In San Diego, in 1974, Barbra Streisand offered Prince Charles, as he then was, a sip of her tea. He accepted, and the two of them have remained on amicable terms ever since. (“If I played my cards right, I could have wound up being the first Jewish princess,” Streisand said, when he came to one of her shows.) Asked to put together a playlist of music he admires, a couple of years ago, Charles picked Streisand’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” Did that forthright plea of hers run through the royal mind, on May 6th, when Charles awoke, on the morning of his coronation, drew the curtains, and looked up at the sky?
No luck. Even the unearthly powers of Streisand could not redeem the eternal glumness of the British climate. The coronation parade, to and from Westminster Abbey, was quite a spectacle, and, as hoped, it went like clockwork. But the clock was wet. The rain fell before, during, and after the ceremony. The sky was the color of the water that is left in the sink after you’ve scrubbed the dishes. The day wasn’t as cold as June 2, 1953, when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, but it was equally gray; such are the joys of historical continuity. This was the sort of weather that makes even loyal citizens dream of emigration.
And yet, instead, they came. Crowds lined the route and, when permitted, thronged the Mall. Phones were borne aloft, like ensigns. The range of overseas dignitaries was as wide as it was for the funeral of the Queen last September; notably welcome was the return of King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and Queen Jetsun Pema of Bhutan, who must make all other royals, however resplendent, feel a little drab. President Biden, meanwhile, was represented by the First Lady and their granddaughter Finnegan. Lionel Richie was represented by himself. Some guy with a russet beard and a face like muffled thunder, rumored to be a prince of the realm, flew in from California, attended the main event, then went away. (What the hell did he want?) In an unforeseen pairing, Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, was seen approaching the Abbey in the company of Nick Cave. Truly, God moves in a mysterious way.
And what awaited these folk, once they entered the pews? A wealth of music, for one thing, with riches poured into their ears long before the service began. What ensued was guaranteed to leave lovers of the English choral tradition in Heaven—or, at any rate, to afford them a glimpse of the celestial, all too swiftly blocked by a new and purgatorial composition from Andrew Lloyd Webber. The dramatic crux was William Walton’s setting of “Te Deum,” which was overseen simultaneously by two conductors: the ecclesiastical equivalent of the O.K. Corral. One conductor stood aloft, beside the organist, the other at choir level down below. To add to the fun, there was also an array of trumpeters from the Royal Air Force. The avoidance of potential chaos, in the interest of order and harmony, set the standard for the whole affair.
Indeed, a successful coronation can be described as one in which nothing goes gruesomely wrong. In 1838, the Archbishop of Canterbury had to force an ill-fitting ring onto the finger of the young Queen Victoria, who was not amused. “I had the greatest difficulty to take it off again, which I at last did with great pain,” she later wrote in her journal. Iced water was required. As far as one can tell, May 6th inflicted no such agonies, although the arrival of Liz Truss—who, not long ago, was Prime Minister for about forty-five minutes—may have given several worshippers a nasty turn. Also, since some took their seats as early as eight o’clock in the morning, and were unable to leave the Abbey for six hours, the bladders of even the most devout would have been tested to the limit.
We have been here before. Same time, same place, same hullabaloo, another Charles. On April 23, 1661, Samuel Pepys rose around 4 A.M. and went to Westminster Abbey for the crowning of Charles II. “With a great deal of patience I sat from past 4 till 11 before the King came in,” Pepys wrote in his diary. What followed sounds barely distinguishable from 2023:
Pepys enjoyed the pomp, although it created, as he said, “so great a noise that I could make but little of the musique; and indeed, it was lost to every body.” That was not the only annoyance: “I had so great a lust to pisse that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies.” Nothing if not honest, the account concluded with Pepys confiding, to the pages of his diary, exactly where, and with whom (“some gallant sparks”), he then toasted the King’s health. The outcome was easy to foretell: “My head began to hum, and I to vomit, and if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning.” Happy days.
At the heart of the festivities, on May 6, 2023, was a man in a shirt. At one point, much too solemn to be festive, Charles was divested of his robes. Screens were erected around him, to shield him from view. Within this sanctuary, he was anointed with holy oil on the palms of his hands, his breast, and the crown of his head. The choir sang Handel’s “Zadok the Priest,” thereby making explicit the link between this anointing and that of Solomon by Zadok, as recounted in the first Book of Kings. When the screens were removed, Charles was revealed to be kneeling in a plain white garment, facing the altar.
How you regard such activities is up to you. You may have found them impenetrable, nonsensical, or merely fussy. Heretics will have been reminded of the screens that are hastily put up around badly injured horses on a racetrack. Constitutionalists will mention, on the quiet, that none of the palaver is strictly necessary; Charles was already King, from the moment of his mother’s demise, and May 6th merely set the seal upon his status. But here’s the rub: even if you were moved by the anointing—surprising yourself, perhaps, in your response to its mystical intent—you couldn’t help wondering whether so strange a performance really belonged on TV, the most desacralizing medium ever devised. Is the holy not drained of meaning when it becomes just a show on the schedule?
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953, was televised, too. Millions of sets were purchased for the occasion, and millions of people watched the sovereign being led through the timeworn liturgical rite. They were thus relieved of the “great grief” that afflicted Pepys when he realized that he couldn’t see what was going on. But what they received was a scratchy black-and-white flicker—as indecipherable and as distant, in its way, as the images that would be transmitted, sixteen years later, from the moon. Did that coronation feel entirely real, or was it somehow more potent for being held at one remove? Did observers not hunger for a closer look? They certainly went to the cinema, not long afterward, when a documentary about the day, “A Queen Is Crowned,” narrated by Laurence Olivier and shot in refulgent color, played to packed houses. It became the eleventh most popular film of the year in Britain. Just above it, in the tenth spot, was “Call Me Madam,” which, to be honest, sounds like pretty much the same movie.
By definition, the long chronicle of crownings has been marked in non-motion pictures. The sight of Charles III, newly enthroned and carrying his scepter, was, for a second, akin to the depiction of Henry III, say, at his coronation, staring ahead with a busy bishop on either flank. (Just to confuse the issue, Henry was crowned twice—once in Gloucester, in 1216, at the ripe age of nine, and again, four years later, in Westminster Abbey. Hollywood did not invent the remake.) Stillness, you might say, becomes the powerful; the more iconographic the representation, the more plausible the claim to eminence. Hence the frozen splendor of Napoleon, trapped forever at the instant of his idolization by Jacques-Louis David in a sumptuous painting that was finished in 1807, three years after the event. Needless to say, as Joséphine kneels in reverence before him, Napoleon prepares to crown himself.
There is another angle, however, in the collection of the Met. There you will find a related painting, from 1810, by Louis Léopold Boilly, which portrays David’s magnificent work hanging in the Louvre, while the public mills about in front of it. One fellow, on the left, has a guidebook, in which he is presumably checking who is who on the wall above him. Here, in other words, is a picture of people looking at a picture of people looking at an Emperor who wants to be looked at. The modern appetite is alive and begging to be sated, and the man with the book is the direct ancestor not only of ourselves, as we gazed upon our TV screens on May 6th, but also of the guests in Westminster Abbey who goggled at Katy Perry, in candy-pink, and asked her for a selfie in the church. Royally gracious, she obliged. Our craving to draw near is nothing new.
How many of us, around the world, watched the coronation of Charles III is, as yet, unclear. Suffice to say that quite a few of us managed to smother any lofty qualms about intruding on the inscrutable. If so, what swiftly became apparent was the careful, almost cunning, preparation with which every detail had been mapped out in advance. This is a prerequisite for military maneuvers, and a comparable precision had been applied to the minutiae of peace. Who, or what, was the highlight of so elaborate an experience will rightly be a matter for debate. Some likely candidates:
1. The King’s kilted equerry, who is so laughably handsome, and who played so central a part in the proceedings, that any passing aliens, beaming into the broadcast, might well have presumed that he, not Charles, was the leader of the pack.
2. Penny Mordaunt, resplendent in gold-sprigged blue, who, in her capacity as Lord President of the Privy Council, spent most of the service bearing a bejewelled sword, perfectly upright, in her nerveless hands. Proceeding the sovereign down the nave on the way out, she, too, was easy to mistake for a royal personage. Alternatively, if Netflix were toying with a reboot of “Xena: Warrior Princess,” and seeking a new star for the title role, the quest is now complete.
3. Princess Charlotte. Yet another candidate for a greater role than fate has assigned to her. Her elder brother, George, will—if the succession goes to plan—become King in due course, maybe many decades from now. But does she, even now, not seem more naturally suited to the part? In the Abbey, George wore a heavy and hunted look, as well he might, whereas she wore Alexander McQueen. (So did her mother, but she, alas, had to drape the white dress in ceremonial robes.) Self-possessed, calm, and, unstunned by the pageantry, Charlotte kept a firm grip on Prince Louis, as you would on a small cocker spaniel. She has the air of someone who has already worked out, at the age of eight, that the best way not to be crushed by life, however grinding its demands, is to enjoy it.
4. The two Camilla look-alikes who, throughout the service, planted themselves obediently behind and beside the Queen, as she underwent a crowning of her own. Were they on hand, as it were, to act as parachutes? Was the King expected to pull an emergency Camilla if his main Camilla failed?
5. The spoon. A tiny item of vast significance, polished to a blinding shine, and deployed in the anointing. It is the only such item to have survived the age of Oliver Cromwell, under whose auspices much of the royal paraphernalia was destroyed and, as such, a tangible caution to anyone who is blithely confident that the British Royal Family will never falter or fizzle.
6. Rouge Dragon. Not, as you can be forgiven for thinking, a bold new shade of lipstick from Yves Saint Laurent. Rather, one of the pursuivants of arms who formed part of the stately procession in the Abbey. Inheritors of a venerable heraldic tradition, they are easily recognized, bearing a strong resemblance to three-dimensional playing cards. Any temptation to collect the set and use them for a game of gin rummy is punishable as high treason, and should be resisted.
7. The regalia: spurs, sword, armills (better known as bracelets), robe, stole, orb, ring, glove, scepter, and rod. Your basic, everyday royal gear, topped off with a crown. To many eyes, the stole stole the show. Each object was presented to the King by a figure of note from a sector of the British community—the ring, for instance, by Lord Patel, a former social worker and ex-chair of the Mental Health Act Commission.
8. In a similar vein, the presence of Ephraim Mirvis, who is chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. For the event, he and his wife were invited to stay at St. James’s Palace, within walking distance of Westminster Abbey, so that they would not be required to take any form of transport over Shabbat. He was thus able, as he wrote on his official Web site, to “sing zemirot and chant Havdalah within regal surroundings.” A far cry, as Mirvis pointed out, from 1189, when Jews bringing gifts to the coronation of Richard I were stripped, flogged, and sent on their way. Some thirty Jews were murdered that day.
9. Christopher Finney, who was among those selected to present the King to the people in the Abbey, and to ask them whether they were willing to pay “homage and service.” Finney was an interesting choice: the chair of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association, the body that represents the rare souls who have been awarded the highest decorations for valor. (The medals are often bestowed posthumously.) The George Cross is given to someone who has shown great courage while not under enemy fire. Finney was under fire, in Iraq, in 2003, when he went to the rescue of comrades trapped in burning vehicles, but the fire was friendly. It came from American aircraft.
10. Four thousand troops, arrayed in the gardens behind Buckingham Palace, doffing their headgear in unison, as the newly crowned King appeared before them, and giving three cheers. Any fear that the walls of the palace, like those of Jericho, might be felled by the sheer force of the exclamation proved to be groundless. The most stirring spectacle of the day.
There was one big problem with the coronation. Like the rain, it was nobody’s fault. In fact, it may be a permanent occupational hazard of any monarchy. The problem is that May 6th came in the long wake of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, on September 19th last year. Both happenings were stage-managed to the inch, down to the glitter of the last spur, and both passed off with uninterrupted aplomb. But the first was shrouded in a seriousness that the second could not match, and, what is more—in Britain, at any rate—it was as if the nation had already expended its store of emotional energy in the act of lamentation and lacked the fresh impulse to rejoice.
Also, to be blunt, we all go to funerals, and await our own. Despite the panoply of state, the Queen was laid to rest with words and deeds that are used every week, up and down the land. Her end, in that respect, was a familiar one, and something of a comfort, whereas the coronation—the like of which most of us had never seen before—was a royal peculiar, so to speak, and a discomfort zone for all involved. Peak peculiarity was achieved when the King was re-vested, after his brief sojourn in the shirt, with the supertunica, which sounds like something that Clark Kent keeps in the closet, to wear with his supertights, for when he feels chilly on the job. Prince William, envisioning the future, will have needed a stiff drink.
And what of Charles? He seemed grave, touched with melancholy, and purposeful, as befits anyone who has waited seventy years to fulfill that purpose. As even his most ardent detractors will concede, such an imponderable waiting in the wings is not the kindest of destinies, whatever the trappings that adorn it. Charles has always relished acting, and it may be that the prospect of collective performance, at once well drilled and intensely felt, has been a salve for loneliness. Never have I seen him more at ease than at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a merry skit of 2016, when he walked onstage to join a troupe of Hamlets, among them Benedict Cumberbatch, Ian McKellen, and Judi Dench (very dashing in the dark garb of Hamletry, complete with ruff and skull). They all had a crack at “To be or not to be, that is the question,” each emphasizing a particular word in turn. Charles had the task of crowning the gag, and, to be fair, he aced it—bidding the audience be still, and then, gently but firmly, laying the stress on “the question.” He left the stage among his fellow-players, smilingly content in the world of make-believe. Now the pensive prince is a king, for real, although it’s not a reality that many of us would recognize. And he still looks like a man in search of the answer. ♦
