"Can he manage the chief object of all his predecessors since time immemorial of passing on the crown untarnished, safely, to his heirs and successors?"

"Or will he, through his own volition, end up as Charles the Last? This would be a terrible legacy after all this time of waiting: a great humiliation for a deeply proud and self-conscious man who has had dinned into him all his life the special responsibilities he will one day bear.... At his back, King Charles will always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near....  He may feel that it is, at long last, his turn, after all these years. But will he be an old man in a hurry? How otherwise will he make his mark on history? And what if that mark is to bring the whole house tumbling down?

From "King Charles: oldest new monarch ever. How will he handle his reign?" Stephen Bates (The Guardian).

Speaking of "handling," can we talk about King Charles's hands? Perhaps you've seen the closeup photos of his hands, with their very swollen "sausage fingers"...

... and perhaps you've connected it to the alarmingly dark gray-purple hands Queen Elizabeth displayed in her last photographs. 

 

There's this in The International News: "King Charles causes a major uproar in concern and panic after news of Queen Elizabeth’s bruised fingers ended in the monarch’s eventual death." (International News). A doctor with no access to Charles opines generally about edema in old people. It's common, and not in itself cause for alarm. But he's not common. He's royal. And so we will talk about his health. People who watch royalty are always, inherently on a deathwatch. No sooner does one monarch die than they proclaim "Long live the King," start a new deathwatch, and intensify their gaze at who's next.

From the Guardian article:

But [Charles] has a much younger, more personable heir standing right behind him on the balcony. Might it not make sense, people will be saying, to get on to the next generation for the sake of the monarchy’s future?

Oh, no. Abdication ruins the whole mystique. You can't shore this thing up by letting go. The swollen fingers must hang on. 

I was going to work out a witticism based on the NRA slogan, "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." But the monarchy passes to the next in line the instant the king is dead. The body is still fully warm, and there's no rigor mortis necessitating prying. There's no giving or taking at all. And yet the monarchy is not a tangible object, like a gun. It is merely an idea, and it could be unthought.