After 70 years in the wings... the moment Charles became our King
BY IAN GALLAGHER AND SARAH OLIVER
A SATURDAY morning under an ash-grey sky and four shouted words fly from the balcony of a Tudor palace.
‘God save the King,’ cries the nation’s most senior herald. His words are crisp, clear, forceful, and puncture the stilled scene in the court below.
King Charles III, the longest heir apparent in British history, has finally been proclaimed to his new role. No more our pensive prince and perpetual understudy, he gives a little sigh of relief and something approaching a half-smile appears beneath his creased brow.
Outside on the crenellated balcony, alongside state trumpeters, the Garter King of Arms, David White, is delivering his ritual proclamations. They are, he booms, ‘given at St James’s Palace this tenth day of September in the year of our Lord 2022’.
All this choreographed procedure – this blitz of colour, these trumpeters in elaborate hats – delights the watching crowd. A banker from Washington DC likens it to something from a ‘movie about knights and stuff in ancient times’.
He has a point. Often it is said that Britain excels at pomp, but this, with rare echoes of a more distant age, feels different again. We haven’t seen the like for, well, seven decades. At times it seems almost medieval but with a modern twist.
Take the crowd of casually dressed people, mobiles aloft, who gather in Friary Court beneath the balcony, creating a visual clash with the immaculate blood-red Coldstream Guards before them.
‘Three cheers for His Majesty the King,’ cries Mr White, prompting a response of ‘hip, hip, hurrah’ from the bearskin-hatted soldiers.
There is another fanfare of trumpets and a rendition of the national anthem, which, as thousands join in, swells to a roar. So determined are the people to salute their new King that their three cheers ring out a dozen times.
All over Britain yesterday, those potent, single-syllable words were uttered, shouted, mumbled time and time again: God save the King. Britain has been doing this – proclaiming sovereigns – for more than 300 years, but yesterday, for the first time, the public was able to see the process in action as the ritual was broadcast live.
Gun salutes marked the accession. Sixty-two rounds were fired at the Tower of London by the Honourable Artillery Company and 41 rounds were fired at Hyde Park by the King’s Troop.
Salutes were fired from Edinburgh Castle, Cardiff Castle, Hillsborough Castle, Gibraltar, Colchester, York and naval bases in Devonport and Portsmouth.
Earlier at St James’s Palace, Charles was proclaimed the new sovereign at an Accession Council attended by the Queen Consort, the Duke of Cornwall and Cambridge, six former Prime Ministers, judges and senior Government Ministers – all bunched shoulder to shoulder, a thick huddle of black in the redcarpeted Throne Room.
Nicola Sturgeon was among the dignitaries who signed the Proclamation document. It was the first time that a First Minister – a post that has only existed since 1999 – has ever been present at a monarch’s accession to the throne.
‘It’s a very sad time but it is also one of renewal and hope,’ noted Boris Johnson. ‘Everybody is conscious that nothing like this has happened for seven decades and they are witnessing history, full of hope and confidence.’
King Charles later addressed the room and the British nation. He began by discharging the ‘sorrowful duty’ of announcing the death of his ‘beloved mother’, and told the council: ‘I know how deeply you, the entire nation – and I think I may say the whole world – sympathise with me in the irreparable loss we have all suffered.
‘It is the greatest consolation to me to know of the sympathy expressed by so many to my sister and brothers and that such overwhelming affection and support should be extended to our whole family in our loss.
‘My mother gave an example of lifelong love and of selfless service,’ he said. ‘My mother’s reign was unequalled in its duration, dedication and devotion.
‘Even as we grieve, we give thanks for this most faithful life. I am
‘The irreparable loss we have all suffered’
deeply aware of this great inheritance and of the duties and heavy responsibilities of sovereignty which have now passed to me.’
The ceremony took place in two parts, the first of which included a meeting of the King’s Privy Council, a group of advisers to the Monarch who have typically reached high levels of public office. The six Prime Ministers – Mr Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major – stood at the front behind a low rope barrier and chatted.
The meeting also included a litany of official proclamations for King Charles III to sign, including one that makes the day of the Queen’s funeral on Monday, September 19, a public holiday.
Heralds on horseback rode from the palace and began passing the proclamation across the country, but the news was first read out at the Royal Exchange in London at noon. Historically, this relay of Royal announcements that fanned out across the country was the fastest way to spread word of a new sovereign.
If Charles wanted to know how his people felt about him, he only had to look or listen to understand the goodwill, the gratitude and, yes, the love they were sending him.
They had gathered in their thou
sands along Pall Mall, in St James’s Park, and Buckingham Palace from breakfast time, crushing behind barriers, patiently waiting.
It was 10.10am when that procession of the people who run the country was superseded by the people who are the country. Perhaps 400 of the waiting thousands were allowed in to watch. The barriers were opened and they set off at a brisk walk, heading for Friary Court.
Upon reaching it, they congratulated each other on their good fortune and then fell silent.
At 11am, in a voice which carried well beyond the palace precincts, Mr White, spoke the words of the Principal Proclamation.
‘Whereas it has pleased almighty God to call to his mercy our late Sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth II of blessed and glorious memory… We… do now hereby, with one voice and consent of tongue and heart, publish and proclaim that the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign… become our only lawful and rightful liege lord, Charles III… to whom we do acknowledge all faith and obedience with humble affection, beseeching God, by whom kings and queens do reign, to bless His Majesty with long and happy years to reign over us.’
At 11.02am, he called ‘God save the King’ and then the Band of the Coldstream Guards, along with eight State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry, sounded the opening notes of the national anthem.
Everyone sang, beginning uncertainly, wondering if it was their right, stumbling over the words Our King instead of Our Queen, and then ending in an open-throated act of glad communion.
There was some very contemporary clapping and whooping at the close of a ceremony which predates not just the digital age and the age of print, but reaches back to a time when stories, even this one, had to spoken aloud.
Afterwards, no one seemed especially inclined to rush home. Half an hour after the close of royal business many were still lingering. Among them was Bernard Jackson, 87, from London, clutching a bouquet of yellow roses and resting on
a zimmer frame. The first time he visited St James’s Palace was to see the Queen’s wedding presents on display in 1947.
‘My parents had to wake the chickens in the dark to feed them and we left our farm cottage in Dorset before 7am to make the journey to London.
‘We had no hot water or electricity back then. Everything was lit by oil lamp or candle – it was a different world,’ he remembers.
Since then, Mr Jackson, who worked at the British Museum and now volunteers every Sunday as a sacristan in the Tower of London, has been in the capital for many great Royal moments.
He slept in the rain on the Mall for the Queen’s Coronation in 1953 and was there a year earlier for the lying in state of her father George VI in 1952.
He paid his respects to Queen Mary, Winston Churchill and the Queen Mother and could not countenance being absent for the Proclamation of the new King.
Next the ceremony moved two miles east to the heart of the City of London.
Those streets, usually so empty at the weekend, were also thronged.
People massed around the steps of the Royal Exchange where pikemen and musketeers of the Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest regiment in the British Army, formed a ceremonial guard for the Lord Mayor. Threatening grey skies mirrored the glasswalled skyscrapers looming behind the historic commercial building but, at two minutes to midday, the sun split the sky just in time for trumpets to herald the second proclamation of King Charles III.
John May, 67, a lawyer and upper warden of the Paviors, a livery company of the City of London, summed up the curious fusion of history and modernity: ‘It’s the thing that makes the City such a living and successful place. Like the Royal Family itself, there’s constant change and yet, at the same time, continuity. I’ve found it enormously moving.’
Onlookers climbed atop the entrances to Bank Underground station to get a better view as the procession made its way back to Mansion House.
Others craned their necks and held phones above their heads to snatch a glimpse of City of London’s dignitaries, which included the Sword Bearer and Serjeant of Arms.
James Foster, 33, an economist who moved to London last week from Sydney, was FaceTiming family members back in Wollongong, NSW. ‘It’s been surreal to be right in the middle of history happening – to witness the end of the Elizabethan Age,’ he said.
But the Proclamation wasn’t really an ending – it was a beginning.
By tradition, what happened inside St James’s Palace yesterday is witnessed by a standing assembly of the men and women who embody the public life of the country. Yesterday, though, was defined not by that gathering but by the other standing assembly: the one waiting outside.
To be part of it was to feel like an Everyman, there on behalf of the millions of the new Monarch’s subjects, to watch a new King rise.