Princess Charlotte

Princess Charlotte (Charlotte Auguste Viktoria, born 11 March 2005) is a Prussian and German princess of the House of Hohenzollern, the elder sister of Alexander I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, and since 11 October 2028 the Princess Regent, who exercises her brother’s powers alone during his minority, in Prussia and in the Empire separately. From February to October 2028 she chaired the nine-member Regency Council that exercised them before her.

She would be sovereign under the law as it now stands. The succession reform of 2015 enacted absolute primogeniture in Prussia and the Empire, and it was drafted to run only forwards. It equalised the position of descendants born after it and left undisturbed the order already fixed at her brother’s birth in 2014. A girl of ten therefore remained behind a brother who had been born the year before the reform and would not have been ahead of her had he been born the year after it. The reform is generally described as a modernisation. It is also the instrument by which Charlotte is not Empress.

She has never once said in public that she should be. Her position, stated privately and consistently and never elaborated, is that the law is the law and that she will not be the instrument of changing it in her own favour. Alexander does not agree with her, believes she should have succeeded and should now be sovereign, and has kept that belief out of every public statement he has made.

From February she chaired the body that governed in his name, conducting it with a neutrality and a procedural exactness that its other members described as absolute. In April that body dismissed the Prussian Minister-President, Johanna Falk, by six votes to three. Charlotte voted against, and six is exactly the two-thirds a personal Prussian royal power requires. One vote the other way and the dismissal would have failed.

She is also, four days in most weeks, a medical student on a ward at the Charité. She began her studies in 2023, is in the final clinical year, and qualifies in 2029. The press calls her a doctor. She corrects them, which tells you most of what the rest of this article says at greater length.

Family and early life

Potsdam

Charlotte was born at Potsdam on 11 March 2005, the first child of Heinrich I, who had succeeded to the Prussian and imperial crowns two months earlier, and of Caroline of Hanover, of the House of Welf, the sister of Ernest V.

She was born into a reign rather than before one, which is the small biographical fact that shaped everything after it. Her father was already Emperor. There was never a period in which the family was private, and Charlotte has no memory of her father as anything other than a sovereign, a distinction she has drawn herself when asked about him and which she regards as a loss rather than a distinction.

The household was a Prussian one in the ordinary modern sense: Potsdam rather than Berlin for the family’s own life, the Imperial Palace for the office. She was raised in the certainty that she would one day be a private person, since the reform that would have made her heir was ten years away and nobody was contemplating it when she was born.

Nine years, and a brother

Alexander was born on 18 January 2014, when Charlotte was eight, and the gap has done more to shape their relationship than the succession has.

Nine years between siblings in an ordinary family produces an elder sister who is half a parent. Nine years in this one produced something more specific. Charlotte was old enough to understand the machinery of the Crown before her brother could read, and she had watched her father work for a decade by the time Alexander was aware there was work being done. When their father died she was twenty-two and Alexander was fourteen, and the asymmetry that had been a family shape became a constitutional one.

They are close and were close before any of this, which the Register states because it is true and because nothing in what follows should be read as a strain between them. The strain is between Charlotte and an instrument of 2015, and Alexander is on her side of it.

Her mother

Queen Mother Caroline is a Welf, the sister of Ernest V of Great Britain and America, and the second dynastic member of the Regency Council. She and her daughter are the closest thing that Council has to a bloc, and they have voted together on every division of consequence since February, including the one that matters.

The relationship is warm and is worked at. Caroline is protective, of Alexander conspicuously and of Charlotte less visibly, and Charlotte has said that her mother is the only person on the Council who is ever frightened, and that she is frightened for the right reasons. Caroline also exercises the formal royal governorship of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union during her son’s minority, a function Charlotte has no part in and has never sought.

Her father

Heinrich I died on 12 February 2028 of an aortic aneurysm, suddenly, with nothing settled between them.

The relationship was close, affectionate and entirely unexamined on the one subject that mattered. He never spoke to his daughter about the succession reform of 2015, not once, and she never asked. She was ten when it passed and twenty-two when he died, and in twelve years neither of them raised it.

What she believes about that silence, she has not said. The available readings are that he assumed she understood, that he found it too painful, that he did not think of it as being about her at all, or that he knew exactly what it cost her and chose a form of not knowing. The question died with him and cannot now be answered, and the Register records it as the largest unresolved thing in her life rather than as a mystery it can solve.

She has spoken about him publicly twice, both times briefly, and on neither occasion did she say anything that a stranger could not have said.

The succession

The rule she was born under

Until 2015 the Prussian and imperial crowns descended by male-preference primogeniture: a daughter inherited only where there was no son. Charlotte was born in 2005 under that rule, and for the first nine years of her life she was the heir presumptive of two crowns, which is a position that means nothing at all and is understood by everyone to mean nothing.

Alexander’s birth in January 2014 displaced her, exactly as the rule provided and exactly as everyone had expected since before she was born. Nobody regarded it as an injury and Charlotte, who was eight, did not either. The injury was not administered in 2014. It was administered in 2015, and by people who were trying to do the opposite.

The reform of 2015

The succession reform of 2015 enacted absolute primogeniture across the Prussian kingship and the German imperial office, abolishing male preference and providing that the eldest child should succeed irrespective of sex.

It was drafted to operate prospectively only. It equalised the position of descendants born after it. It did not reorder persons already born, and therefore left standing the order fixed at Alexander’s birth fourteen months earlier.

The consequence is exact and is worth stating slowly. A girl born in 2005 remained behind a brother born in 2014, under a reform passed in 2015 which provided that a girl born in 2016 would not have been. Fourteen months separate Alexander’s birth from the reform, and those fourteen months are the whole of it. Had he been born a year and a half later, the reform would have reached them both and Charlotte would be Empress.

Why it was drafted that way

The prospective form was not aimed at her and this is the part that makes it worse rather than better.

A retrospective reform would have reordered living persons, which raises real difficulties: it disturbs settled expectations, it can be represented as a personal measure directed at an individual, and in a federal empire it required the assent of states with their own crowns and their own succession law. The prospective form was the form that could pass, and everybody who voted for it knew precisely which child it would leave behind.

The debates of 2015 do not conceal this. Charlotte is not named in them. She is referred to throughout as the existing order, the present arrangement and the settled position, and every member of both chambers knew that the settled position was a girl of ten. The most quoted sentence of the whole passage, from a member who voted in favour, is that the reform would be a good law for everyone born after it.

Her position

Charlotte’s position is that the law is the law, and that she will not be the instrument of changing it in her own favour.

She has stated it privately, consistently and without elaboration for as long as anyone has asked her. She has never stated it publicly, because to state it publicly would be to raise the question, and raising the question is precisely what she declines to do.

The reasoning is coherent and is not comfortable. A reform reopened at the instance of the person who would benefit is not a reform, it is a claim. A princess who campaigns to be made sovereign is a princess advancing an interest, whatever the merits, and the merits would thereafter be inseparable from the interest. She has concluded that the only person who cannot argue for the retrospective reform is the person it would make Empress, and that this is a hard consequence of a principle she nonetheless holds.

She has therefore made herself the one person unable to seek the remedy, and the remedy is not otherwise being sought, which is dealt with next.

Nobody is asking

There is no movement to make the reform retrospective, and the reason is her brother’s age.

The question is treated in Germany as closed. It is raised occasionally in the press and never in either chamber. No party has adopted it, no member has tabled anything, and the constitutional lawyers who would write the amendment have not been asked to.

The reason is arithmetical and everybody understands it. A retrospective reform now would remove a reigning fourteen-year-old sovereign from a throne he occupied lawfully for the benefit of his adult sister, in the middle of his minority, while she chairs the council governing in his name. However the case were argued, it would look like a coup, and it would look most like one to the people whose support it would require.

So the window in which the injustice could have been corrected has closed, and it closed at the moment Heinrich died, and nobody chose that either.

What Alexander believes

The reigning sovereign believes his sister should be sovereign instead of him.

Alexander accepts the legal settlement, has never challenged it and has never made his belief a public constitutional claim. He holds it privately, has expressed it to a small number of people, and expressed it once to Charlotte herself. She did not answer, and he has not raised it again.

Neither sibling has sought to reopen the succession, and the Register records that this is a joint position arrived at separately rather than a bargain. He does not raise it because she does not want it raised. She does not raise it for the reasons above. The one person in Germany with standing to reopen the question and the one person with standing to refuse it are the same two people, and they have chosen not to.

The Hanoverian line

The same rule places her behind her brother in a second line. Their mother, Queen Caroline, is the sister of Ernest V, and the Compact realms of the Hanoverian union moved to absolute primogeniture, as Prussia did, by a reform drafted to run only forwards. Frederick, who has no brother or sister, acceded as George V on 31 October 2028, and behind him the succession to the fourteen Crown capacities passes to Caroline and then to her children in the order the older rule fixed, Alexander and then Charlotte. Caroline is heir presumptive, Alexander second and Charlotte third.

No instrument of any realm says what would follow if that line were ever reached: whether a German Emperor could hold the Hanoverian Crowns, two of which lie inside his own empire, or whether he would have to give up one inheritance for the other. The question has been noticed and nothing has been done. Charlotte has said nothing about it in public.

Medicine

The Charité

Charlotte began medical studies at the Charité in Berlin in 2023, at eighteen, and is in the final clinical year. She qualifies in 2029.

She is not a doctor and says so. German medical education runs six years and ends in a practical year on the wards, under supervision, with patients and a rota and no licence. The press has called her a doctor since February and she has corrected it every time she has been given the opportunity, in terms that are polite and completely immovable. The correction is the most characteristic thing she does.

The choice of medicine was not a royal gesture and predates everything. She sat the entrance requirements like everybody else, on results obtained under her own name, and she chose the Charité because it is in Berlin and Berlin is where her family was. It is also the oldest teaching hospital in Prussia and was founded by a Prussian king, which is a fact she has never once mentioned and which is mentioned constantly on her behalf.

On the ward

She works under her family name, which in her case is not a disguise and is not quite a disclosure either.

The ward knows. Colleagues know. Most patients do not, because most patients meet a tired person in scrubs at seven in the morning and do not study the badge, and because a great many of them are unwell enough to have other things on their minds. Those who do recognise her are, in the reported experience of her colleagues, almost uniformly discreet.

Protection is present in the building and never on the ward. The arrangement took negotiating and is the subject of a written agreement between the household and the hospital, and its central term is that clinical space is not a place where the protection of a princess may take precedence over the treatment of anybody in it.

Her colleagues are protective of her in a way she finds embarrassing and has asked them to stop, without effect. It takes the form of not mentioning her in the presence of press, of a rota that has quietly never required her to be photographed leaving a night shift, and of a general and unspoken agreement that what happens on the ward is not a story.

The photograph

One photograph exists and everybody in Germany has seen it.

It was taken in March 2028, five weeks after her father’s death and three weeks after she took the chair, by a member of the public in a hospital corridor. It shows her in scrubs, mid-conversation, holding a coffee, entirely unaware of the camera. It is not a flattering photograph and it is not an unflattering one. It is a photograph of somebody at work.

Its effect was completely disproportionate to its content, and the reason is that until it appeared the country did not know she had a job. She had been principally known for provincial civic patronage, which is what a princess of her rank is known for, and the patronage was real and dutiful and told nobody anything. The photograph told them she had been getting up at five for five years.

The household did not release it, did not comment on it and has never used it. Charlotte has referred to it exactly once, to say that the patient in the background did not consent to be photographed and that this is the part nobody has discussed. It remains the only widely reproduced image of her that was not taken at a ribbon.

The days that are left

She still works, reduced, on the days the Council does not sit, and those who know her best say it is the only thing keeping her upright.

The arrangement is that the Council’s business has first call and the ward takes what is left, which in an ordinary week is three or four days and in a bad week is none. The hospital has been accommodating to a degree that is itself slightly awkward, since a supervised trainee can be flexed in a way a consultant cannot, and Charlotte is entirely aware that her flexibility is a function of her seniority being low rather than her rank being high.

What the ward gives her is the only room in her life where the question is not about her. A patient with chest pain does not care who her grandfather was. The work is difficult, absorbing, and entirely indifferent to the constitutional position of the person doing it, and she has said, in the one interview she has given on the subject, that she does not know what she would have done since February without somewhere to be at seven in the morning.

The Regency Council

The Council was abolished on 11 October 2028, and Charlotte has exercised its powers alone since as Princess Regent. This section describes the body she chaired from February to October.

What it is

The Regency Council was constituted on her father’s death and exercises Alexander’s powers in both his capacities until he is sixteen. It has nine members: Charlotte, the Queen Mother, two presiding officers from the Reichstag, two from the Bundesrat, the President of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus, a retired judge of the German Imperial Constitutional Court, and a retired judge of the Prussian Constitutional Court.

It acts for two offices and never merges them. An imperial meeting and a Prussian meeting have different agendas, papers, minutes, votes, seals and consequences, and a member may vote one way in one capacity and the other way in the other. The Council cannot alter the succession, cannot extend the minority and cannot treat itself as a collective sovereign.

At sixteen Alexander begins to exercise the office personally, on 18 January 2030, and the Council loses its power to decide for him while remaining available to advise and supervise until he is eighteen.

Her chair

Charlotte chairs it as the senior dynastic member by blood, which is a description of her relationship to her brother and not of any authority over the body. The chair carries no casting vote. She is one of nine and has said so, in those words, more often than anybody has needed to hear it.

She conducts the business with a procedural exactness that the other members describe without qualification as absolute. Papers circulate on time or the item is held over. Members who have not read them are told so. The imperial and Prussian proceedings are kept apart to a degree that has been called pedantic by two members and correct by both of the judges. Nothing has ever been taken by acclamation and nothing has been decided outside a sitting.

Why she does it that way

Her stated reason is that the forms are the only protection a boy sovereign has, and she believes it.

The argument runs like this. A fourteen-year-old cannot check whether he is being managed. He has no vote, no experience and no independent advice, and the people around him are individually decent and collectively an interest. What he has instead is procedure: papers that must be produced, votes that must be recorded, capacities that must be kept separate, thresholds that must be met. Every one of those is a thing that can be pointed at afterwards, and Charlotte’s view is that a minority survives on the record it leaves rather than on the good intentions of the people making it.

She has extended the principle to her own conduct without being asked to. She does not meet members privately about business before the Council. She does not use her brother’s name in argument. She has recused herself twice, once from a question touching a patronage she holds and once from a matter concerning the Welf household, and on both occasions the recusal was more scrupulous than anybody thought necessary.

Alexander in the room

He attends, receives the papers, asks questions and may state a view. He has no vote.

Charlotte protects his right to be heard and does not pretend it is a right to decide, and the distinction is one she enforces in both directions. When a member has suggested that the Council should simply do what the King wants, she has ruled the observation out of order. When members have talked over him, she has stopped them.

The most quoted thing she has done in the chair took four seconds. In the March sitting a member began a sentence with the words that the boy could not be expected to understand, and Charlotte said that the King was in the room and would be addressed. The minute records only that the member withdrew the remark.

The dismissal of Johanna Falk

What happened

In April 2028 the Prussian Minister-President, Johanna Falk, issued the Advice-Binding Declaration, a direction stating that royal discretion in Prussia would thereafter be exercised in accordance with ministerial advice as a matter of settled practice.

The Regency Council concluded that the Declaration attempted to remove constitutional discretion reserved to the King without using the amendment process, dismissed her, and installed Konrad von Arnim as a restricted caretaker.

The vote was six to three. Exercise of a personal Prussian royal power requires two thirds of the Council, and two thirds of nine is six. The dismissal passed by exactly the minimum and by not one vote more.

How the three voted

Against dismissal: Princess Charlotte, Queen Mother Caroline, and the President of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus.

For dismissal: the two presiding officers of the Reichstag, the two of the Bundesrat, and both retired judges.

The split is not random and has been much analysed. The two dynasts and the presiding officer of the Prussian lower house were on one side; the four federal parliamentarians and the two judges on the other. The people closest to the Prussian Crown as an institution voted to leave its minister in place. The people furthest from it voted to remove him. Which way round that cuts is the subject of the entire German constitutional argument of 2028, and the Register does not adjudicate it.

Her reasons, and the one she gave

She voted against for two reasons and stated one.

The reason she gave was constitutional: that the power of dismissal is an emergency safeguard, that an emergency is a thing that must be shown rather than asserted, and that a declaration of practice by a minister with a parliamentary majority is a matter for the courts and the amendment process rather than for the personal exercise of a royal power by nine people acting for a child.

The reason she did not give was that Alexander opposed the dismissal. He had said so in the room, had asked that his dissent be minuted, and had been overruled. Charlotte thought that a Council governing in his name should be extremely reluctant to overrule him on the first substantial question of his reign, and she did not say this aloud, because to say it would have been to convert the King’s minuted view into an argument deployed by his sister.

The leak, and why it damaged her

Alexander’s dissent leaked.

The minute recording that the King had opposed the dismissal and asked for his opposition to be noted reached the press within a fortnight. The leak has never been traced. Its effect on Alexander is dealt with in his own article; its effect on Charlotte was to make her position unreadable in both directions at once.

One reading is that she is weak. She chairs the Council, she agreed with the King, she had the Queen Mother with her, and she lost. On this account a stronger chair would have carried the room, and her procedural neutrality is the reason a fourteen-year-old was overruled on the only question he had ever asked to be heard on.

The other reading is that she is manipulative. She gave a lofty constitutional reason in the room and her brother’s dissent then found its way into print, which is convenient for a woman who many believe should be sovereign. Nobody who knows her believes this, and it has been printed anyway, and it cannot be answered.

She cannot answer either reading without discussing the succession, because both of them are ultimately about whether she wants the throne. So she has answered neither, and the ambiguity has been allowed to stand for five months.

Where it stands

On 9 October 2028 the Prussian Constitutional Court held the dismissal void and the Advice-Binding Declaration of no legal force, and restored Falk. Charlotte had voted against the dismissal and had said once, in public, that she would implement whatever the Court decided; she implemented it the same day. But the Zentrum had left Falk’s coalition on 3 October, and Falk was restored to a House she could no longer command.

On 10 October the Prussian Landtag and the imperial Reichstag and Bundesrat abolished the Regency Council and made her sole Regent, by amendments to both Constitutions that need no royal assent, and all twenty-seven states ratified the imperial one within a day. Every party but the Deutschkonservative Partei voted for it. She had not sought the office, had said nothing in public while it was drafted, and accepted it reluctantly, on the condition that the members of the abolished Council remain available to advise her.

She was sworn on 11 October, twice, as Regent of Prussia and as Regent of the Empire, and her first act was to dissolve the Abgeordnetenhaus on Falk’s advice for an election on 3 December 2028. She said she would keep her shifts on the ward on the days she could. Main article: Prussian constitutional crisis of 2028.

She is also, alone among the six who voted the other way and the two who voted with her, understood to be preparing for the Council to be found to have acted unlawfully. Papers have been ordered. Counsel has been instructed on the Council’s own position rather than the Crown’s. No other member has done this, and when it was put to her at a sitting that the preparation implied a want of confidence in the Council’s own decision, she said that it implied a want of confidence in her own judgment, which was different, and moved to the next item.

Alexander

Constitutional mentor

She is his closest confidante and the person who taught him how the Crown works, and she began before there was any reason to.

She was old enough to understand the machinery before he could read. She has helped him read official papers, distinguish advice from information, and identify the point at which a procedural question becomes a constitutional one. That last is the skill she rates above all others and the one she says cannot be taught quickly, which is why she started teaching it when he was eleven and their father was in good health.

Procedure, not politics

She teaches him the forms and does not teach him the politics, and this is a deliberate policy she has explained to him.

He is taught what a countersignature is for, why the two capacities are never merged, what a two-thirds threshold protects against, how an advice paper differs from a submission, and what a minute is for. He is not taught what she thinks of the parties, of the Chancellor, of Falk, or of the members of his own Council.

Her reason is that a sovereign who has been given opinions has been given somebody else’s opinions, and that a boy who learns the machinery can form his own when he is old enough to be held responsible for them, whereas a boy who learns his sister’s will be repeating them at thirty.

The Register records this as a considered position and also as her clearest failing, for reasons set out below.

What he believes, and what she did not say

He believes she should be sovereign. He said so to her once, directly, in the weeks after their father died.

She did not answer. She has not raised it since, he has not raised it since, and the conversation has never been repeated to anyone by either of them, which is how it is known to have happened at all: each has mentioned its existence, separately, without describing it.

They disagree about Falk and have not resolved it, which is the only substantive disagreement between them that either will acknowledge. He thinks the Council should not have dismissed her. So does Charlotte. What they disagree about is whether Charlotte should have said in the room that the King’s view was a reason, and Alexander thinks she should have, and Charlotte thinks that would have made his view into her instrument.

Neither has moved. It is the first argument of his reign and it is with the person he trusts most.

The Queen Mother

Charlotte and her mother are the two dynastic seats on the Council and they agree about almost everything.

They have voted together on every division of consequence since February. They were two of the three against the dismissal. They are widely, and slightly lazily, described as a bloc, which both of them dislike, and which is accurate in effect if not in reasoning.

Where they differ is in what they are protecting. Caroline is protecting her son, openly and without embarrassment, and would say so. Charlotte is protecting the office, and would say that the boy is protected as a consequence of the office being protected, and that the order matters. The two positions produce identical votes and different arguments, and the Council has never yet met a question on which they would diverge.

Their private relationship is warm and neither has ever discussed 2015 with the other. Caroline was Queen when the reform passed and has never been asked what she thought of its prospective form. Charlotte has not asked her. This is the second such silence in the family and it is the one that could still be broken.

Frederick

Charlotte writes to her cousin Prince Frederick, and she is the only member of the family who does. On 12 October 2028, the day after she took the regency, she wrote him a single line: “It is less than they say. It is also more.” He has shown it to no one, and she has still never mentioned the succession to him.

He is fifteen, at school in New Westminster, and nine years her junior in exactly the way her brother is. Until 31 October 2028 he was the only other person in the world in her precise position: next, young, and not yet anything. Since then he has been in her brother’s, a sovereign under sixteen whose powers a Regent exercises.

She knows what it is and he knows that she knows. She was heir presumptive from birth until she was eight, and then she was heir presumptive again in a different way, and then in 2015 she was neither and has been neither since. She is the one person who can tell him what it is like to be next, and also the one person who can tell him that being next is not a guarantee of arriving.

The letters are letters and not instruction. They are irregular, are handwritten, and are said by the one person who has seen them to be mostly about ordinary things. She has never given him constitutional advice, which she regards as belonging to his own household and his own Governor-General, and she has never mentioned the succession to him at all.

She has met him perhaps a dozen times, at funerals, weddings and the two occasions in a decade when the two families have both been in the same country for a reason. An ocean and nine years are the whole of the relationship’s difficulty, and the letters are the whole of its answer.

She has not met Theo Hartigan and has asked after him twice.

In public

Respected, and slightly feared

She is taken seriously to a degree that is unusual for a woman of twenty-three, and part of the seriousness is wariness.

Members of her own Council are careful with her. Officials prepare more thoroughly for her sittings than for anything else in the constitutional calendar. The wariness is not of her rank, which in a constitutional monarchy is a thin thing, and it is not of her temper, which nobody has seen. It is of her memory and of her willingness to say the exact thing in the exact words at the moment it is least convenient.

The cause she refuses to be

She is the obvious subject of a feminist argument and has declined to be its subject.

The argument makes itself. A woman was passed over by a reform intended to stop women being passed over, because the reform was written to begin after her. Every element of that sentence is true and it is not hers to make, on the reasoning set out above: the person who would gain cannot be the person who argues.

Others have made it and she has neither joined nor repudiated them. She has not appeared with the campaigners, has not thanked them, has not asked them to stop, and has not criticised them. Her silence has been read as endorsement and as rebuke in roughly equal measure, and the campaigners themselves are divided about whether her refusal helps or hurts.

The Register states plainly that her refusal has a cost that falls on other people. She is the most powerful available illustration of what a prospective reform does, she has declined to be that illustration, and the argument is weaker in her absence than it would be with her.

Suspected by monarchists, precisely because she never mentions it

A section of monarchist opinion believes she wants the throne, and believes it because she never says she does not.

The logic is closed and cannot be escaped. Silence about an ambition is what an ambitious person maintains. Every act of restraint is available as evidence of calculation: the procedural rigour becomes positioning, the recusals become theatre, the refusal to join the campaign becomes the shrewd course. The one thing that would answer the suspicion, a public renunciation, is a thing she will not make, partly because she regards it as beneath the office and partly because renouncing something she has never claimed would be to concede that the claim was live.

She is therefore in a position where restraint and ambition are indistinguishable to anybody determined not to distinguish them.

Popular with the young

She is genuinely popular with Germans under thirty, who read the whole thing as an obvious injustice and do not find the constitutional subtleties interesting.

The support is warm, is unorganised, and is a source of some difficulty to her. It is expressed largely as sympathy, which she dislikes, and it treats her as a person things were done to, which is accurate and which she does not wish to be the first fact about her. The photograph is the reason for a good deal of it, and the fact that a hospital corridor did more for her standing than a decade of patronage is an observation she has made herself, once, drily.

Abroad she is barely known, including in the realms her cousin will one day inherit, where the German imperial family is generally understood to consist of a boy of fourteen and a Regency Council of no fixed membership.

Education and formation

School

Charlotte was educated at day schools in Potsdam and Berlin and took the Abitur in 2023 with results she has never permitted to be published, on the ground that a princess whose marks are printed is a princess whose marks were adjusted whatever they say.

She was not a conspicuous pupil. Her teachers, speaking after the photograph made her interesting, describe a girl who was hard to draw out, extremely well prepared, and disinclined to answer a question she had not thought about. One of them used the phrase that she would rather be silent than approximate, which is the earliest recorded instance of the quality that now runs her Council.

Languages

German and English are working languages. She reads French. She has no Polish, which is a small and pointed difference from her brother, who studies it deliberately as an obligation of the Prussian state, and which she has described as a gap she should have closed and did not.

The patronages

Before February she was principally known for provincial civic patronage, which is the phrase the record uses and which conceals a genuinely large amount of unglamorous work.

She holds patronages of provincial hospitals, of two nursing foundations, of a Silesian civic trust and of the Prussian ambulance service, and she has attended them properly for six years: opening things, sitting on boards, reading papers, and turning up in places that had not had a member of the royal house since the 1990s. The work was real, dutiful, and completely invisible outside the provinces where it happened.

It also explains the medicine, or at least sits beside it. The patronages are almost all medical, they preceded her studies, and she has said that she chose them and then found she wanted to do the thing rather than open the building.

Faith

She is a member of the Evangelical Church of the Prussian Union, attends without conspicuousness, and holds no office in it. The formal royal governorship during the minority is her mother’s, and Charlotte has been careful never to be photographed in a way that might suggest otherwise.

The private life she does not have

Unmarried

She is unmarried, which at twenty-three is unremarkable and is remarked upon continuously.

The remarking is of two kinds. The first is the ordinary dynastic speculation that attaches to any unmarried person in a reigning house, and she ignores it. The second is more specific and less pleasant: because she is the elder sibling of a minor sovereign with no issue, her own marriage and any children of it would sit high in the succession, and this has been discussed in print in terms that treat a woman of twenty-three as a constitutional contingency.

She has made no comment on any of it, ever.

What February took

She had a life and it ended in a fortnight.

Before her father’s death she was a medical student in her fifth year with a flat, a rota, colleagues, a small circle of friends from her intake who had known her for five years, and a set of provincial patronages that occupied perhaps thirty days a year. She now chairs a regency.

The flat is the same. The friends are mostly the same and see her much less. The circle has not closed around her so much as thinned by attrition, because a person who cancels four times in a row stops being asked, and she has cancelled four times in a row repeatedly since February and has never once been able to say why.

She has not complained about this to anybody and it is documented only because two of her colleagues, independently, have said the same thing to journalists: that she used to come to things.

Security

Protection was routine before February and is not now. It is present in the hospital building and never on the ward, it accompanies her to Council sittings, and it has been increased twice since April, both times in connection with the Falk case rather than with anything directed at her personally.

She finds it intrusive and says nothing about it, which is the household’s description rather than hers.

The cost

The training will not be made up

The heaviest cost is the one that cannot be reversed: she is now years behind her intake and will not catch them.

Medical training is sequential and it is timed. A final clinical year done in fragments around a constitutional calendar is not the same year, the competences take longer to sign off, and the qualifying examinations sit where they sit. Her intake qualifies in 2029. She may not. If the Council’s business runs as it has since February, and if the Falk litigation continues into next year, the most likely outcome is that she finishes a year or more behind people she started with, in a profession where the first years after qualification are the ones that determine what a career becomes.

Nobody has offered to fix this because it cannot be fixed by anybody. The Council cannot sit less. The hospital cannot compress a practical year. The only mechanism available would be to give her an easier passage than her intake receives, which she has refused in advance and in writing.

She is twenty-three, she is losing the thing she chose, and the reason is that her father died and her brother is fourteen. None of those is anybody’s fault and the loss is real anyway.

The public face of a decision she opposed

She is the presiding officer of a Council whose most contested act she voted against, and she is the person who announced it.

The chair announces the Council’s decisions. She announced the dismissal of Johanna Falk, in her own voice, in terms that were correct and complete, and she did not indicate that she had opposed it, because a chair announcing a decision does not announce her own vote. The vote was published in the record, as the forms require, and by then the announcement had been broadcast.

Most of Germany therefore saw the woman who opposed the dismissal announcing the dismissal, and a considerable number of people concluded that she supported it.

The defence she cannot make

Both hostile readings of her conduct end in the succession, and she will not discuss the succession, so she cannot answer either.

To answer the charge of weakness she would have to argue that she used the chair as forcefully as its neutrality allowed, which invites the question of what she would have done with a stronger position. To answer the charge of manipulation she would have to say that she does not want the throne, which she will not say, for the reasons above.

She has therefore been silent for five months while two incompatible accounts of her character have circulated freely, and the Register notes that she was warned this would happen by at least one person and did it anyway.

Belief

She believes in the monarchy straightforwardly, and the injustice done to her has not altered her view of the institution at all.

This is the fact about her that people find hardest to accept and that she has never bothered to defend. She was passed over by an instrument of the constitution she serves, and she does not regard the constitution as having been discredited by it. Her position, as far as it has been stated, is that a rule that produces a hard result in an individual case is not thereby a bad rule, that the alternative to rules is discretion exercised by whoever holds power at the time, and that she would rather live under a settlement that occasionally injures her than under one that occasionally favours her.

Monarchists find this admirable and do not believe it. Republicans find it inexplicable. Her brother finds it maddening, and has said so.

Her failing

Her proceduralism is also a way of never having to say what she wants, and this is the criticism of her that lands.

Everything in this article that is admirable about her is the same quality: the exact conduct of the chair, the refusal to argue her own case, the reasons given and the reasons withheld, the teaching of forms rather than opinions, the silence about the succession, the silence about her father, the silence about her mother’s part in 2015. Every one of those is defensible on its own terms. Together they describe a person who has arranged her life so that she is never required to state a preference.

The costs are not hypothetical.

Her brother is being taught machinery and not judgment. A sovereign learns the forms from a manual; what he cannot get from a manual is how a person he trusts reasons about a hard question. Charlotte has decided that giving him her reasoning would be giving him her conclusions, and the effect is that the one person he trusts most has withheld the one thing she is uniquely able to teach him. He will need it, and it is not clear who else is going to provide it.

The women who are making her argument are making it without her. Her refusal is principled and its consequences fall on people who did not choose it.

And her mother has never been asked about 2015, in thirteen years, by the daughter it concerned. That is not neutrality. That is avoidance wearing neutrality’s clothes, and the difference between the two is a distinction Charlotte would enforce ruthlessly in anybody else.

She would recognise all of this if it were put to her about somebody else. Whether she recognises it about herself is not known, because she has not said.

At present

She is twenty-three. She is Regent of two states, and by Kamerun’s own law of a third capacity besides, and works a ward on the days she can. She is a year or more from qualifying and may now be more than that.

The Court has voided Falk’s dismissal, the parliaments have abolished the Council and made her Regent, and she has dissolved the House on Falk’s advice: whether anyone can command the House elected on 3 December, and how she uses the powers the Council used against Falk, are not decided.

On 18 January 2030 Alexander turns sixteen, begins to exercise his offices personally, and she loses her power to decide for him. She remains his adviser and supervisor until he is eighteen.

And nothing whatever has been arranged for what Charlotte does after that.

There is no plan, no proposal and no conversation. She holds no office that survives the regency. She has a profession she may or may not be able to return to at the level she left it. Her brother will want her near him and has not said so to her. She has not raised it with him. No member of the household has asked her what she intends, and she has not volunteered.

The Register puts the question in the form the record leaves it. A woman who would have been Empress, who chairs the council governing in her brother’s name, who will not ask for the throne and will not ask her mother about the law that cost it to her and will not tell her brother what she thinks, has eighteen months left of the only public position she has ever held. Nobody has asked her what she wants. It is not clear that she would answer.

The other six

She lost the Falk division to four parliamentarians and two judges, and she has to sit with all of them every fortnight.

The two presiding officers from the Reichstag are the most political members and the least comfortable with her chairmanship, having arrived expecting a dynastic figurehead and found a chair who reads the papers before they do. Both voted to dismiss. Neither has been able to fault her conduct of a single sitting, and one of them has said so publicly in terms that were meant as praise and were received in Berlin as something closer to an alibi.

The two from the Bundesrat represent the states, are more suspicious of Prussian weight than of Charlotte personally, and voted to dismiss substantially because a Prussian minister asserting a general rule about royal discretion looked to them like Prussia legislating for the Empire by other means. This is the reading Charlotte considers the most respectable of the six and she has said so.

The two retired judges are the members she is closest to in method and furthest from in result. Both voted to dismiss, both did so on a reasoned view that the Declaration was an attempted amendment by ministerial fiat, and both have been scrupulous with her since. The retired judge of the Prussian Constitutional Court is the only member who has asked her, privately, whether she is preparing for the Council to be found to have acted unlawfully. She told him the truth.

The President of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus voted with her and is the third of the three. He is a politician, he represents the chamber whose government was dismissed, and his vote is the one most easily explained by interest. Charlotte has never once cited his vote in support of her own position, which those who know the Council regard as characteristic and slightly excessive.

Two capacities, kept apart

The Council acts for an Emperor and for a King and never for both at once, and Charlotte enforces the separation more strictly than anybody has asked her to. A third capacity, the Kaiser von Kamerun, follows the imperial one by the law of Kamerun itself: the regency reaches it automatically, and Charlotte took no separate oath for it, which the Landtag at Jaunde noted by resolution and some of its members resented.

The imperial sitting and the Prussian sitting have different agendas, papers, minutes, votes and seals. She has refused to take an imperial item at a Prussian sitting on four occasions, twice when the item was uncontroversial and once when the delay was, by general agreement, inconvenient to everybody in the room.

Her reason is that the distinction is easy to keep when it does not matter and impossible to recover once it has been let go. The Empire cannot be used to settle a Prussian dispute; Prussian institutions cannot instruct the German Crown; and a Council that had blurred the line on small business would have no answer when it mattered.

The Falk dismissal is the demonstration. It was a Prussian act, taken at a Prussian sitting, on the Prussian royal power, requiring a Prussian two-thirds. Not one person has been able to argue that the Empire was used to remove a Prussian minister, and the reason is that the records show four years of small refusals.

A week

In a sitting week she is at the Council on the Tuesday and the Thursday, in the Prussian capacity on one and the imperial on the other, with papers on the Sunday and Wednesday evenings.

The other days she is at the hospital, on a rota she has been on since 2027, doing the work of a final-year student: taking histories, presenting on ward rounds, writing up, being examined on her feet by people who are not interested in her surname. She starts at seven. In a non-sitting week she is at the hospital five days and reads Council papers at night.

The two halves of the week do not meet. She does not discuss the Council at the hospital, and nobody there asks. She does not discuss the hospital at the Council, and it has come up exactly once, when a member observed that she looked tired, and she said that she was, and turned to the first item.

Her colleagues describe the arrangement as unsustainable and have said so to her. She has agreed with them, in the sense of not disputing the description, and has changed nothing.

The regency as Germany sees it

The Council is not popular and is not unpopular. It is watched.

A regency is an unfamiliar thing in modern Germany: the office had existed since it was created and the duty had never been exercised, and the country has been working out what it thinks about nine people holding a boy’s powers for two years. The Falk dismissal is the reason the question became urgent, because until April the Council had done nothing anybody could disagree with and after April it had done the most contested thing in German constitutional life since the war.

The criticisms run in both directions and Charlotte attracts both. To those who think the Council overreached, she is the chair who presided over the overreach. To those who think it acted rightly, she is the dynast who voted against a necessary act and whose brother’s convenient dissent then leaked. The one position nobody holds in public is that a Council which split six to three on its central act, on precisely the two-thirds threshold, might simply have been a body of nine people who disagreed.

Comparisons

She is not the first person in a European royal house to be passed over by a reform that arrived slightly too late, and the comparison is made constantly and is not exact.

Elsewhere the reforms were retrospective, or the birth order made the question academic, or the person concerned was a child when the change came and had never expected anything else. Charlotte’s case is unusual in three respects at once: the reform was passed in her lifetime and in her memory, the margin was fourteen months, and she is now the presiding officer of the body exercising the powers the margin denied her.

No other European reform of this kind left the passed-over heir chairing the regency, and the Register can find no precedent for it anywhere in the constitutional history of the continent. It is a genuinely novel situation and it has been handled, so far, without incident, which is a sentence that should be read as praise of a specific person rather than of any arrangement.

The Welf half

She is a Hohenzollern by her father and a Welf by her mother, and the second is the less obvious and more consequential of the two.

Her mother is Caroline of Hanover, sister of Ernest V, of the house that reigns over Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America and eleven other realms. The marriage of 2002 renewed a connection between the Prussian house and the Welf dynasty whose kingdom Prussia had declined to annex in the nineteenth century, and it is generally described in Germany as a reconciliation.

What it means for Charlotte is that she is a first cousin of the heir to fourteen Crown capacities, that half her family lives in London and New Westminster, and that she has grown up with an unusually close view of a monarchy that works nothing like her own.

The comparison has shaped her thinking and she has never made it in public. The American Crown operates inside a written Charter, a Rights Act and a federation of forty-nine polities, with a Governor-General standing between the sovereign and the government. The Prussian Crown retains personal powers that are real, undefined at the edges and exercisable by a Council of nine acting for a boy. She has seen both from the inside of the family, and she has told nobody at all what she concludes from it.

Her German critics occasionally raise the Welf half as a criticism, in terms that are never quite said outright: that a princess with an American cousin and an English uncle is not wholly Prussian in her instincts. It is the only line of attack on her that has ever visibly annoyed her, and the annoyance was reported by a member of the Council rather than observed by anybody else.

Medicine, and what she wants from it

The specialty

She intends to train in emergency medicine, and has intended it since her third year.

The choice surprised her teachers, who had her marked for something more measured. Her reasons, given once to a colleague and repeated by him, were that it is the specialty in which the question is always what to do next, in which the information is always incomplete, and in which somebody has to decide now and be accountable for it afterwards.

The Register notes without further comment that this is a precise description of everything her constitutional life is not.

What the work is for

She is not doing medicine as a demonstration and has been careful to make that impossible to argue.

She has never opened a hospital she works in. She has never appeared at a health-service function in any capacity connected to her studies. She has declined every request to speak about the health service, of which there have been many since March, on the ground that a student who has not qualified has no standing to speak about a profession she has not yet entered.

She has also refused, in writing and in advance, any accommodation her intake does not receive. The written refusal was made in 2024, before her father’s death, before there was any prospect of the Council, and it is the document her colleagues cite when they are asked whether her position gives her an easier passage.

It is now the document that will make her qualify late, and she has not withdrawn it.

The reform of 2015, in the record

The debates are on the record and the Register has read them, because the shape of what was said is the best available account of what was done to her.

The reform was introduced by her father’s government as a modernisation and was carried in both chambers with large majorities. The prospective form was in the bill from first introduction and was never seriously contested, because everybody understood that a retrospective form would not pass the Bundesrat, where states with their own crowns and their own succession law were being asked to accept a federal principle.

Charlotte is not named once in either debate. She is present throughout as the existing order, the settled position, the arrangements already in being, and on one occasion as the position as it stands. Members rose to praise a reform that would ensure no daughter of the house was ever again passed over, and sat down again having voted for an instrument that passed over the daughter of the house then living.

The most quoted line belongs to a member of the Reichstag who supported it, and who said that the bill would be a good law for everyone born after it. He meant it as a modest disclaimer about transitional provisions. It has since been printed beside her photograph more times than anybody can count, and he has said publicly that he wishes he had chosen other words and would still vote the same way.

Nobody has ever apologised to her and it is not obvious who would. The reform was right, the form was necessary, the majority was large, and the person it cost has said she agrees with all three propositions.

Household

She keeps a small household and lives in an apartment in Berlin that she rented as a student and has not moved out of.

The establishment is a private secretary, an assistant, and the protection detail, and it is the smallest of any adult member of the reigning house. She has no palace, no country residence of her own and no court. The Council’s business is transacted at the Imperial Palace and at the Prussian ministries; her own papers are read at a kitchen table.

Her income is from the household settlement rather than from the state, she has never had a civil list of her own, and the arrangement has not been altered since February despite the chairmanship being an unpaid full-time position. She has not asked for it to be. Two members of the Council have observed that the chair of a German regency is the only person at the table not being paid for the work, and Charlotte has ruled the observation out of order on both occasions.

What the chair actually does

The office is procedural and the work is mostly reading.

Papers for a sitting run to several hundred pages in each capacity. She reads them all, which is not true of every member and is known not to be true because she asks about the annexes. She settles the agenda with the secretariat, rules on whether an item is imperial or Prussian, determines whether the two-thirds requirement is engaged, and records the result.

She does not vote first, and she does not vote last. She takes the members in the order they sit, and she has never once departed from it, including in April.

She writes nothing herself that goes out under the Council’s name except the announcements, which are drafted by the secretariat, checked by her line by line, and delivered in her own voice. The announcement of the Falk dismissal took her four minutes and she is understood to have rewritten it eleven times.

What she thinks about the Crown’s powers

She has a considered constitutional position and has stated only the parts of it that a chair may state.

On the personal powers, her view is that a Crown retaining real discretion is safe only while everybody agrees the discretion is for emergencies, and that the danger is not a sovereign who uses the power wrongly but a settlement in which nobody can say what would count as an emergency. She regards the absence of a definition as a weakness rather than a flexibility, which is a minority position in Prussia and the ordinary position among the Empire’s constitutional lawyers.

On the Falk Declaration itself she thinks the Minister-President was substantially right and procedurally wrong, and this is the part she has never said aloud. A settled practice of exercising royal discretion on advice is, in her view, what the Prussian Crown has been doing for a century and ought to continue doing. A ministerial declaration is not the instrument by which a constitution acquires a rule. Both halves of that are hers, the first would have delighted Falk and the second is what the Council decided, and Charlotte has been quoted publicly on neither.

On the regency she is unambiguous. A council acting for a child should do the minimum the calendar requires and no more, should not take questions that can wait until the sovereign is sixteen, and should treat every act as one it will be asked to justify. She has argued for deferral four times since February and been outvoted four times, and the dismissal of a Minister-President in April was, by that standard, the largest possible departure from the principle she chairs by.

She has never said that either, and the record shows only the votes.

Manner

She is quiet, exact, and difficult to read, and people who deal with her professionally report the same three things.

She does not fill a silence. Officials who have briefed her describe pauses of a length that produces volunteered information, and are divided about whether this is technique or simply how she is.

She is precise about words to a degree that has become an anecdote. She corrects doctor to student. She corrects the Council decided to the Council resolved, and the Princess ruled to the chair ruled. She has corrected her own private secretary for saying that she had chaired an imperial sitting when the sitting had been Prussian, and the correction was made in front of two members.

She is funny in private and almost nobody has seen it. Her brother has, her mother has, and two colleagues from her intake have, and all five accounts agree that the humour is very dry and mostly directed at herself. None of it has ever surfaced in public, and the effect is that a woman of twenty-three is generally described in the German press in the vocabulary usually reserved for judges.

The provinces

The patronages are almost all in places the royal house had stopped visiting, and she chose them for that reason.

They are provincial hospitals, two nursing foundations, a Silesian civic trust and the Prussian ambulance service. None of them is fashionable, none is in Berlin, and several had not received a member of the reigning house since the 1990s. She has attended them properly for six years, which means boards, papers, and the unglamorous parts rather than the openings.

What she saw in them is the closest thing she has to a politics. The provincial hospitals are worse resourced than the Charite by a margin she has described in a board paper as indefensible, and the Silesian trust operates in towns that have lost a third of their population in her lifetime. She has never said anything about either in public, because a member of the royal house commenting on the distribution of health spending would be a constitutional event rather than an observation.

Her critics have noticed the silence and drawn the opposite conclusion, that the patronages were decorative. The board minutes do not support that reading and are, at present, the only public evidence of what Charlotte thinks about anything.

The letters to Frederick

They began in 2027, before her father died, and they were her idea.

She had met her cousin perhaps ten times and had watched, at a distance, the Household make a decision she recognised: to educate the heir at an ordinary school in the capital rather than abroad. She thought it was right and thought he would find it difficult, and she wrote to say so.

What she writes about is mostly not the Crown. The letters are irregular, handwritten, and by the account of the one person who has seen them, largely concerned with ordinary things: what he is reading, what she is doing, the weather in two countries, and a running argument about a novel neither of them will concede.

What she does not write about is the succession, which she has never mentioned to him in any form, and her own position, which she has never described to him at all. He knows what happened to her in the way that everybody knows. He has not heard it from her.

She has, once, written something that bears on it. After the photograph in March, when the German press had spent a fortnight discovering that she had a job, she wrote to him that the useful thing about having somewhere to be at seven in the morning is that it is somewhere nobody can follow you. He is fifteen, has a protection detail, and is at school in New Westminster under a surname his family does not use. The Register does not know what he made of it.

Assessment

Princess Charlotte is the most capable person in the German constitutional crisis of 2028 and the one with the least standing to act.

She has no office that is hers. The chair is a description of her blood, carries no casting vote, and ends in January 2030. She has no vote beyond one of nine. She holds the position she does because her father died and her brother is fourteen, and she will hold nothing at all when he is sixteen.

Her conduct in it has been, by the unanimous account of people who disagree with her, faultless. The papers circulate. The capacities stay apart. The King is heard and is not pretended to decide. The recusals are more scrupulous than required. Nobody in Germany has been able to point at a single act of the chair and call it partial, and the six members who outvoted her on the only question that mattered are the people who say so most readily.

That is the case for her and it is strong. The case against her is that it is also a hiding place.

Every silence in this article is defensible and there are a great many of them. She will not argue her own succession, because the beneficiary cannot be the advocate. She will not tell the Council that the King’s view is a reason, because that would make his view her instrument. She will not teach her brother her politics, because his politics should be his own. She will not answer the charge of weakness or the charge of scheming, because both end in the succession. She will not join the campaign, because it is not hers to lead. She has not asked her mother, in thirteen years, what she thought of a law that cost her a throne.

Each is a principle. The collection is a habit, and the habit is that Charlotte has arranged a life in which she is never obliged to say what she wants. The cost is borne by other people: by a boy who is being taught the forms and not the judgment, by women making an argument she could make better, and by a Council that would have benefited from knowing what its chair actually thought.

What was done to her was done by people trying to do the right thing, which is the hardest kind of injury to be angry about. The reform of 2015 was a good law. It was drafted prospectively because that was the form that could pass. Everyone who voted for it knew there was a girl of ten on the wrong side of the line and voted for it anyway, correctly, because the alternative was no reform at all. Charlotte agrees with them. She has said the law is the law and she has meant it, and she has never suggested that the people who passed it were wrong to.

She is also, four days a week, a twenty-three-year-old who is going to finish her medical training late because her father died, and who gets up at seven to do a job in which nobody cares what her grandfather was, and who has said that she does not know what she would have done since February without it.

The Register offers no view on whether she should be Empress. It records that the question is closed, that it was closed by fourteen months, that the two people with standing to reopen it have agreed not to, and that the woman it concerns has made herself the only person in Germany who cannot raise it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Alexander I, her brother, who believes she should be sovereign and has never said so publicly
• Kingdom of Prussia, whose Regency Council she chairs and whose succession reform of 2015 passed her over
• Heinrich I, her father, who never discussed the reform with her and died in February
• George V, her first cousin, King since 31 October 2028, to whom she is the only relative who writes
• Lukas Brandt, appointed Page and Gefahrte on her proposal as chair of the Council
• German Empire, the imperial half of the two capacities she keeps apart

Categories

People · World People · The Crown · Prussia · The German Empire