From conflict at George IV’s crowning to Charles III’s downsized audience, the ceremony is a constant reinvention
King Charles’s coronation will put the thousand-year history of the British monarchy on display, but the royal family’s pomp and circumstance is not as historic as it might appear. In 1953, for example, the royals had to borrow extra horse-drawn carriages from a film company for Elizabeth II’s coronation.
Sir David Cannadine, a historian and author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, has written about the reinvention of coronation traditions over the centuries.
