King Charles seems to be prepared to risk the wrath of his wife after it was confirmed he would make his first foreign trip of the year. Despite undergoing treatment for cancer, the monarch, 76, is determined that 2025 will be a case of ‘business as usual’ with journeys abroad the norm once more.
Charles was forced to put many visits on hold last year due to his treatment. But he did manage to spend 11 days in Australia and Samoa in October, an energy-sapping journey that left Queen Camilla with pneumonia.
This upcoming journey is a little less taxing with the King visiting Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He will join other dignitaries and Holocaust survivors at a service held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial, commemorating the milestone.
Ahead of the event next Monday, Charles will meet members of the local community in Krakow, Buckingham Palace has said. The King will also meet Poland’s President Andrzej Duda during his brief visit.
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This will be Charles’s fifth trip tp Poland but his first as King. His most recent visits included one in 2008 with Camilla and another in 2010 as part of a wider European tour which also took in Hungary and the Czech Republic.
It comes despite Camilla wanting Charles to slow down for the sake of his health. Insiders say she held reservations about the journey to Australia, especially as Charles was pausing his cancer treatment for 11 days.
Queen Camilla
She did convince her husband to skip the Cop29 event in Azerbaijan last year but both she and Charles’s medical team were left bemused when Buckingham Palace started briefing that the King would return to a full schedule of royal trips in 2025 even before the impact of his Australian odyssey was fully known.
Camilla herself is also struggling with the pace of royal engagements with pals becoming increasingly worried about her health. Speaking previously, one pal told the Daily Beast: “At 77, to be shipped off to the other side of the world to shake hands with thousands of people when your husband has cancer is, quite frankly, too much to ask.
“Camilla would never complain, and of course she wanted to support her husband, but she never should have been put in that situation. And she got pneumonia as a result. I hope this makes the mandarins sit up and take notice.”
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