The 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings on 6 June is the most important international event this summer. As Head of the Armed Forces and head of state King Charles III, health permitting, will be prominent in the commemorations.
Queen Camilla recently visited the Royal Lancers (Queen Elizabeth’s Own) at Catterick Garrison for the first time as their colonel-in-chief. Her Majesty was delighted with the appointment as this was her late father Major Bruce Shand’s regiment. When Shand was serving with the 12th Lancers in the Second World War he won a Military Cross during the withdrawal to Dunkirk in 1940 (and again in 1942 during the second Battle of El Alamein), so it was a particularly poignant occasion. Her Majesty gave a moving personal speech to the soldiers on parade, quoting from her father’s memoirs of the time he joined the regiment in 1937.
The Queen has been particularly busy during the period of the King’s cancer treatment and when they made their first official appearance together for some time, in late April, it was appropriately to visit the Macmillan Cancer Centre at London’s University College Hospital.
Chatting with patients waiting for their treatment, the King told them his own session was scheduled for later that day, so they knew he understands exactly what they are going through. The monarch revealed that receiving his cancer diagnosis was ‘a bit of a shock’ but reassured anyone who asked how he was that he was ‘feeling OK’. The King, whose patronage of Cancer Research UK was announced that morning, has done a huge amount for cancer awareness and repeatedly stressed that early diagnosis is ‘the key’.
As usual, any mention of the Duke of Sussex returning to the United Kingdom causes a media furore. Where will he stay, will he have a police escort and – the biggest question of all – will he see his father or brother? No one knew the answers to these questions before he arrived but Harry’s attendance at a service to mark the tenth anniversary of the Invictus Games, two days after his son Prince Archie celebrated his fifth birthday in California, was guaranteed. We know now that a meeting with the King did not take place.
Under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the duke delivered a reading to a congregation largely consisting of representatives from the participating nations, including injured service personnel and members of the veteran community for whom the games were devised.
The service on 8 May marked a decade since the inaugural Invictus Games in London and for a theatrical flourish actor Damian Lewis, a friend of Harry, read William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus, after which the games were named.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex subsequently made a trip to Nigeria following an invitation from the country’s chief of defence staff, General Christopher Gwabin Musa, who met Harry last September at Invictus Games Dusseldorf. Meghan told podcast listeners in 2022 that she had recently discovered she is ‘43 per cent Nigerian’ after taking a genealogy test.
This might have been the sort of trip that the late Queen had in mind for the Sussexes when they were working members of the royal family, but that was not to be.
