On Monday morning, April 27, King Charles III and Queen Camilla begin a four-day state visit to the United States. They will be received at the White House on Tuesday, April 28, where they will attend a state banquet in their honor, after which the King will deliver an address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. He is the second British monarch to address Congress, following his mother in 1991.
The address is intended to “reaffirm” the supposed special relationship between Britain and the United States. The Congressional leaders’ invitation acknowledged, with no apparent embarrassment, that “the American experiment endures in no small part because of the British tradition from which it sprang.”
The 250th anniversary of an act of armed insurrection against the British Crown is to be commemorated in the U.S. Capitol by a speech from the British Crown, before a joint session of the body whose constitutional ancestor, the Continental Congress, was at the time waging war on the British Crown.
Consider who Charles is. His younger brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, had a long association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and has been the subject of repeated investigations. Andrew was arrested by the Thames Valley Police on Feb. 19 on suspicion of misconduct in public office, in connection with allegations that he shared confidential government reports with Epstein while serving as a U.K. trade envoy.
Charles is the inheritor of an empire whose record includes: the slave trade and partition of Africa; the conquest, dismemberment, and starvation of Ireland; the Opium Wars against China; the colonization and partition of India, including the Bengal famines; the Sykes-Picot dismemberment of West Asia; and, most relevantly to this week, the post-Cold-War project of organizing the Anglosphere for permanent confrontation with Russia, China, and Iran.
This is the “tradition,” in Speaker Johnson’s choice of phrase, “from which” the American experiment “sprang.” It is, more accurately, the tradition the American Revolution was waged to escape.
As John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams on July 3, 1776: “I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration… Yet through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.”
Through the gloom of King Charles’s visit, what light may yet break through depends on whether members of the U.S. Congress, and the citizens whose vote put them there, remember what they are commemorating.