King Charles Has Canceled Diplomatic Meetings After Brief Hospitalization

For much of the last year, King Charles III has been carrying out his public duties while undergoing treatment for an unspecified form of cancer. On Friday, Buckingham Palace announced that he would be canceling a series of events after experiencing side effects of a recent treatment.

The palace said the king was “greatly disappointed to be missing” meetings with ambassadors on Thursday and a visit to Birmingham originally scheduled for Friday. “He very much hopes that they can be rescheduled in due course and offers his deepest apologies to all those who had worked so hard to make the planned visit possible.”

According to The Times, the king was undergoing treatment for his cancer at a hospital on Thursday when he was briefly admitted for observation. By the end of the day, he had returned home to Clarence House and canceled his subsequent events as a precautionary measure. Palace sources told the newspaper that the side effects were minor and are not expected to affect the king and Queen Camilla’s planned tour of Italy from April 7 to 10. One source added that Thursday’s situation was a “most minor bump in a road that’s very much heading in the right direction.”

While in Italy, the king and queen were planning to visit Pope Francis for the Vatican’s Papal Jubilee. Following five weeks of treatment for a life-threatening double pneumonia, the pope was discharged from Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Sunday. Citing his ongoing recovery, the palace announced Tuesday that Charles and Camilla would be postponing their visit to the Vatican, though the rest of the Italy tour would continue as planned.