Culture : Is the Sun Setting on Elizabeth's Reign? : As the queen begins a tour of the United States, there is talk at home about her abdication for the sake of Prince Charles.

By WILLIAM TUOHY

May 14, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LONDON —

When Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II arrives in Washington today on an official state visit, she will be greeted with an unrivaled mix of pomp and circumstance befitting the world’s best-known monarch.

But back at home, she is leaving behind mounting speculation over the very institution of the monarchy and particularly over the appropriate role of her son and heir, Charles, Prince of Wales.

Some British monarchists even suggest that the 65-year-old queen, who has reigned since 1952, should abdicate within the next five, or at most 10, years in order to make way for her son while he is still at the height of his physical and intellectual powers.

While she is said to see the logic of stepping down, court insiders describe the queen as still scarred by the scandal of the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, in 1936, and concerned that if she followed suit, it might so devalue the crown that it would be the first step toward the end of the monarchy itself.

Given the mostly ceremonial role of the Royal Family under Britain’s parliamentary system of government, the whole debate may seem much ado about nothing to Americans. But here, the public seems to have an insatiable appetite for news and gossip about the queen’s entire extended family. “The Royals,” as they are known collectively.

Each tidbit is endlessly analyzed and dissected by the nation’s press, and particularly by the aggressive tabloids which regularly splash “The Royals” all over their front pages. Every major British paper has a full-time correspondent assigned to Buckingham Palace--all of whom will accompany the queen to the United States.

As leading gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, of the Daily Mail, has put it: “The Royal Family is our national real-life soap opera--’Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ put together.”

Given the intense interest in the Royal Family and the close scrutiny by the press, it’s not surprising that both the institution of the monarchy and individual members of the Royal Family regularly undergo popularity ups and downs.

Currently, the Royal Family appears to be in something of a trough--at least as depicted in the tabloid press and in some public opinion polls.

Attention earlier this year was focused on the antics of Viscount Althorp, brother of Princess Diana, whose self-admitted “one-night stand” with an ex-girl friend in Paris was duly splashed across the pages of the popular press.

The Duchess of York, more familiarly known as “Fergie” because of her maiden name, Ferguson, came under fire for too much partying while British troops were engaged in the Gulf War.

Princess Margaret, sister of the queen, is faulted for not paying enough attention to royal duties--mainly assisting at charity and civic affairs--while Mark Phillips, the estranged husband of the queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, this year was accused of fathering the child of a horsewoman he met in New Zealand.

Prince Edward, the queen’s third son, disappointed his parents by resigning from the Royal Marines and going to work in the London theater. Some stories went so far as to suggest he was homosexual, which was vigorously denied.

Even the queen herself was recently taken to task by the conservative Sunday Times, during a national argument over raising local taxes. Reputedly the world’s richest woman, the monarch’s private income is nevertheless tax-free.

Only the Queen Mother Elizabeth, the 90-year-old “Queen Mum,” seems beyond critical comment in the British press, since she is the quintessential grandmotherly figure who loves to bet a few pounds on the Saturday horse races and who maintains a steady round of royal appearances.

By far the most-watched of the royals are Prince Charles, 42, and his beautiful wife of 10 years, the former Lady Diana Spencer. No detail of their lives is too insignificant to report, and almost every day there appears in at least one newspaper photographs of them or of their two sons--8-year-old William, called “Wills,” and 6-year-old Henry, known as “Harry.”

The British seem particularly obsessed with what is regularly depicted as the troubled state of relations between the heir to the throne and his wife. Much is made of the inordinate amount of time Prince Charles spends away from his wife and sons. While recuperating last year from a broken arm, he spent a month at one of his mother’s castles, rather than at home with the family.

“His failure to accompany his wife and children on a recent skiing holiday was crass,” commented the novelist and essayist A. N. Wilson. “One photograph of him with his arm round his wife on the ski slopes would have allayed public fears.”

And only last week, it was widely reported here that during an official visit to Czechoslovakia, Charles and Diana occupied separate suites on different floors of their Prague residence.

“After three nights sleeping on the third floor of Prague Castle while her husband was accommodated on the second, (Princess Diana) flew home to Kensington Palace, her children, her very different circle of friends and a life which has not lived up to its promise,” wrote reporter John Passmore in the London Evening Standard.

“Let’s face it,” commented a woman close to palace circles. “This has not been the happiest of marriages. Charles and Diana have totally different interests and sets of friends. They don’t communicate well. He prefers Bach to the Beatles, Schubert to Springsteen. But there is no question of the future king and queen of Great Britain getting a divorce. It would be unthinkable.”

A favorite theory is that Charles is getting increasingly restless as he seeks some kind of meaningful role as a monarch-in-waiting.

Traditionally, under the unwritten British constitution, the duty of both the monarch and the heir apparent is to remain apolitical and uncontroversial. But in recent years, the man who hopes one day to rule as Charles III has increasingly spoken out on various public issues, leading some critics to suggest he is exceeding his so-called constitutional role.

His favorite themes involve the environment, architecture, inner cities and education--subjects that invariably take on a political coloration. He has privately come out for electoral reform and his remarks found their way into print.

As the Evening Standard put it last week: “When Prince Charles speaks out against the evils of modern architecture or educational methods, he speaks for huge constituencies that are insufficiently represented in our existing democratic system.

“When he speaks out in favor of proportional representation, or as he did in Prague, against materialism and economic efficiency, he enters the party political arena, which is beyond his constitutional rights or powers.”

London papers also strongly criticized the prince for having his chauffeur drive his favorite Bentley to Prague last week--a few days after he had argued, in a speech in Madrid, that automobiles are a peril to the environment. This inconsistency led London’s Daily Star to brand him “A Royal Gas Bag.”

As Charles gets older, reporters say, he is getting more morose and irritable.

Passmore declared: “He is cranky, self-centered, changeable and often indecisive--and he has outgrown the authority of the queen and her senior advisers. The prince is becoming ever more selfish, introspective and consumed with his own narrow interests.”

Charles has just fired his latest private secretary, a retired major general, in what observers say is another example of his difficult character--and his dissatisfaction with his ambiguous role in public life.

As his unofficial biographer, Anthony Holden, has described that role: “The only explicit purpose of his life, put at its bleakest, is to wait for his parent to die.”

Is there any answer to the Prince of Wales’ succession problem?

There are those who say the queen should adopt the practice of some European monarchs and step down in her son’s favor while he is still young enough to establish himself as a major monarch. They often point to Edward VII, the son of Queen Victoria, who waited in the wings so long that by the time he ascended the throne at the beginning of this century, his health was so fragile that he had to postpone his coronation.

Others, like Sunday Telegraph deputy editor, Peregrine Worsthorne, say Charles is the one to step aside. If he were to renounce his right to the throne, Worsthorne suggested last week, it would open the way for his son, William, to inherit the throne. Meanwhile, Charles could “lead crusades, champion causes, fight battles and intervene generally to the top of his royal bent.”

Abdication has been a nasty, unacceptable word in the House of Windsor ever since Edward VIII stepped aside in 1936 in order to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson--a scandal which shook the monarchy.

As one defender of royal tradition put it: “The queen did not get her job by mere promotion, as would a bank manager or a Cabinet minister. She was anointed and crowned in a religious ceremony with the clear understanding that being crowned, like being married in church, was something for life. Once an anointed monarch, always an anointed monarch.”

Others suggest that because of her position of head of the Church of England, abdicating would be tantamount to heresy.

So it is as an anointed monarch that she arrives on her American state visit: “Queen Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

And her son continues to wait uneasily in the wings.

As Charles’ biographer Holden describes that wait: “Privately, his is the story of a confused and tortured soul trying to come to terms with a claustrophobic if comfortable life of inherited imprisonment; publicly, it is that of a caring and thoughtful man in search of good to do--not merely a prince in search of a role, but a crusader in search of a crusade.”

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The Royal Line of Succession

The monarchy is the most ancient secular institution in the United Kingdom. The current sovereign reigns by 1,000-year-old tradition as “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.” She is not only head of state but symbol of national unity. Title to the crown derives partly from statute and partly from common law rules of descent. Lineal Protestant descendants of Princess Sophia, a granddaughter of James I, are alone eligible to succeed unless the member nations of the Commonwealth give their common consent to a change in the present line.

Charles, Prince of Wales, is Queen Elizabeth II’s oldest son and therefore next in line for the crown. After him come:

Prince William of Wales, oldest son of Charles and Diana.

Prince Henry of Wales, second son of Charles and Diana

Andrew, Duke of York, second oldest son of the queen

Princess Beatrice of York, oldest daughter of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson

Princess Eugenie of York, second daughter of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson

Prince Edward, third son of the queen

Anne, Princess Royal and daughter of the queen

Peter Phillips, son of Princess Anne and Capt. Mark Phillips

Zara Phillips, daughter of Princess Anne and Capt. Mark Phillips

Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden and sister of the queen. David, Viscount Linley, son of Princess Margaret

Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, daughter of Princess Margaret