Are you all set for the coronation? Whether you plan to pay the “people’s homage” – swearing aloud the newly proposed oath of allegiance to the king while watching it at home – is, of course, a private matter between you and your television set. This morning, Charles’s friend Jonathan Dimbleby suggested that this faintly controversial innovation was some ghastly evangelical idea of the archbishop of Canterbury’s (I paraphrase), and that Charles himself would find it “abhorrent”. Which feels fairly definitive.
Even if the archbish hasn’t made a bish, it must be said that the full-spectrum reverence of the run-up to the coronation can leave one always on the point of collapsing into giggles. I hugely enjoyed a Spectator article this week about the spoon used to anoint the sovereign with holy oil, which was described as a “very special one” (agreed), “one of the most beautiful examples of that humble genus” (OK), and “doubtless the world’s most important spoon” (sorry, I’ve gone).
Royalty remains, with a few notable resignations, a family firm, and Prince William and his wife, Kate, have spent the big game buildup engaged in typical tasks for the royals of our era. They go to a gym, where they must gigglingly ride exercise bikes; they go to a pub, where they must gigglingly pull pints. The giggling is key: the royals must show themselves keen to laugh at their relative ineptitude at these tasks, gamely participating in photographs whose message always seems to be: “We are not skilled enough to be ordinary people such as your good selves – thank you for bearing with us!” This maladroitness is very bad when politicians do it (see Rishi Sunak at the petrol station) but very good when the royals do it. It is the form of duty on which we have settled for them in the modern age.
The quality of that age is not unalloyed. Talking to Elizabeth II’s biographer, Ben Pimlott, Princess Margaret recalled the 1953 coronation as a “phoenix time”, where everything was being raised from the ashes of the immediate postwar years. This current moment is very clearly a different one, when the coronation feels to many not part of a general sense of renewal and optimism, with the new sovereign merely the most gilded boat being lifted by a rising tide. Instead, it is a time of contraction, with state pageantry frequently described as the last thing we do peerlessly. By 2024, the average UK household will enjoy a lower standard of living than the average household in Slovenia. By 2030, we will have fallen behind Poland. But will they have such world-beating royal spectacles? No, they will not. A win is a win, even if it is in a game few other countries seem very interested in playing any more.
There is absolutely no question that we do these things rather amazingly. Indeed, we have done them rather amazingly rather a lot recently, what with the platinum jubilee, Queen’s Elizabeth II’s period of mourning and funeral, and now the coronation. Some of the golden hardware is starting to look very familiar from recent seasons of the show. The Duke of Norfolk’s organisational skills increasingly seem like the administrative apogee – perhaps he could be persuaded to take over a government department or three in the post-coronation lull? At this point, there is virtually no question he could do any worse.
The contrast between the state of the country and the state of royal occasions was best illustrated for me by the formation of two queues this week. The first was the expected one, of those citizens and tourists staking out the best spots along the procession trail. And the second was one of hundreds of people, which started building well before dawn on Tuesday in King’s Lynn, Norfolk (population 154,000), after the sole dental practice in the town that treats people on the NHS announced it would be accepting new patients.
Twenty-four hours before the 1953 coronation, hundreds of thousands people were already camping out in London to see the procession. Some of those doing so this time around have said some fairly odd things to the microphones pointed their way, but you can’t mention this or it’s elitist. If you’re keeping a taxonomy of things that are and aren’t elitist, raising an eyebrow at someone fuming about Prince Harry’s “porn book” is elitist, but riding past him in a gold coach with the demeanour of Leeds players largely ignoring young fans at the team hotel is not elitist.
As for the man at the centre of it all, Charles remains oddly – perhaps ominously – unknown. His belatedly saluted prescience on environmental matters has left the depth of his creed unexamined. A totally fascinating article in the New Statesman this week saw its author, Will Lloyd, travel to Transylvania, the rural region of Romania with which Charles is under-the-radar obsessed. He owns two properties there and has visited every year since 1993, holding it up as an idyllic rebuke to modernity. “It’s the timelessness which is so important,” our king is quoted as saying on a tourist website. “The landscape is almost out of some of those stories you used to read as a child.” To this pre-modern simplicity, Charles is in wild thrall, which is in some ways understandable, given that Transylvanians do things like gratefully show him their breads, and – to my knowledge – have never put a private call in which he expressed a wish to be his now-wife’s tampon on a premium-rate phoneline to titillate local readers.
But Lloyd visits the typical Transylvanian village of Bunesti, where people have no shoes and their animals grub in the dirt. His taxi driver points out the sole anachronism in this otherwise ancient peasant scene: satellite dishes bolted to every shack. He tells him that our world is beamed into their houses, and that these people want it. But evidently Charles does not want them to have it. He apparently prefers them to exist in this “simplicity”, which to other eyes looks merely like grinding poverty. Can a man of many palaces – who famously lamented the departure of the servant who squeezed his toothpaste on to the brush for him better than any other – truly reconcile these aspects of his character with a backbreaking existence he so romanticises in others? Maybe it all makes sense in the sort of mystic feudalism that seems to amount to his philosophy.
Yet so many of Charles III’s chosen works echo with melancholy, a sense that he has arrived past the point in history at which he would have liked. Perhaps the new king feels like that other uneasy head of a family, Tony Soprano. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” reflects the mobster soon after we first meet him. “I came too late for that – I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
• This June, Marina Hyde will join fellow columnists at three Guardian Live events in Leeds, Brighton and London. Readers can join these events in-person and the London event will be livestreamed
