Coronation of a King

 Coronation of a King

It hardly seems like 70 years ago but time does indeed fly. In 1953 the late and much beloved Her Majesty the Queen was royally crowned as Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Then Britain was still emerging from the most horrendous conflict it had ever known. The memories were still bitter and of course painful but we got through it all and our powers of resilience knew no bounds. The Second World War had traumatised us so much that maybe we didn't think we could do it but we did with flying colours.

Roll forward 70 years and the then Prince of Wales will now become King the George third in a couple of weeks time and the merry month of May will have the sweetest resonance of them all. King Charles the third will be accompanied by the Queen Consort Camilla. But royal protocol will insist that she be referred to as Queen Camilla and none of us would dare question this highly contentious issue. It'll be a glorious day, the sun will shine incessantly and we'll become very patriotic again. Besides, we could do with a boisterous knees up and street party.

All we do know is that come the beginning of May a new King will sit on his regal throne and his wife Camilla will be known as Queen and this is the way it's going to be. Yesterday details were revealed of the glittering golden carriage that will transport the future King and Queen. It'll be a notably different carriage in as much that it'll be far more comfortable than the Queen's carriage 70 years ago. It'll still be luxurious and splendid to look at but this time, or so we've been told, it'll have air conditioning and may be a substantial improvement on Her Majesty's mode of transport. This is not to say that Her Majesty hated the journey down the Mall and around the streets of London but the King will enjoy the whole day immensely.

So where will you be on this most historic of all days. For some of us it will be one of those once in a lifetime experiences that we knew we'd be a part of at some point in our lives. Sadly the Coronation of a King was the one day we could never have imagined and yet shortly it will come to fruition. After all, most of thought our noble Queen was invincible, that she'd reign supreme indefinitely, that one day Charles would become King but not yet anyway.

But here we are weeks away from one of those momentous, scarcely believable days that will take place. We may wake up the following morning after the Coronation convinced that we'd seen perhaps the most spectacular display of pomp and pageantry ever seen in modern royal history. Of course there were the royal weddings, the Queen's wedding to Prince Philip, sister Margaret and her nuptials, the Silver, Diamond and more recently the Platinum anniversaries because let's face it, they were pretty cool weren't they? You had to be there in order to appreciate or just swept up in the elegant euphoria of it all.

And yet here we are weeks away from another singular chapter in the lives of our royal family, another page in the illustrious history of a family who still divide opinion but for some, are there, easily identifiable, privileged and astonishingly wealthy but we don't think we'd have it any other way. Their lives have been so well documented that perhaps we know too much about them, that all of those by now familiar details of their every movement have become almost common knowledge.

We've all heard about the invasions of their privacy throughout the decades, that whole voyeuristic, nosey parker nonsense that gives us a revealing insight into the royals. We love a bit of gossip when it comes to the royal family but the fascination is surely a morbid one. They may be famous but how we adore the tittle tattle, the salacious Buckingham Palace rumours? Now may be the opportunity to stop this silly speculation immediately since the Royal Family are still the most revered and deservedly loved of any other Royal Family around the globe.

Charles, as has become widely apparent, has led an often colourful and tempestuous life in the full glare of the TV cameras and the whole panoply of the media spotlight. His marriage to the late Princess Diana has assumed Greek tragedy proportions now but the dust has thankfully settled and we can all get on with the business of recognising him as King shortly. When Her Majesty the Queen made him the Prince of Wales in 1969 there was a school of thought that the future for the next King could only be a rosy complexioned one. 

Those who treasure happy ever after stories thought he'd one day get married to the love of his life and they'd both be happy ever after without any complications or troubles. Well, yes he did get married and to all appearances the match was a compatible one - at least for a while. Then we discovered that Lady Diana, as she was formerly known, wasn't the girl we thought she'd turn out to be. The cynics sneered. They thought it had been an arranged marriage and Diana was just a shy young lady who wanted nothing to do with the media. They were proven right but at the time none of us knew the whole story.

To this day most of us remember those horribly intrusive images of Diana rushing out of a nursery, hair wind swept, ducking into her car, smiling awkwardly and wishing people would just go away and never come back. The bombardment of questions about her relationship with the Prince of Wales are now etched into our memory banks. From that point the joining together of Charles and Diana would seem inevitable but full of warning signs and caveats. She was too young and he just wanted to settle down with his wife and children. It did though seem a bit too hurried, rash and not particularly well thought out.

Then on July 29th 1981 millions of people from around the world converged on Buckingham Palace and St Paul's Cathedral, adoring, idolising, lionising, wishing and hoping. The Prince of Wales would be marrying Lady Diana Spencer who would now become Princess Diana. It was the quintessential fairy tale marriage but somebody obviously forgot to tell us. Behind the scenes and now privately, the rumours about serial affairs and infidelities would circulate like a spinning top. Charles only had eyes for Camilla, Diana was simply overcome by blanket coverage of the royal wedding and, although on the surface, blissfully happy, may have wanted the whole day to be over as quickly as possible.

The tragic car crash which claimed Princess Diana's life still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths years after the event. Paris 1997 will not be a date to recall with any pleasure at all since that was the day when the Queen of Hearts died suddenly and unexpectedly in heartbreaking circumstances. The procession which saw Charles, the Queen and Prince Philip, William and Harry bow their heads in unutterable grief and sorrow, can never ever be forgotten.

Charles though has now though happily re-married the very woman we knew she should have married in the first place and on May the sixth, will become King Charles the third. Yesterday he walked among the public on Easter Monday as if everything in the world was just perfect. Queen Camilla, as the King would like his wife to be known as, held her husband's hands tenderly and it felt as though a whole new generation had just been ushered in. Briefly, he put one of his by now characteristic hands in his suit pocket, smiled warmly and pondered on tomorrow, next week, month and year. It had all turned out for the best as we always knew it would.