CHARLES AND A CARRIAGE NOT FIT FOR A KING

FOR his eventual coronation (alongside his wife), the future King Charles and Queen Camilla are expected to be conveyed in the Gold State Coach.

According to yesterday’s Mail on Sunday, this stupendous 18th-century bone-rattler, weighing four tons, will require a ‘major overhaul for Charles, 73, and Camilla, 74’ — presumably to make it more comfortable for them.

Last week I visited the world’s finest collection of royal carriages: the Museu Nacional dos Coches, in Lisbon, created in 1905 by Queen Amelia of Portugal.

Its most memorable exhibit dates from three years after Amelia opened the museum. In a side room, you can view the Landau do Regicidio: this is the coach in which on February 1, 1908, King Carlos, Queen Amelia and their sons Princes Luis Filipe and Manuel were attacked by two pistol-firing republican assassins.

Carlos and Luis were killed. Manuel was injured but protected by Amelia, who belaboured the assassins with the bouquet she was holding. This macabre exhibit has a sign next to it pointing out that ‘the bullet marks are visible on the body’ — and I could indeed see two bullet holes in the coachwork.

But one of the assassins had leapt onto the carriage itself to fire at his royal target, point blank. One can see how this was possible: far from grandiose, the royal landau is a small vehicle, low to the ground and entirely open.

So although Charles and Camilla may not be physically comfortable in the Gold Coach, when the time comes, they should at least feel much more secure than Carlos and Amelia. Besides, the republican movement in the UK is entirely non-violent.

As for the only male survivor of that regicidal attack, Manuel II remained on the throne for just two years, when revolution forced him into exile in the UK, at Twickenham, where he enjoyed a friendship with George V.

But he must have been a constant reminder to that British monarch of the vulnerability of the head that wears the crown.