Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (3 page)

Now only four of the Queen’s dogs remain: corgis Willow and Holly, and dorgis Vulcan and Candy. Philip and Charles always despised the “yapping dogs,” and William made no secret of his distaste for their “constant noise. They’re barking all the time. They drive me mad.” In fact, none of the male Windsors are fans of the Queen’s corgis—a feeling that was apparently also shared by Princess Anne. In the end, members of the household staff who had cared for the dogs volunteer to adopt them, and within a week the Queen’s beloved corgis and dorgis are gone from the palace.

All of this is simply prelude to the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Viewed by a global audience that obliterates the record set only months before by the Queen’s funeral, the crowning of the new king takes place amidst the pomp, pageantry, grandeur, and splendor that only the thousand-year-old institution of the monarchy can provide.

Clad in their own royal regalia, William and Kate—the new Prince and Princess of Wales—look on as the Archbishop of Canterbury begins the elaborate ceremony. Seated on a chair slightly below Charles and to his left is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

After the Archbishop of Canterbury leads the communion service and prayers are said, the Lord Great Chamberlain removes Charles’s crimson robe, and the new monarch is seated in King Edward’s Chair. Every anointed sovereign since 1308 has been seated in St. Edward’s Chair, encasing the legendary Stone of Scone, at the moment of coronation. “Sirs,” the Archbishop of Canterbury declares to the assembled throng before anointing the monarch, “I here present unto you King Charles, your undoubted King, wherefore all of you who are come this day to do your homage and service, are you willing to do the same?” Their answer thunders through the abbey: “God save King Charles!”

Charles is then invested with two coronation robes—one white and the “great golden mantle,” the Imperial Robe—while the Lord Great Chamberlain touches the king’s heels with St. George’s Golden Spurs (no longer actually buckled onto the monarch’s ankles since the coronation of Queen Anne in 1702 because Anne’s ankles were too thick to fit them). Then he is handed two swords by the assembled bishops and archbishops—the Great Sword of State and the Jeweled Sword of Offering—which he passes to a cleric who lays them on the altar.

The Archbishop then hands Charles a “Golden Orb” encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies symbolizing “the world under Christ’s dominion” before slipping the coronation ring onto the fourth finger of the new king’s right hand. This
ruby and sapphire ring represents the sovereign’s “marriage” to the nation.

Still seated in St. Edward’s chair, Charles hands the Golden Orb to the Bishop of London, and is then presented with two more symbols of royal power. The Royal Scepter, symbol of regal power and justice, is placed in the sovereign’s right hand. It is mounted with the largest cut diamond in the world, the 530-carat Star of Africa. In his left hand, King Charles now grasps the dove-topped “Rod of Equity and Mercy.”

It is at this point that a memory from Charles’s childhood surfaces—the moment when, as a very bored-looking boy of three, he stood in the gallery between the Queen Mother and his aunt, Princess Margaret, to watch his mother become queen. The night before her coronation, Elizabeth, then just twenty-five, had practiced walking with the heavy crown on her head in front of Charles and his sister Anne, dissolving in giggles as she struggled to keep her balance. This would be one of his fondest memories of a mother who, from that point on, had little time to dote on her lonely, emotionally isolated eldest son.

Now, at last, it is Charles’s turn—the moment in history that has defined his entire life, his raison d’être. His eyes widen perceptibly as St. Edward’s Crown is brought to the Archbishop of Canterbury on a red cushion. It is especially fitting that this, the traditional coronation crown, was actually made for the crowning of the last King Charles—Charles II—in 1661.

The Archbishop carries the crown slightly above his own head as he walks toward St. Edward’s Chair. Once he reaches it, the Archbishop raises the crown high and pauses for a moment before bringing it down and placing it firmly on Charles’s head. His
eyes are vacant; he is utterly expressionless. It is the classic out-of-body experience. At precisely this moment, the male peers of the realm in attendance place their coronets on their own heads in unison—the only time this is ever done.

“God save the King!” Kate, William, and Camilla shout loudly with everyone in the Abbey. “God save the King! God save the King!” There is a fanfare of trumpets, and the Archbishop raises his right hand to speak. “God crown you,” he intones, “with a crown of glory and righteousness.” While the orchestra and choir launch into William Walton’s soul-stirring “Coronation Te Deum,” church bells ring across the kingdom and guns thunder in the royal parks—from Hyde Park to the Tower of London.

In full regalia, the crown very literally weighing heavy on his head, Charles rises from St. Edward’s Chair and moves to another royal throne closer to Camilla. While the choir sings, William kneels before his father and pays homage to the King, followed by the other “Dukes of the Blood Royal”—Prince Harry, the King’s brothers Andrew and Edward—and then a long procession of “Lords Temporal”: lesser dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons.

Kate is smiling—not the unfettered, natural smile she willingly bestows on the flower-bearing children and awe-struck housewives who flock to catch a glimpse of her at ribbon cuttings and walkabouts, but the slightly pursed grin designed to keep reporters and the all-powerful Men in Gray guessing. The new Princess of Wales, bearer of the title that once belonged to her late mother-in-law, Diana, knows that all eyes will be on her for some faint glimmer of disapproval, or even anger.

Once the parade of peers kneeling in homage to their king
is completed, Camilla rises from her seat and kneels in prayer before the altar. Then she rises and moves several steps to the “Faldstool”—an ancient ceremonial prayer lectern—and again kneels in prayer, this time beneath a canopy held by four duchesses representing the four corners of the kingdom.

As he did with her husband, the Archbishop of Canterbury anoints Camilla, and then slips the queen’s coronation ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. Once again, one of the most treasured of the Crown Jewels is brought to the Archbishop on a red velvet cushion. This crown is a national treasure in its own right, as laden with memories and sentiment as any single object in the realm can possibly be. It is the Queen Mother’s Crown, made especially for the coronation of Charles’s grandmother as queen in 1937. The first royal crown to be made of platinum, it is set with twenty-eight hundred diamonds, including the heart-stopping 105-carat Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of Light).

The Queen Mother’s crown was placed on her coffin following her death in 2002, and has been displayed with the other Crown Jewels in the Tower of London ever since. Now the Archbishop raises the crown and gently settles it atop Camilla’s head. All the peeresses—the viscountesses, the baronesses, the duchesses—simultaneously follow suit, crowning themselves with the glittering coronets that denote their rank in Britain’s aristocracy.

Now “God save the Queen” reverberates through the archways of Westminster Abbey, and Queen Camilla is handed her own two royal scepters. She then takes her place on a throne of her own next to her husband’s—a smaller throne, but a throne nonetheless.

It is the scene that Charles, in his effort years earlier to sell
Camilla to the public as a suitable replacement for the adored Diana, repeatedly vowed would never take place. By tradition and by law, Camilla has been for all intents and purposes Princess of Wales—among all women in the realm second only to the Queen in rank. But Charles’s wife settled for a lesser title that had also been held by Diana—Duchess of Cornwall—ostensibly as a “wedding present” from the Queen.

The Palace went to considerable lengths to downplay Camilla’s status in the royal hierarchy, but the instant Camilla married Charles she became Her Royal Highness The Princess Charles Philip Arthur George, Princess of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall, Duchess of Rothesay, Countess of Chester, Countess of Carrick, Baroness of Renfrew, Lady of the Isles, Princess of Scotland, Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. This panoply of titles aside, Charles had repeatedly vowed that, upon his ascension to the throne, Camilla would become princess consort—never queen. He would not press to have her crowned—and, he insisted to a wary public, Camilla herself had absolutely no interest in rising above her station as duchess.

In truth, Camilla automatically became queen on the sovereign’s death. Only a “morganatic” marriage would have prevented this—a strict legal arrangement in which Camilla would have been expressly forbidden from acquiring any of her husband’s many titles and privileges. That far Charles was unwilling to go.

There are those who feel this was never Charles’s decision to make. But preventing Camilla from becoming queen would take an act of Parliament, followed by the passage of identical laws in the other fifteen Commonwealth countries (out of fifty-three) where the British monarch is head of state—an unwieldy process at best.

Nevertheless, there is no doubting that resentment toward Camilla is deeply ingrained in the British psyche. The reason: For decades the notorious Mrs. Parker Bowles carried on a torrid affair with Charles that sent his naive young bride into an emotional tailspin that ended in scandal, divorce, and death. In the immediate aftermath of the Paris car crash that killed Diana, Camilla became England’s—and arguably the world’s—most despised woman. “Mrs. PB,” as she was known by palace operatives, rightly believed she would never earn the public’s acceptance, much less its affection.

In the weeks leading up to Camilla’s 2005 wedding to Charles, Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry declared “there is only one Princess of Wales in people’s minds. And only when Prince William gets married, perhaps many years from now, will it be time for another one.” Another Diana ally, Joan Berry, publicly called on the Queen to call off their wedding “even at this late date.”

Berry and Parry had public opinion solidly behind them. A poll in the
Daily Telegraph
showed a majority of Britons were convinced marriage to Camilla would cripple the monarchy, and that fully 69 percent of British subjects wanted William, not Charles, as their next king. The
Sunday Times
did its own poll one week before the wedding. Similarly, it revealed that 58 percent of the public wanted William to succeed Elizabeth on the throne, and that 73 percent emphatically opposed having Camilla as their next queen.

Nor did it help matters that, in order for Charles and Camilla to wed, the Church of England—of which the monarch is titular head—had to hastily rescind its centuries-old ban on second marriages for divorced couples. Back then, the Queen refused to attend the awkward civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, but she
did show up at the forty-five-minute-long Service of Prayer and Dedication that followed at Windsor Castle. At the time, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was so distressed at having to conduct the service that he insisted that an act of contrition be part of the wedding ceremony—that they expressly confess their “manifold sins and wickedness” and offer a public apology for their rampantly adulterous behavior.

Now, more than a decade after her 2005 wedding to Charles, public opinion seems to have changed little. Some 58 percent of Britons still remain adamantly opposed to Charles as their next monarch, with a staggering two-thirds of those aged eighteen to thirty-four wanting Charles and Camilla to step aside for William and Kate.

In the few months since Elizabeth’s passing, Buckingham Palace has slowly fed the press and public details of the coronation ceremony. Yet it has only been a matter of days since palace officials confirmed that Camilla would indeed be crowned queen alongside her husband. There has been the expected initial public outcry, but Charles’s courtiers assure him that this will quickly subside as the country is caught up in the excitement of the coronation.

To be sure, few things can be counted on to stir the souls of the British people as much as a royal procession through central London. On April 29, 2011, for example, more than a million people lined the route from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace to cheer Prince William and his beguiling and popular bride.

Now Charles and Camilla will take the same five-mile route, giving the public its first glimpse of the new king and queen. Before they leave the Abbey, Charles exchanges St. Edward’s Crown for
the Imperial State Crown. With its 2,868 diamonds, including the 317-carat Cullinan II, the 104-carat Stuart Sapphire, and the legendary Black Prince’s Ruby (not to mention four other major rubies and eleven emeralds), the Imperial State Crown symbolizes the sovereignty of the monarch. The last time Charles saw it, the crown was sitting atop his mother’s coffin.

Riding to the palace in the extravagantly ornate, twenty-four-foot-long Gold State Coach pulled by eight white horses, the royal couple waves and smiles, but the reaction of the crowd is oddly muted. Nor can Charles and Camilla fail to hear the odd catcall, or to spot the occasional placard echoing the same sentiments expressed years earlier at their wedding:
ILLEGAL, IMMORAL, AND SHAMEFUL
.

Still, the people have come for spectacle and pageantry, and on that score the Royal Family never fails to deliver. The procession includes more than twenty thousand troops from around His Majesty’s Commonwealth, marching to the strains of “Rule, Britannia,” “The British Grenadiers,” and of course Sir Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” as they make their way past Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, and Regent Street before heading down The Mall.

Finally reaching Buckingham Palace, King Charles III climbs out of the carriage, still wearing the Imperial State Crown and somehow managing to juggle the golden orb and scepters. Camilla, the Queen Mother’s crown firmly in place on her head, trails a respectful few steps behind.