On February 5th, a formal statement from Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer. This news comes after the King underwent a “scheduled treatment” for an enlarged prostate in January, according to a separate Buckingham Palace announcement from January 17th.
We now know during that “treatment” a different concern was noted, and that further testing confirmed that it is a form of cancer. While the Palace has not currently confirmed what kind of cancer the King has, they have made a point to specify that it is not prostate cancer. Prostate cancer is noted to be “among the best of all cancers” when it comes to overall prognosis, so it is interesting that the Palace specified that King Charles does not have this form of cancer.
In the weeks since the announcement, King Charles has stepped back from his front-facing royal duties to begin treatment. In this time, other working royal family members have taken on some of his duties, namely Queen Camilla and Prince William. Princess Kate, another royal who would typically be expected to step up in this time, though, is unable to do so because she is still in recovery for an unspecified abdominal surgery performed in January. Typical recovery times for abdominal surgeries are long, and Kate is not expected to return to life as a working royal until after Easter in April.
It is unusual for Buckingham Palace to be so forthcoming with information about the status of the King and Queen. After the announcement, many took this news to mean that Charles is significantly ill, pointing to the fact that the Palace only announced that doctors were “concerned” about the health of Queen Elizabeth after the monarch was already dead. The London bureau chief of The New York Times, Mark Landler, stated that he was “surprised by the palace’s transparency,” noting that “It’s a milestone in royal family communication that they said so much publicly.”
The Palace admitted that part of this honesty-policy was aimed at quelling speculation, but this has mostly been unsuccessful. The flames of rumor were stoked even more when Prince Harry – who publicly left life as a working royal in 2019 – returned to England to visit his father. This unexpected move left many wondering how serious Charles’ condition truly is. In time we will learn more about the King’s cancer journey. The King, for now, is stable and undergoing treatment.
Junior Ella Peeples is the Managing Editor. Her email is epeeples@fandm.edu.