Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King Charles III

1948 – · Generation XXXVIII · King of the United Kingdom (r. 2022– ) · House of Windsor

Portrait of King Charles III

Charles III has been King of the United Kingdom and fourteen other Commonwealth realms since 8 September 2022. He was born at Buckingham Palace on 14 November 1948, the first child of Princess Elizabeth and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and was christened Charles Philip Arthur George. His mother’s accession in February 1952 made him heir apparent at the age of three and, automatically, Duke of Cornwall. He watched her coronation in Westminster Abbey the following year. He was created Prince of Wales in 1958 and invested with the title at Caernarfon Castle on 1 July 1969.

His parents chose to send him to school instead of having him taught at the palace, something no heir apparent before him had experienced. After Hill House in West London he went to Cheam and then Gordonstoun in Moray, both his father’s old schools, and in 1966 he spent two terms in Australia at Timbertop, an outpost of Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, which he later remembered as the part of his schooling he enjoyed most. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he read archaeology and anthropology before switching to history, and when he graduated in 1970 he was the first heir to the British throne to have taken a degree. He trained as a jet pilot at RAF Cranwell in 1971, then served in the Royal Navy, flying helicopters with 845 Naval Air Squadron from HMS Hermes. He ended his naval service in 1976 in command of the minehunter HMS Bronington.

In 1976 he used his £7,500 of naval severance pay to found the Prince’s Trust, which by 2020 had supported more than a million young people. It was the first of more than a dozen charities he went on to establish. As Prince of Wales he was known for voicing his opinions. His 1984 speech calling a proposed extension to the National Gallery a “monstrous carbuncle” began a long campaign for traditional architecture, later put into practice at Poundbury, a new town built on Duchy of Cornwall land. He farmed organically at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, launched the Duchy Originals brand in 1990 and has campaigned for decades on the environment and climate change. His advocacy of alternative medicine, including homeopathy, has by contrast been criticised by doctors and scientists.

He married Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 July 1981, and their sons William and Harry were born in 1982 and 1984. The marriage did not last. In December 1992 the prime minister, John Major, announced the couple’s separation in the House of Commons, and they divorced on 28 August 1996. In a television documentary in 1994 Charles said that he had resumed his relationship with a former girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles, only after the marriage had “irretrievably broken down”. When Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, he flew there with her sisters to bring her body home. Charles and Camilla married in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall on 9 April 2005, followed by a service of prayer and dedication in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

He succeeded his mother at the age of 73, after longer as heir apparent than anyone in British history, and is the oldest person to have succeeded to the British throne. In March 2023, on a state visit to Germany, he addressed the Bundestag, which no British monarch had done before. On 6 May 2023 he and Queen Camilla were crowned in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in the first coronation since his mother’s in 1953. In February 2024 Buckingham Palace announced that he had been diagnosed with a form of cancer, found after a hospital procedure for a benign enlarged prostate. He stepped back from public engagements while continuing with state business, and returned to public-facing duties at the end of April 2024. In May 2025 he opened the Canadian Parliament in person, delivering the Speech from the Throne in Ottawa.

Place in the family

  • King Charles III is a son of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • King Charles III is the eldest of 4 children of Philip Mountbatten and Queen Elizabeth II recorded in this archive.
  • The archive records 7 of his descendants, across 2 generations.

Images

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria → King Edward VII → King George V → King George VI → Queen Elizabeth II → King Charles III.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

Children

Life

  • 1948 — Born
  • 1981 — Married Diana, Princess of Wales
  • 1996 — Separated from Diana, Princess of Wales
  • 2005 — Married Queen Camilla
  • 2022 — King Charles III accedes to the throne on the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth II
  • 2023 — Coronation of Kng Charles and Queen Camilla in Westminster Abbey
  • 2024 — Both King Charles and Catherine Princess of Wales reveal that they are undergoing treatment for cancer.

Sources

  1. Charles III · Wikipedia
  2. The King · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. A statement from Buckingham Palace (5 February 2024) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  4. The King returns to public-facing duties · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  5. King Charles III · Westminster Abbey

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