AFTER DECADES OF WAITING, THE NEW MONARCH MEETS HIS MOMENT BY TINA BROWN
SPECIAL REPORT
AS HE STOOD IN FOR HIS AILING 96-year-old mother at the opening of Parliament in May 2022, it was hard not to catch Prince Charles gazing mournfully at the Imperial Crown next to him on a velvet cushion. The irresistible thought bubble his expression suggested was “Mummy, when?”
Cue trumpets. On May 6, 2023, the 74-year-old man who spent more than five decades in the waiting room of his destiny—longer than any Prince of Wales in history—finally walked through its door. King Charles III by the Grace of God, of the (still) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His Other Realms and Territory, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, had placed on his head by the Most Rev. Justin Welby (Archbishop of Canterbury) the nearly 5-lb. solid gold St. Edward’s Crown at Westminster Abbey. Crowned alongside him was the 75-year-old woman who has herself shown years of shrewd, strategic patience: Queen Camilla. Even the baleful stare of Prince Harry, who blurted late that he would attend the ceremony—but without Meghan—cannot throw shade on the former mistress’s vindication.
This was no off-the-rack coronation. A flurry of belabored palace bulletins in the past months about a “slimmed-down,” budget-conscious ceremony suggested an occasion as suffused with mixed messages as the King himself. To whittle the guest list to 2,000 from the 8,000 hanging from the rafters at his mother’s coronation, the cavalcade of ermined dukes was mostly booted in favor of National Health Service and charity workers and other inclusive representatives of an effortfully modern Britain. The few MPs who made the cut didn’t get a plus-one (a bitter pill). Princes of the Blood and other grandees were not required to take the knee and swear a Shakespearean oath of fealty. And unlike Queen Elizabeth’s bladder-busting three-hour ceremony, this two-hour 21st century coronation was not much longer than a Premier League soccer match.
Not that the King would have arrived at his coronation in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach wearing a lounge suit. Nor would much daylight be let into the magic of the anointing when, like his mother 70 years before, the King donned an austere, shiftlike garment off camera and was doused from a medieval spoon with consecrated oil. Unlike at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, no civet oil or ambergris from the intesti
