UK: The eyes of the world will be on the U.K. this weekend as King Charles III is crowned at Westminster Abbey in a quintessentially British display of pomp and pageantry.
The coronation, which will be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury today (May 6), will kickstart three days of celebrations across London and the wider U.K., culminating in a public holiday on May 8. The service — the first of its kind in 70 years — is largely ceremonial, following the 74-year-old king’s official accession to the throne on September 8, 2022, the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. A ritual both ancient and made-for-television, the Coronation service and its surrounding events will summon the world’s gaze on behalf of a royal family that has undergone a sometimes uneasy transition from imperial power to global celebrity.
The Coronation will mark the formal ascension of King Charles III as the British head of state and Defender of the Faith. But it is also a triumph of image transformation, with his wife, Camilla crowned as Queen Consort.
However, King Charles himself is said to have sought a more scaled-back celebration, with a “shorter,” “smaller, less expensive and more representative” ceremony — part of his wider plans for a slimmed down monarchy.
Camilla’s branding overhaul has been a huge effort, said Cele Otnes, a professor and co-author of “Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture,” that began long before Camilla’s marriage to Charles.
In the latest polls on the Royal Family’s standing among the British public from the analytics group YouGov, Camilla outranks both Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan. The approximately 2,300 people who have been invited to attend the Coronation Ceremony includes a mix of new faces, old lineages, world leaders, pop icons and a dash of controversy.
Among those to receive the invitation — a hand-painted card by an heraldic artist, reproduced and printed on recycled paper with gold-foil details — are Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, Jill Biden, European aristocrats, Nobel Prize winners, the actress Joanna Lumley, and famed musicians like Lionel Richie and Nick Cave, but also a magician, a hairstylist and a Syrian refugee.
The bunting is hung, the Union Jack flags are hoisted, and the royal emblems have been rolled out as Britain gets ready for a weekend of celebrations for the coronation of King Charles III. The monarch will be formally crowned in a ceremony on Saturday, and the festive agenda will run through the weekend, including a nationwide day off on Monday.
The coronation ceremony of King Charles III and Camilla, the queen consort, on Saturday has been described as a millennium-old tradition of pomp and circumstance, reaching back to Charles’s most distant forebears.-