How lost he hangs in the ermine fur.

How awkwardly he holds the scepter.

How crooked the crown sits, pinched between the protruding ears.

How red the cheeks, although the image processing could certainly help back then.

But the worst thing about the official coronation photo of Prince Charles from 1969 are the sad eyes: the look of the future king, who has just been made Prince of Wales, is a mixture of resignation, arrogance and endless abandonment.

That was the ugly beginning of Charles Philip Arthur George's long career as heir to the throne.

And the impression conveyed by the gloomy photo seemed to be confirmed again and again in the decades that followed: the Queen's firstborn, the kingdom feared, was good for nothing.

He's a miscast.

One who was obviously not up to his role, who earned ridicule and pity and repeatedly failed.

Charles' missteps were so numerous and spectacular that he was considered a tragic to ridiculous figure for long stretches of his life, as an oddball who talked to plants and quarreled with people.

Unforgotten are moments like the interview he gave to Princess Diana shortly after his engagement.

Little did the world know back then that even as the most eligible bachelor in the world, he had managed to be rejected by several women.

Diana later described how clumsy it was to woo the supposed prince charming.

"He lunged at me and started kissing me and I was like - eh!

- you don't do that.

He then clung to me like a puppy for the rest of the evening.”

After she agreed to become his wife, they faced the press together.

Nervous spots blazed again on the heir apparent's face when he failed to answer the extremely simple question of whether he was in love.

"Whatever love means," he murmured, questioning the dream wedding before it happened.

On the day itself, he then got tangled up in the marriage vows.

The progress of the unhappy relationship of the prince couple is well known.

The supposed low point was reached when tapes emerged of phone calls in which Charles wished he were a tampon.

Worse still, Diana embarrassed him on TV, proclaimed herself the princess of hearts and died in a car accident.

Charles' reputation as the heartless stick that had driven his sons' mother to despair and death seemed sealed.

Less than ten percent of Britons still wanted him on the throne, the rest wished he never became king.

The fated son

All of that was a quarter of a century ago.

But Charles' history is so eventful and full of unforgettable scandals that the day after the Queen's death, the anxious question arises as to how this tragic son of all people is supposed to live up to the proud legacy of his stoic mother.

There is still a kind of mourning moratorium.

So far, only the Times has dared to express doubts.

Although she has been insulted as irreverent on the Internet, many will think the same: "Charles' problem is," the newspaper writes, "that we know him too well.

We've spent decades learning about his opinions, interests and fads, not to mention the harrowing soap opera details of his personal life."

According to this reading, Charles III is missing.

what his mother had preserved with all her strength all her life: distance and impenetrability, that magic of the unapproachable monarch that nobody knows and that everyone can therefore worship.

He'll never have that aura of mystery again, that's true.

But there are reasons to believe that his reign will succeed, despite his lack of conventional royal charisma and despite his willfulness - perhaps precisely because of this.

Both history and the present suggest that Charles Philip Arthur George may be in the right place at the right time for the first time in his life.