I can see that the United States version is called “The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy”. I suspect the titles must be written this way for SEO purposes, or perhaps he just couldn’t decide which description he wanted so used all of them at once. It must be quite a fraught process to come up with a distinctive and meaningful name for a biography when you know that lots of other biographies will be documenting the same person and all competing to emerge in future history as the one definitive authority thereon. Most likely in the long run the general public (maybe academics too) will discard the pretentious subtitle and just remember it as “[AUTHOR] on [SUBJECT]” (e.g. “Jenkins on Churchill”) instead.

Hardman’s lengthy volume covers the first year of the New Carolean era. As one might expect, this period in royal history was particularly dominated by two big ceremonial events: His mother’s funeral and his own coronation. In the book, the funeral (as well as the period of Operation London Bridge leading up to it) takes up chapters 3, 4 and 5 while the planning and execution of the coronation takes 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. That makes for nine chapters out of a total of eighteen across the whole book. The coronation section in particular is loaded with dense historical comparisons, detailing not just the crowning of Charles III but also quite a lot about those of George VI an Elizabeth II. A less charitable reader may accuse Hardman of padding here, though doubtless a lot of the innovations (and omissions) of 2023 cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of what came before. Anyone buying this book at first printing will, doubtless, have already watched the public side of these events on television as they were happening, so the real value of these chapters is in reading the personal accounts of the people involved as to what went on behind the scenes, such as the aide who spontaneously hugged Princess Anne to console her in her grief, the brigadier getting a summons back to London while giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding in Corfu, the Duke of Norfolk getting his GCVO investiture in a rush so he could wear his sash in the procession or the royal pages being packed off into a side room with some video games. It is worth mentioning as well that Hardman directed a BBC documentary about the coronation and some other aspects of royal life that year which aired at Christmas and can be seen in some ways as the prelude to this book.

The other chapters are about the personalities of Charles & Camilla, the looming political challenges for the institution of the crown and some of the other projects in which the sovereign couple have engaged themselves (such as the Prince’s Trust/Charity/Foundation organisations which now all have to be renamed). The running thread is the process of establishing Charles’s approach to kingship and the need to assert, like most new incumbents whose predecessors served an unusually-long time, that he is his own person and is not obliged to become a clone of his forbear with whom the institution had become synonymous. Charles, of all our sovereigns, had the longest pre-accession life and a brings with him a much more complete (and publicly-known) individual persona, which makes this task all the more pressing. I was amused to read in Chapter 15 that an unnamed senior courtier refers to this as “Doctor Who syndrome”, showing that the habit of explaining the British constitution in terms of that franchise is one that runs all the way to the top. Given the relative perceptions of the new king and his late mother, I would especially see parallels to Colin Baker succeeding Peter Davidson, or Capaldi following Tennant and Smith.

Being acutely aware of some of the less-sympathetic perceptions that have swirled around the royal family as a whole in recent years, and around Charles in particular for many decades, Hardman occasionally includes explicit references to and arguments against ideas emanating from either that acclaimed Netflix drama or statements by the exiled Duke & Duchess of Sussex. At times it can feel as if he has a bit of an axe to grind. It’s probably redundant in any event, as the people likely to be credulous of the claims he’s refuting are not likely to picking up his book in the first place. I’d like to think this is merely a demonstration of Hardman’s passion for truth over sensationalism, but I can’t entirely trust him on that front given he writes for the Daily Mail after all.

These minor quibbles aside, New King New Court is an engaging and enlightening work which I would recommend to anyone interested in the topic area, though any customer (or library) sinking their money into the original edition now may wind up feeling short-changed he does another expanded version in the near future.