ROYAL PROBLEMS

Charles III Confronts First Problem as King: Too Many Palaces

There’s Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral, and Sandringham. But Charles and Camilla already have a lovely family home in Gloucestershire.

It's a nice problem for a king to have: too many palaces but only one royal head to lay down on one’s pillow at night. The Times of London reports that the newly promoted Charles III can’t decide what to do with all the residences left him by by his mother. The newspaper said that the “obvious assumption” was that Charles would copy his mother and divide his time between Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, with holidays at Balmoral—the Scottish castle where Queen Elizabeth died last week at the age of 96—and the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. The problem is that Charles, 73, already has a picture-perfect home, Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, and doesn’t like either Buckingham Palace or Windsor. The solution being suggested is that Buckingham Palace is converted into some sort of royal hotel/conference center and Charles’ son William, the new Prince of Wales, moves out of his house on the Windsor estate and into the drafty old castle itself.