‘It’s the moment I have been dreading,” the new King said to the new prime minister on Friday, “but you do try to keep things going.” This morning, in the ancient courtyard of St James’s Palace, and among 200 assembled privy counsellors, the inevitability of that fact became law: the reign of King Charles III was formally proclaimed. While at one end of the Mall long lines of mourners clutching supermarket flowers were patiently queueing to leave their tribute at the gates of Buckingham Palace, in the upper rooms of its older Tudor neighbour constitutional cogs smoothly ratcheted the succession.
The ceremony of accession was witnessed for the first time by television cameras. Viewers across the world watched Penny Mordaunt, leader of the privy council since last Wednesday, preside over a ceremony unchanged for 300 years. The new King addressed an audience including six of the 14 former prime ministers who served under his mother, their heads bobbing allegiance like extras in a Holbein painting.
Liz Truss, stealing anxious glances across the room – realising with a jolt, perhaps, the giant’s robes she had acquired – witnessed the documents of succession with the new Prince of Wales, the Queen Consort and the archbishops of Canterbury and York.
Charles III spoke with great warmth of “the most faithful life” of his “irreplaceable” mother, of the “heavy duties of sovereignty” to which he would devote the rest of his days and how, “in all this, I am profoundly encouraged by the constant support of my beloved wife.”
On the balcony of the old courtyard, the mass media of the 1500s – men in scarlet jackets and feathered hats – clambered through a window to trumpet news of their “only lawful and rightful liege lord”.
The announcement was captured on a thousand smartphones raised in salute. The Garter King of Arms read from a parchment scroll before bellowing out a “God Save the King!” that might have reached the gods of the Globe theatre across the river. Three cheers for the new monarch rippled around the courtyard and were echoed by the thousands of onlookers in the park beyond.
The proclamation then moved to a ceremony at noon in the City of London; this form of royal news will formally ripple out to Edinburgh and Cardiff and Belfast tomorrow.
If there was a message in this ceremony, even for ardent republicans, it seemed to be: never underestimate the seductive power of the crown, that peculiar pull of tradition and ceremony and eyes-right and bugles. Like no monarch since Edward VII, King Charles III’s accession is carried aloft on a wave of mourning for his mother. It comes with the understanding that, whatever happens, his reign will be seen as a coda to one of the grand symphonic movements of the institution.
Still, there was no denying a rapid sea change of sentiment toward him, reflected in the spirit in the Mall. For most of Charles’s three-score-and-ten in waiting there have been misgivings about his move to leading man not least, it sometimes seemed, from his own parents.
When I talked to crowds earlier in the summer at the Queen’s jubilee, there had been a widespread argument even among flag-waving monarchists that, when the time came, it might be preferable for the succession to skip a generation, fast-forward to William and Kate.
A few months on, however, no one in the crowds waiting to glimpse the new King would admit to ever having held that opinion. Phil Daly, 53, a primary school teacher from Deal in Kent, was typical of those I spoke to. He had come to the capital on the first train at 6.30am and left a bouquet at the palace.
Watching the new King in the days since the Queen’s death, he said, “had made me straighten up in my chair. I admit, I’ve sometimes looked at him before with slight hesitation. The Queen was such a wonderful example. And he has sometimes been mocked in comparison. But I don’t think he’s going to be mocked from this day forward”.
That sentiment was shared by sisters Santa Hirani, Jaystree Pindoriya and Hansha Kerai, all from north London, who had come in part in honour of their mother, who was too ill to be here, but desperately wanted to be; and by Sam Tan, a barber from Crouch End, who was clutching a bunch of gladioli. “I loved the Queen so much. I had to take the morning off to see this. I came because I know Charles will be so great too,” he said.
Doreen Ruddock, 84, and her neighbour Pangi Matabo, 87, had travelled from Peckham, south London. They remembered the previous time all this happened, “not long after the Doodlebugs”, Ruddock said. They are adamant that King Charles will make a more than worthy successor to his mother. “He’s had such a very long apprenticeship,” Ruddock said, “there is nothing that he doesn’t know about how to do this job. Just look at how brilliantly he behaved yesterday.”
They are, they said, along with others I spoke to, getting used to the of idea of “God Save the King”, even though the change of lyric seemed so odd just 24 hours ago.
That feeling prompts the other observation that seems likely to take on greater clarity this week. The news of the death of the Queen, that long-anticipated afternoon of black ties and heroic airtime-filling, prompted the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell to suggest the event would almost certainly leave the nation “unmoored”. Philip Murphy, a professor of British and Commonwealth history at the University of London, claimed: “It’s going to be an extraordinary psychological dislocation for British people.”
“Life has paused again,” Truss told parliament, comparing this week’s events to the national hiatus caused by the sudden death of the Queen’s father, George VI, in 1952. But that’s not what anyone I encountered seemed to feel, not really. “The jubilee prepared us for all this,” some among the crowds said.
Despite the BBC’s stubborn desire to stop all the clocks, and the baffling decision to cancel the football programme (rather than make stadiums a powerful outlet for collective memory), the capital has continued to move with all its usual haste. Heading down to St James’s Palace this morning, the most visible changes were the electronic billboards that had given up on KFC and McDonald’s in favour of portraits of the Queen. Waiting at bus stops you now have the uncanny impression of the monarch waiting for the 210 at your shoulder, giving a reality to Keir Starmer’s memorable observation that, “in spirit she stood amongst us”.
As people in those queues observed, the shift from mourning solemnity to life-goes-on warmth had been eased by Charles’s spontaneous walkabout in front of the Palace on Friday afternoon. The expectation might still have been that the royal motorcade with its sovereign flag would sweep past and into the palace, but the new King seemed determined to do things differently from the beginning. If you sensed that show of easy affection with the crowd had been encouraged by his Queen Consort, it was no doubt prompted in part by a memory of that infamously ill-conceived royal distancing from the floral tribute to his first wife.
His reward for that meet-and-greet had, it appeared, been instant: in the crowd one or two half-embarrassed cheers of “God Save the King” swelled to a tentative chorus of the revised national anthem. That interaction – when, if ever, had a member of the public felt able to plant a kiss on a monarch’s cheek? – seemed to have given a clue to the likely tenor of King Charles III’s reign. He’s waited too long, we know his flaws too well, for him to try to conjure too much of his mother’s stoicism and reserve.
Don’t imagine that he expects the adulation afforded the Queen in that long succession of jubilees culminating this summer; but in times of grim political division and economic turmoil he might yet offer supporters of the institution some emotional reliability, like a much-loved Repair Shop heirloom. Just as it felt like a statement of intent to let the cameras into St James’s Palace and the crowds into the courtyard, so it seemed like an inspired touch to welcome all comers, rather than an invited audience, into the first memorial service for the Queen at St Paul’s on Friday.
The mix of people in pinstripes and polo-shirts, mothers with pushchairs and babies in slings, tourists and locals, reflected the crowd that will no doubt continue to line Birdcage Walk in this week’s mourning period.
Watching the footage of the Queen’s coronation, the narrowness of the class and caste allowed into monarchy’s inner sanctums was marked. Seventy years on, it is an important shift to have a monarch who at least expresses the wish to treat all citizens with “loyalty, respect and love … whatever may be your background or beliefs.”
He knows, and we know, that if he had come to this role in any of his previous seven decades of waiting there might well have been a constitutional crisis in the making. His first measured speech to the congregation at St Paul’s and to the wider world on Friday evening showed not only a keen feel for the tone of the moment however – mixing private eulogy with clear thinking about his changed role – but also a sense that, at 73, he is a wiser, more relaxed, less needy man than in the past.
It is nearly 40 years since the then Prince of Wales spoke aloud the anxiety that has always plagued heirs to the throne. Addressing the Cambridge Union on the eve of his 30th birthday, Charles said: “My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.”
One conclusion of today’s events is that the new King does finally have the answer to that lifelong problem.
So far, it suits him well.
• This article was amended on 12 September 2022 to remove an incorrect reference to officials wearing tricorn hats.
