No one under the age of 75 can have anything but the haziest memory of the last time we did this. Britain has not witnessed a coronation since 1953, and even those who remember the crowning of Elizabeth II will have little to guide them. We are a different country now, and Charles a very different prospective monarch – if only because of one simple, unavoidable fact: he is an old king.
Start not with him, but with us. The Britain of 1953 would scarcely recognise itself in the Britain of 2023. Obviously the entire world has transformed. Ask someone who recalls the last coronation and they’ll soon tell you about the novel thrill of seeing the ceremony on live television, perhaps at the home of a neighbour who was the one person on the street lucky enough to own a “set”. Today, almost every one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket, complete with a screen able to carry live colour pictures from anywhere on Earth – or even of a distant planet.
The changes wrought in Britain are especially sharp. Not long before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, she famously dedicated herself to a life of service to the “great imperial family to which we all belong”. In 1953, India was only six years into its newly won independence and the British empire still reached across the globe. True, the country had been drained by the war against fascism but Britain remained a military power of serious heft. More than 40,000 troops took part in Elizabeth’s coronation – drawn from a military that numbered more than 850,000 – with 24 military bands, and a naval review at Spithead involving 190 ships.
Today the headcount of the UK armed forces has shrunk to fewer than 150,000. As the Constitution Unit at University College London put it in a recent paper, the UK “still has an international monarchy, with the king being head of state of 14 other countries” but “it is no longer a major international power”. If this weekend’s ceremonies are more modest than those of 70 years ago, that will only be partly down to the new king’s reported preference for a more modern, slimmed-down monarchy. It will also be because, as the scholars at UCL put it, “the UK no longer has the capacity to mount anything like [the] spectacle” that installed his mother.
As for “the great imperial family”, in 1953 few were asking tough questions about what Britain had done in the name of empire; instead, the concern of the hour was how Britain had begun to lose it. The idea that a king would one day be asked to account for, and apologise for, the crimes of empire, including the crown’s profiting from slavery, would have seemed as remote a prospect, and as unimaginable, as a tweet.
Another change is so profound, we barely notice it. The coronation would have been understood by the generation of 1953 as a religious event, and not only because it took place in Westminster Abbey. Pollsters found that 34% of 1950s Britons believed Elizabeth had been placed on the throne by the hand of God. Yet by 1992 a survey could find not a single respondent who was even aware, unbidden, that the monarchy had a religious dimension at all.
Charles inherits a realm in which not merely belief in the divine right of kings has faded, but belief itself. Less than half of the population of England and Wales, a mere 46.2%, identify as Christian, according to the 2021 census – and 37.2% say they have no religion at all. Lots of people will watch an Anglican service on television this weekend, but fewer than 2% attend one regularly. The coronation of King Charles will be more inclusive than the last, with representatives of other creeds present – even if he will vow to be Defender of the Faith, namely Protestantism, rather than the more ecumenical “defender of faith” as he once suggested was his preference. This pluralism clearly stems from a conviction of the king’s, but it is also – like the relatively pared-down pageantry – a recognition of reality.
The same will be true of some of the other ceremonial tweaks. There will be more explicit recognition that this is a kingdom made up of several nations, reflecting the devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that were still decades away in 1953. Peers will have less of a role, a nod to the fact that most – though, incredibly, not all – of the hereditary peers lost their seats in the House of Lords under the last Labour government. Expect some of the most archaic ritual, such as that requiring assorted nobles to assert their right to render service to the monarch in a “court of claims”, to be reduced or quietly dropped. These amendments may be offered as evidence of the new king’s modernising instincts, but they will also be born of a pragmatic recognition that there are limits to just how much feudal flummery contemporary Britons are prepared to stomach.
So 6 May 2023 will be billed as a coronation for the people we now are, rather than the country we used to be. And yet, none of these changes touches on the main difference between then and now. In 1953, a nation battered by war, with its ration book still in the kitchen drawer, gathered to watch the anointing of a young queen. That act in itself seemed like a harbinger of renewal. Elizabeth was a new mother, who had given birth twice and would do so twice more as queen.
Her son is an old king, already a grandfather. Indeed, at 74, he is the oldest new monarch, man or woman, ever to have the crown placed on his head. His nearest competitors for that title lag miles behind. William IV was not yet 65 when he acceded in 1830. Edward VII, like Charles a seemingly perennial Prince of Wales who spent most of his life waiting to succeed his mother, Queen Victoria, took over at the age of 59. Even George IV, another son forced to wait and wait for a long-lived parent, was a mere 57 when George III died and the crown finally became his. Charles has had to wait longer than anyone before. By the time his mother had reached the age he is now, she was gearing up for her golden jubilee.
It makes for an awkward inheritance, and not only because there can be few harder acts to follow than a head of state who, even the staunchest republicans had to admit, barely put a foot wrong over seven decades. No, a different legacy comes to mind: namely the place an aged king occupies in the folk memory of these islands.
“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” are the opening words of England 1819, Shelley’s sonnet describing a country then ruled by an ailing George III who appeared to have lost not only the American colonies 40-odd years earlier, but his mind. Thanks in part to Alan Bennett’s hit play and film The Madness of King George, that image of the fading monarch lingers in the public imagination.
Of course, it was already there. In the Bible, age might be associated with wisdom, but in the English literary canon the most famous old king is also the most foolish. Generations of schoolchildren and theatre audiences have grown up studying and watching King Lear as he descends into vanity, delusion and, like George III, seeming lunacy. To be sure, in those stories Lear and George were at the ends of their reign; Charles is at the start of his. But while Elizabeth benefited from the vague, even subliminal cultural associations triggered by the accession of a young queen – Boudicca, Elizabeth I, Victoria – the arrival of an older king rings less helpful bells in the collective memory.
Still, Charles can find comfort elsewhere in the canon. In Shakespeare’s late plays, once the writer was approaching the autumn of his life and career, he took a more benign view of those monarchs whose faces are becoming lined and whose hair is turning grey. The literary scholar Prof John Mullan is struck that three of that final quartet – The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest – are concerned with “ageing rulers who have to come to terms with handing power on to the next generation”. Whether in Leontes, Prospero or Cymbeline, the older Shakespeare offers an alternative to the Lear model: a twilight sovereign who accepts their heyday is done, who has mellowed and become content with watching over those who will follow. Mullan suggests the bard’s final works might send a useful message to the new king: “Be a nice, wise, old guy – and look after William and Kate. That’s what Shakespeare would want.”
That may be a smart strategy; indeed, it may be the one Charles is already embarked upon. He cannot replicate the trick pulled off by his mother in 1953 and thereafter, of functioning as a blank screen on to which Britons could project whatever they liked. She was young enough to be an empty vessel. But Charles has been waiting so long, in line for the throne since the day in November 1948 when he was born, that he is an utterly known quantity.
Where Elizabeth had distance and mystery, he has been part of the furniture since the Attlee government. Like the eponymous character in The Truman Show, he has grown up in front of us and in the age of television. He has given interviews – which she never did – including one in which he admitted being unfaithful to a woman much of the British public adored. His voice has been heard in intimate talk with the woman he himself adored – and who is now his wife – confessing a fantasy whose recollection can still make one blush or squirm, depending on your disposition. The last season of the Peter Morgan drama prompted a series of helpful online explainers for younger viewers, with headlines such as “Yes, The Crown’s Tampongate really happened”.
It’s not just the years he has spent in the public spotlight. It’s also what he has done while there. Elizabeth understood that the role of constitutional monarch required a deep neutrality: more than a vow of silence on any issue of controversy, it demanded an absence even of clues to the royal state of mind. That was possible for the late queen, because she had been effectively silent as heir. But that is not the case for Charles.
Plenty of progressives may like to credit him now as a visionary, for his early interest in the environment or the respect he showed other faiths, including Islam. Others may fault him for his conservative stance on architecture or for the exploitation of his position, regularly bombarding government ministers with the notorious “black spider letters”, revealed by this newspaper in 2015, lobbying them on everything from equipment for British troops in Iraq to alternative herbal medicines. There’s enough in the Charles back catalogue to enrage the right and warm the left – and vice versa. The specific stances are less significant than the fact that they exist at all. He is nobody’s idea of a blank page.
The king has long been aware of the problem, says one former aide: “He would acknowledge, and be self-deprecating about, this label of being a meddler.” In recent years, as his accession to the throne loomed, he changed tack. He dialled down what the ex-adviser diplomatically calls “targeted conversations” – bending the ear of officials and ministers – and where he once ran towards controversy, he began to shy away from it. There was talk of him attending the Cop summit on the climate crisis in Sharm el-Sheikh last November, but that was quietly cancelled. “I haven’t seen him say or do anything controversial in years,” says the former official.
The strategy has mostly paid off. What was once radioactive is now gently accepted. Consider the place of his wife. At the height of the Diana wars, Camilla was a tabloid hate figure, reviled as the woman who came between a prince and his fairytale princess. Even when the self-styled “Fred and Gladys” married in 2005, plenty assumed Camilla would never be allowed to be anything more than a consort to the king, that the country would not accept her as queen. Yet look at the official coronation invitation. Much attention went to the playful, bucolic, almost pagan Merrie England design, but no less striking were two simple words: “Queen Camilla.” No ifs, no buts, no qualifiers.
What once stirred Fleet Street outrage is now greeted with a shrug or even a fond tenderness towards a septuagenarian couple whose love has clearly been a lifelong affair. But none of that is the same as popularity. After the death of Elizabeth, YouGov showed a jump in the percentage of Britons with a positive view of Charles – but the leap only took him from the mid-40s to 55%. That makes the king only the fifth most popular member of his own family, behind Kate, William, his sister Anne and, still out in front, his late mother – who routinely notched up an approval rating in the high 70s and now stands at 80%. (Harry, Meghan and Andrew languish at the bottom of the league table: if there was a royal relegation zone, they’d be in it.)
The coronation may help, but even this weekend does not present a cloudless sky. Last month a YouGov poll for BBC Panorama found broad support for keeping the monarchy, with Britons preferring it to having an elected head of state by 58% to 26%. At first glance, those numbers look like stasis for republicanism, stuck on its perennial level of support of about a quarter of the British public. But dig beneath the headline figures and the picture for the palace is far less reassuring. Among those aged between 18 and 24, only 32% favoured monarchy as the method of selecting a head of state; 38% preferred election. Support among the over-65s remains rock solid at 78%, but among the young – bolstered perhaps by those who tend to take the Sussexes’ side in the Windsor wars – the monarchy’s future is far from guaranteed.
Once the ceremonies conclude on Saturday, once the standards are folded away and the horses are back in their stables, no other grand royal occasion is on the horizon: the princes are married, there are no jubilees or milestones circled on the calendar. Instead, the reign of Charles III will begin in earnest.
In the final decades of the second Elizabethan era, many imagined the accession of her son would bring great change, even crisis, for the monarchy. Either the death of the royal family’s strongest asset would prompt national doubts over the value of the institution without Elizabeth in it – a republican moment – or it would bring about a wave of reform led by the man who for so long presented himself as a frustrated moderniser, held back by the stuffy, staid ways of the palace old guard and his parents.
As it turned out, it’s been neither of those things – though few would bet against a republican drive in one or more of the other 14 countries that have inherited Charles as their head of state. The country bade farewell to a widely loved matriarch, and then seemed to move on. For his part, the new king is perhaps too accustomed, too attached, to the life of royal luxury he’s always known – the grand houses, the stately cars, the retinue of flunkies – to go very far towards the no-frills monarchy his ecological and spiritual leanings once seemed to promise. The result is that Saturday’s coronation represents something very different from the ceremony of 1953: not the start of a new era, but rather a coda to the old one.
