Charles III Was Crowned King. But Can He Ever Be the Star?
This was a tall order. Charles has never been the star of his own life. He’s been the king for months now; he’s been an international figure for decades. But much of his story has been his mother’s, his wives’, his children’s.
For nearly the entire television age, his mother was the visual representation of royalty. His wedding was one of the biggest TV events of the 20th century, but he came first in “Charles and Diana” only by virtue of birth and, perhaps, the alphabet. Now, in a sense, he is a secondary or tertiary figure in a running soap opera lately dominated by other characters, including his disgraced brother and his estranged son and daughter-in-law.
Saturday, he was at the center. And amid a day of carefully staged celebration, he looked somber, even weighed down by it. Each piece of royal hardware presented to him during his installation — orb, bejeweled sword, robes upon robes — seemed to add psychic poundage. Queen Camilla, wryly smiling throughout, seemed to be having more fun.
Maybe the most peculiarly apt element of the ceremony came when Charles was ritually anointed behind a screen of lavishly embroidered panels. The barrier is meant to guard a sacred moment between the monarch and God, but it also captures the oddness of the king’s relation to celebrity: a theatrically intimate act, staged in privacy before an audience of millions.
Even his departure in a bumpy, lustrous gold coach felt like a symbol of the discomforts of splendor. On the BBC, a panel discussed the challenges and perils of entering a carriage while trailing yards’ worth of luxurious fabric. (You have to mind the creases.)
Source: The New York Times
