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‘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 tricorn 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.
