King Charles III has already proved he can deftly navigate tricky diplomatic missions.
During a state visit to America in April, he charmed President Trump even as he subtly pushed back against the worldview of a man who is wildly unpopular among most of his own subjects back in Britain.
This week, the British monarch faces a perhaps even more vexing challenge. How to hold together the Commonwealth, the loosely bound remnants of an empire his ancestors once ruled, amid demands to apologize for colonialism and pay reparations for those who were not only subjects of the realm, but subjected to the evils of slavery?
In a seven-day trip to the Caribbean that begins on Tuesday, the king will visit three countries and then convene the leaders of 56 member nations of the Commonwealth. It is a largely symbolic voluntary group consisting mostly of onetime British colonies; some still also regard him as their ceremonial head of state but many are now republics. There, he will confront renewed calls, including from the organization’s secretary-general, for a frank discussion about those difficult issues.
“We are calling for a dialogue of decency,” Hilary Beckles, the chairman of the Reparations Commission for CARICOM, an organization of Caribbean states, told reporters last week during a briefing ahead of the king’s visit.
“I’m appealing to Charles Windsor, a parent, a grandparent,” Mr. Beckles, the vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, said. “He can see the enrichment that slavery has presented to his family. He can see that the wealth he’s passing on to his children and his grandchildren all came out as significant sums to this process of the chatilization of the African people.”
Ed Owens, a historian who writes about the British monarchy, said that the king’s visit to the Caribbean was inherently fraught because of the legacy of colonialism and exploitation there. About three million enslaved Africans were trafficked on British ships across the Atlantic in the 1700s and 1800s to work on colonial plantations. Attempted rebellions were brutally crushed.
“The dominion of Britain and the white power over those peoples of color” in centuries past still looms over the monarchy, Mr. Owens said. “The whiteness of the institution is the problem. It remains an emblem of British white supremacy.”
Buckingham Palace said in a statement that Charles, 77, would not seek to avoid the subject of “the darkest days of our past.” But he would not apologize, in line with his constitutional role, which prevents him from diverging from official government policy. The statement said the issue of reparations was the responsibility of Britain’s government.
For Charles, who as a prince said that the “appalling atrocity of slavery” was one that “forever stains our history,” the visit to the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda is another test of his ability to shine on the world stage.
For decades, it was his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who was the face of the waning British Empire, which came to an end during her reign, and then of the Commonwealth. After his coronation in 2023 at the age of 73, Charles finally emerged from the royal scandals that have plagued his family and has become a global diplomat of sorts, including by using his role to offer support for Ukraine and Canada.
So far, he has surprised some royal watchers.
“He’s proved to be a very effective constitutional monarch,” said Philip Murphy, the director of history and policy at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research.
“He can deliver a speech very well,” added Mr. Murphy, who is the former head of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. “And he can deliver it with a degree of personal conviction and humor that his mother, you know, singularly lacked.”
The king deployed both attributes during his visit to the United States this year. During a speech to Congress, he prompted bipartisan laughter with his line about the commonalities between America and Britain. “Everything in common,” he said, “except of course language.”
At the White House state dinner, he stroked Mr. Trump’s ego by giving him a brass bell from a World War II-era British submarine, emblazoned with the sub’s name: H.M.S. Trump. The king also tweaked the president for his “readjustments to the East Wing,” saying that he was sorry for his ancestors’ “own small attempt at real estate redevelopment of the White House” when the British set it on fire in 1814.
“What he did there very cannily was reinvigorate British and American ties by carefully working around a very difficult president,” Mr. Owens said. “Charming him, but also challenging him.”
Humorous moments might be harder to come by in the week ahead, as King Charles and Queen Camilla try to avoid the kind of public relations disaster that befell Prince William and Catherine, the Princess of Wales, in the Caribbean several years ago.
Their weeklong visit to Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas in 2022 was supposed to be a celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee. Instead, they heard calls for reparations, plans to become a republic and protests over a land dispute. In one infamous moment, the two were photographed shaking hands with Jamaican children through a chain-link fence.
Those are the kinds of images the palace will be hoping to avoid for Charles and Camilla. There will be stops at sporting events, educational institutions and several demonstrations of environmental projects, long a priority for the king.
Last week, Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the secretary-general of the Commonwealth and Ghana’s former foreign minister, said that “the time has come” to discuss whether Britain should pay reparations to the descendants of British slaves. She added that an apology from the king “wouldn’t hurt at all.”
“I don’t believe we can run away from it,” she told Sky News. “But it is important to determine the form that reparations should take, and that is something that will emerge eventually as countries sit around the table to discuss — as difficult a subject as it is, I believe that countries will come to some conclusions.”
David Comissiong, the ambassador of Barbados to CARICOM, said in the briefing for reporters that “by addressing the still existing negative effects of that monumental crime, we will usher in not only an era of reparative justice, but what we are now calling the coming enlightenment.”
Ben Judah, who served as a top adviser to David Lammy when he was Britain’s foreign secretary last year, said last week that the organization needed to be restructured.
“It is time to admit that the Commonwealth does not only not serve its purpose, but works against its premise of post-imperial comity,” Mr. Judah wrote on social media. “This is because it has become a little more than a poorly attended biannual summit whose only purpose seems to be to for Caribbean countries to lobby Britain for reparations. This does nothing but worsen these relationships.”
Of the 56 members of the Commonwealth, only 14 besides Britain remain part of Charles’s realm, with him as their ceremonial head of state. (Australia, New Zealand and Canada are the largest of those.) The rest have shifted to a republican form of government.
In Antigua and Barbuda, where the Commonwealth meeting will be held, Prime Minister Gaston Browne said in 2022 that the country would hold a referendum on leaving the realm. The vote has yet to take place.
It will be up to King Charles to make the case for staying in the realm, and — more broadly — for the future of the Commonwealth as an institution, more than seven decades after its creation.
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