King Charles III has been known for promoting some very progressive and sometimes radical, unorthodox policies long before his ascension to the British throne.
While the royal family is expected to remain above politics, the 73-year-old Charles through the years has discussed policies, and even worked to persuade government officials to embrace his causes.
Charles has promoted extreme climate change policies, even advocating these long before other world leaders regarded climate change as a major issue, and he has advocated for such things as organic farming, and alternative medicines and therapies.
In 2008, Charles gave a speech to the EU Parliament offering an apocalyptic view of global warming.
In his speech, Charles claimed, "In the last few months we have learned that the North Pole ice cap is melting so fast that some scientists are predicting that in seven years time it will completely disappear in summer." That prediction turned out to be incorrect.
He then added that the "doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight. We cannot be anything less than courageous and revolutionary in our approach to tackling climate change."
He received backlash from ministers this summer for criticizing a government policy to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Charles also caused controversy within the Anglican church several years ago when he said he wanted to embrace all the other religions practiced in Britain.
The King is not only head of state in Britain, but the head of the Anglican Church. Still, The Express reported Charles even voiced his intention to change the "Defender of the Faith" moniker, bestowed on King Henry VIII in 1517 by the pope to reflect the monarch's position as supreme governor of the Church of England.
There has been serious concerns about Charles over his statements about faith, even opening the door to question about his fitness to be monarch.
In 2018, a British documentary titled, "The Madness of Prince Charles" claimed that "Charles' views on religion go against a long-standing tradition in the Royal Family, after the Prince of Wales declared to be the defender of all faiths.
"He has praised Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, the Greek Orthodox church and other un-Orthodox beliefs, going against the traditional stance taken since the reign of Henry VIII."
Reverend Gordon Warren, former rector of St. Anne's Limehouse (London), told the filmmakers, "If he can't in all honesty be supreme governor of the Church of England, then perhaps abdication."
Letters to and from Charles or his aides to government ministers released in 2015 showed that the then-prince raised topics such as affordable rural housing, the quality of food in hospitals, the preservation of historic buildings, resources for British troops in Iraq, and the fate of the Patagonian Toothfish.
He has spoken out about architecture, expressing dislike of many modern buildings and designs.
He famously described an extension to London's National Gallery in 1984 as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."
Journalist Catharine Meyer said in a 2015 biography that there had been concerns in the United Kingdom about Charles succeeding Queen Elizabeth.
"Some courtiers — and the sovereign herself — fear that neither the Crown nor its subjects will tolerate the shock of the new," Mayer wrote.
"They feel he [Charles] puts his more cerebral passions — his activism — before his royal job. They are a long way from being persuaded of Charles's evolving view: that campaigning and kingship can be synthesized."
In a 2018 documentary, Charles tried to assuage critics by saying, "the idea, somehow, that I'm going to go on in exactly the same way, if I have to succeed [Elizabeth], is complete nonsense because the two — the two situations — are completely different."
Reuters contributed to this story.
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