Poor King Charles. And yet, on the other hand, daft King Charles: he’s served a 50-year apprenticeship for this gig. You’d think he’d have learned, sometime between the invention of the moving image and now, that when all eyes are upon you, if you tell your wife you’re bored, people are going to notice. “But I’m in my gold coach!” he must have thought. “In my gold coach, no one can hear me whinge.” And so, fatefully, he said to his queen: “This is boring.”
He spoke for the nation. There was his grandson, yawning his damn head off outside Westminster Abbey. There was his wife, on the balcony for the historic wave, unable to really focus on the crowds in front of her because she was too busy shepherding her swarm of ceremonial minions, probably more grandchildren, plainly too bored to remember where they were supposed to stand. People in the crowd – and these, you had to assume, were the most fervent royalists the nation could produce – did not seem that wild. A small group of protesters on their way out of Trafalgar Square seemed more exercised about the arrests that had been made earlier in the day than they were about the monarchy itself. I agreed with them; the anti-protest bill probably is more consequential than the existence of a working royal family, but still.
