It will not be, as Labour Party co-founder Keir Hardie castigated the coronation of George V in 1911, “an orgy for the display of wealth and senseless spending”. Instead, the Coronation tomorrow will be a religious service: Charles III will be crowned in the name of God in a ceremony dominated by prayer.
n front of more than 2,000 invited guests and the eyes of a watching world, he will be formally invested with the royal powers he inherited on September 8 last year and undergo an act of personal transformation as ancient as monarchy in these islands.
For all its sacred significance, a coronation is also the most spectacular ceremony in the British repertoire, what Noel Coward once called “the English state ballet at its best”.
Its stately choreography symbolises the nation’s acknowledgement of the monarch’s earthly and spiritual powers, his relationships with his people and with God. It’s a serious business and accompanied by some serious pomp: bended knees, raising and lowering of splendid headgear, oaths, processions. Bursts of music punctuate proceedings. Some of it has been newly commissioned; other pieces, like Handel’s Zadok the Priest, written for the coronation of George II in 1727, can claim to be coronation old-timers.
Like every coronation since Edgar in 973, tomorrow’s will be structured round key elements: the recognition, when the King is presented to the congregation by the Archbishop of Canterbury; the oath, when the King makes a series of promises about his kingship; the anointing, the service’s most sacred moment; the investiture, when the King receives the Coronation regalia; the crowning, and the homage, when those in the Abbey swear allegiance.
If the participants in 2023 differ from those in 1953 — many of different social background, ethnicity, faith and gender — the way they go about their minutely scripted moments will not be so very different. Just expect less walking backwards in cumbersome velvet trains, and fewer young boys carrying coronets on velvet cushions.
Throughout their history, coronations have been visual showstoppers. In 1953, couturier Norman Hartnell designed not only the Queen’s gown but those of countless royal ladies.
Sartorial excess has not been a priority for a 21st-century coronation. Nevertheless, we can expect visual treats. The Queen Consort has good form when it comes to oversized jewellery. The rump of the hereditary peerage who have received the invitations their forebears took for granted have been permitted to don ancestral robes. And the Princess of Wales surely won’t let us down.
In Britain, pageantry means marching soldiery. Tomorrow won’t match the 16,000 uniformed men, including troops from “the Colonies”, who took part in Elizabeth II’s two-hour Coronation procession. But its 6,000 men and women will make up in slickness what they lack in numbers.
Thanks to a series of rehearsals, everyone knows their parts, from Floella Benjamin, carrying one of the King’s sceptres, to the Archbishop of Wales, who will hand the sceptre to the King. The late Queen’s state funeral was almost certainly the finest display of pageantry ever witnessed in this country. Tomorrow, too, will dazzle the world.
