A Week Ago Today

Reflecting on the magnificent, and in its own way, ground-breaking coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla

A portrait of the “Working Royals” with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace after the Coronation

I spent last Saturday offering commentary in a TV studio at CNN’s bureau in Shoreditch, three miles from Westminster Abbey. But it’s also only a half mile from one of the King’s proudest accomplishments as Prince of Wales. His vision of a foundation devoted to traditional art and “sustainable urbanism”—restoring old buildings and designing new communities on a human scale—became reality in a renovated furrier’s warehouse in a gritty East London industrial neighborhood more than two decades ago.

In 2014 the Queen showed her approval by renaming the Prince’s Drawing School the Royal Drawing School, bringing it into the ranks of the Royal Ballet School and the Royal Academy. The prince, who was originally mocked for going against the grain of art schools by teaching draftsmanship, expressed his pleasure that the new status would ensure that future generations could experience “the great tradition of the quiet, intense process of drawing from observation.”

The Royal Drawing School in Shoreditch

I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched the coronation unfold, that the King’s sophisticated appreciation of the arts had infused the thousand-year-old ceremony in delightful ways, even as he honored the ancient traditions. As expected, there was not a tiara to be seen in the congregation of 2,000 guests—a dramatic departure from the coronation of his mother in 1953 and his grandparents in 1937. The headpiece worn by the Princess of Wales—and replicated in miniature for Princess Charlotte—was “floral” in character, as predicted—but cleverly reinvented as silver leaves entwined with silver threadwork and crystals.

Evoking nature with a dash of splendor, the silver and crystal headpieces worn by the Princess of Wales and Princess Charlotte were stunning

There was a similar reverence for nature displayed on the screen that shielded the King during his sacred anointing. Previous monarchs had been anointed under a golden cloth canopy held on silver poles by members of the nobility. Charles’s innovation was a three-sided screen that offered additional privacy as well as a design inspired by a stained glass window in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace that depicts the nations of the Commonwealth within a tree.