Britain's King Charles III waves from the Buckingham Palace balcony after viewing the Royal Air Force fly-past in central London after his coronation on May 6, 2023.STEFAN ROUSSEAU/Getty Images
As King Charles begins treatment for cancer, questions have started swirling about what happens if he becomes too incapacitated to carry out his duties and whether a stand-in for him would have the same authority in Canada.
Buckingham Palace officials announced on Monday that Charles has cancer and that he will be receiving treatment in London as an outpatient. Officials have not provided any further details, but British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the BBC on Tuesday that the disease had been “caught early.”
The 75-year-old monarch will not perform public duties while he undergoes medical care. He will, however, continue to hold some private meetings and conduct official business such as granting royal assent to legislation and signing official papers, a statement from the palace said.
Should he become too ill to carry out his duties, royal officials and the British government have several options.
Under Britain’s Regency Act, the King can delegate duties to counsellors of state on a short-term basis. Those responsibilities include representing the monarch abroad and at official functions, holding Privy Council meetings and granting royal assent.
The people currently authorized to serve as Councillors of State are Queen Camilla, Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Andrew and Princess Beatrice. Since Prince Harry and Prince Andrew are no longer working royals, King Charles added his siblings Princess Anne and Prince Edward to the list.
Delegating to counsellors of state has been a fairly common practice. When King Charles was the Prince of Wales he frequently served in that capacity for his mother, Queen Elizabeth, when she could longer travel outside the country or attend major events such as the opening of Parliament.
If the King was incapacitated for an extended period of time, the Regency Act allows for the appointment of the heir to the throne as regent. Currently that would mean Prince William would take over almost all of his father’s royal duties, the only exceptions being that he would not be allowed to grant royal assent to a bill that changed the line of succession or to legislation that altered the role of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland.
If Charles recovered, the regency would end and the King would take back the powers.
King Charles’s cancer diagnosis heaps more pressure on the British monarchy, which is still evolving after the 70-year reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
The Associated Press
The last time a regent was appointed was in 1811, when Parliament grew concerned about the mental health of King George III. A special law was passed bestowing the regency on his eldest son, George, the Prince of Wales. He ruled as Regent until 1820, when his father died and George became King George IV.
The Regency Act was adopted in 1937 to codify the way of delegating royal powers. However, the law only applies to Britain, and a regent would not automatically have any powers in the King’s other 14 realms, including Canada.
In Canada, the full powers of the monarchy were delegated to the governor-general in 1947 through a legal instrument known as letters patent. This was done so that the Canadian government could continue to operate in the absence of a king or queen.
In the event that Charles became unfit to rule, the Governor-General would carry on granting royal assent and performing other royal responsibilities in Canada. However, if Prince William became regent, it’s not clear who would have power over the Governor-General.
Scholars have debated whether the 1947 letters patent included transferring “the power to appoint a successor governor-general, and critically, to remove the governor-general, being the two remaining powers of the sovereign that might need to be exercised during a regency,” wrote Anne Twomey, a constitutional law professor at the University of Sydney in Australia. “As issues concerning succession, abdication and regency have rarely arisen in living memory, when they do so there is often a lack of institutional knowledge about how to deal with them.”
Craig Prescott, a lecturer in law at Royal Holloway, University of London, is writing a book on the Regency Act that includes a chapter on how the law would apply to other realms. Regency “is not something that happens very often and it’s something we try and avoid,” he said in an interview Tuesday. Countries such as Canada would “have to work out whether the Regency Act applies or whether they need to just pass a short act of Parliament to recognize the authority of the regent.”
As questions about his health continued, Charles was photographed on Tuesday leaving Clarence House for Buckingham Palace, where he and Queen Camilla then flew by helicopter to the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk.
There has been speculation that the King’s condition could help heal the fractured relationships within the family, especially between Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William. Prince Harry arrived in London alone on Tuesday and was photographed driving to Clarence House. It’s not clear how long he will stay in Britain or whether he will meet with Prince William.