There were 150 BBC cameras inside and outside of Westminster Abbey for King Charles III’s coronation and a platoon’s worth of TV personnel twizzling the knobs and tech thingumabobs and yet not one managed to capture what would have to be one of the most charming moments of the day.
After the ceremony, the Duke of Norfolk (real name, Edward Fitzalan-Howard) who in his capacity as Earl Marshall was in charge of planning the entire ceremony, was standing by the Great West door of the abbey. As the duke, I’m assuming, was busily doing the maths on how fast he could get his hands on a pint of bitter and a gross of Valium, the newly enthroned King passed him by at which point did something decidedly un-regal. He winked at him.
“Eddie, well done and thank you,” Charles said, according to ‘Eddie’ aka the duke himself.
But that’s not the only moment of high-emotion on coronation day that somehow got largely missed on a day when we all overdosed on pomp, ceremony and awe at Penny Mordaunt’s biceps as she bore the 17th-century silver-gilt sword of state aloft for nearly an hour.
While it was largely overlooked at the time, what with history being made via live stream and Queen Camilla looking suspiciously like she had had a bracing belter with the Marchioness of Lansdowne when no one was looking, Prince William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales came very close to truly buggering up the day.
One possible reason for this snafu? William and Kate wanted to do some Instagramming.
Monday marked a full 12-months since the King’s big day, a moment that he had been preparing for since he was in short pants and Britain was still busy tooting the horn for empire and powdered eggs.
Thus, on Monday, Crown Inc celebrated by putting out a couple of social media videos and the Waleses celebrated the day by doing precisely nothing, suggesting either the retweet button has stopped working on William’s keyboard or he totally forgot. (What’s the customary gift for a King on their first coronation anniversary? A territorially disputed North Sea island?)
Things, however, were far less perfect behind-the-scenes on the actual day. While much of it went off sans hitches and without any of the horses doing a bolt for the greener pastures of St James’s Park, as the clock ticked down towards the 11am start time, a major stuff up was unfolding.
Somehow, every single one of the 2000 of people packed inside Westminster Abbey looking like slightly bored sardines (many who had been seated for nearly four hours by the time the service started) managed to process down the aisle before Charles and Camilla did – except for William, Kate and their children.
Distinguished, longtime royal biographer Robert Hardman explains in his roman-a-Rex, Charles III: The Inside Story, how this came about.
According to Hardman, things started to veer off schedule on the coronation day when the King’s Procession, the horsey, big Household Cavalry convoy that escorted the Golden State Coach to the Abbey, proved too efficient. In short, they went too fast, thus getting Their Majesties to the church early.
(They even, in fact, arrived before their eight pages who were still probably being divested of their Nintendo Switches.)
As Hardman writes: “Although the congregation inside the abbey don’t know it, there is an awkward scene unfolding outside as the King and Queen remain in their coach. It is an added layer of stress that the couple really do not want or need on a day like this.”
Sky News had had the foresight to hire a lip reader for their coverage, who caught what Charles was saying while he twiddled his famously sausagey thumbs outside in the State Carriage. It was wonderfully un-King-like. “We can never be on time,” he grumbled. “This is a negative. There’s always something … This is boring.”
(I, personally, love the image of a septuagenarian about to give himself over to a positively ancient ritual whose roots date back to the Old Testament sitting outside and kvetching about being ‘bored’ like a petulant preschooler who wants their iPad back.)
Meanwhile, over at Kensington Palace, the London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, things that morning had been moving in the opposite direction with the family running about a minute and a half late. The Waleses had been due to arrive eight minutes ahead of the King and Queen and instead ended up arriving … after them.
Pause for us all to adopt an Edvard Munch The Scream-style pose of horror.
Any who, while His Majesty fussed and Her Majesty, I’m assuming, urged her husband to try some alternate nostril breathing to keep calm and Carolean-on in the Golden State Coach, royal staffers were adopting panic stations.
“It is unusual for the two most important arrivals at such a significant event, and over such a well-trodden route, to be so unpunctual,” Hardman writes of the scene in Charles III. “The result is some frantic rewriting of the running order. There isn’t time for the Waleses and their two younger children to enter ahead of the King and Queen. They must now follow behind and bring up the rear.”
So what had triggered the “awkward scene” outside the abbey and ended up causing the King this stress? How did William and Kate come so perilously close to buggering up Charles’ day?
Instagram. And X.
Over the course of the coronation weekend, the couple released a series of glossy, high-sheen content via their social media channels. Per Hardman: “Conflicting sources will suggest that the Waleses’ decision to make a Coronation Day video has added precious seconds to their schedule and made them late.”
As of now, these high-def, largely self-serving and self-promoting, clips have accumulated nearly 110 million views on Instagram and X alone.
Looking at that moment – The King arriving early and irked, William and Kate running behind as they were filmed for posterity and in the eternal quest for likes – is highly illuminating. The Prince and Princess of Wales would seem to have gone into the day with a keen eye on how their participation would play out to a global, social audience and they put their brand first, at the expense of Charles.
There is another major point that needs to be double underlined here – Imagine if this had been Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, if they had gotten to the abbey behind schedule because they were busy making ‘grammable morsels. Certain segments of the British press would have been so incensed and outraged by such a Sussex display that they would have been calling for their deportation on the first flight to a non-Commonwealth jurisdiction.
The upside, at least, is that it gave Charles something in common with his dear departed “Mummy”. In 1937, the then 11-year-old Princess Elizabeth watched on as her father was crowned George VI, later writing in her journal, “the service got rather boring.”
I look forward to Prince George’s confessional video beamed into our cerebral cortexes via whatever neural link Amazon will end up selling in which he complains about being bored at King William’s coronation one day …
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.