On the morning of Saturday 6 May, King Charles III will waken to the realisation that this is the day which he has anticipated, or perhaps dreaded, all his life. Yet there is no reason to suppose he will be nervous. He is a veteran of royal occasions by the thousand and, specifically, his own two weddings which he experienced at the ages of 32 and then 56; perhaps he once imagined his coronation would happen sometime between these two. Now he is 74 and, if anything will cloud the experience for him, it might be the memories of his parents’ recent (and comparably momentous) funerals.
But how do we imagine he will feel about his role in this sumptuous ritual which is in its way a survival from Britain’s pre-Reformation Catholic past? And is there anything in the movies to help us? The most famous coronation scene in cinema comes to us via Shakespeare, in the form of Henry’s icy rejection of Falstaff on his coronation day in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, his concatenated mashup of Richard II, both parts of Henry IV and Henry V. Keith Baxter’s Hal – his face nightmarishly shot from below, from Falstaff’s supplicant position, in fact – humiliates Welles’s desperately cringing rascal, when this scapegrace former pal presumes to approach him on the day itself, sensationally disrupting the ceremony: “I know thee not old man.”
