Brits embraced the King’s coronation, but is this the last multimillion royal extravaganza?
As the UK wakes up with a collective hangover after the hoopla of the coronation, many wonder whether it was the last royal extravaganza of its kind.
As the United Kingdom wakes up with a collective hangover after the hoopla of the King’s coronation, many wonder whether it was the last royal extravaganza of its kind.
With the royal family under growing pressure to justify its costs and with a new generation of young Brits indifferent to the monarchy, will we see a gold-dripping coronation like that again?
The debate has already begun and it will only get louder in the years ahead.
Most of the country seemed to embrace the extravagant celebration of the crowning of Charles III, but even walking back from The Mall in London after the procession, cafes and bars were full of young Brits who weren’t paying the least bit of attention to it.
Britain is changing and the monarchy under Charles will have to work harder than ever to justify its place in modern Britain.
The palace claimed that the coronation was a slimmed down service, but it didn’t look like a cut-price show. The government has not revealed much it cost but when the figure is revealed it will be used against the monarchy by republicans and others. It is estimated to have cost between £50m to £100m ($93m-1$86m).
Yet most Brits, for now at least, seem to love the medieval pomp and pageantry of celebrations like the coronation and even elaborate memorials like Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. After waiting 70 years between the coronations of Elizabeth and Charles they won’t have to wait so long for the next one. At 74, Charles is the oldest monarch to be crowned, and it is likely to be only 10 or 15 years until they see another coronation.
Luckily for monarchists, this will see the ascension of Prince William and Princess Kate who are far and away the most popular members of the royal family.
The sight of William and Kate waving from the royal carriage with their three young children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, would have melted the hearts of many Brits.
Given that Charles is only moderately popular, at least compared to his mother, and there is deep dysfunction in other parts of the family, William and Kate are now pivotal to the monarchy’s future.
They are a new generation of royals, far removed from the old-school upbringing of Charles and much more able to relate to the younger Brits that they will need to win over.
The kind of coronation that William and Kate will depend, above all, on public mood at the time.
The Brits love royal hoopla and if there is still solid support for the monarchy when it’s William’s turn on the throne, we can expect another gold-dripping extravaganza like we saw on Saturday.
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 cost £912,000, or £20.5m in today’s pounds.
The coronation of Charles’s grandfather George VI in 1937 was the most expensive in 300 years, costing £454,000 in 1937 or £24.8m today.
But cut-price coronations have existed. William IV in 1831 didn’t want a coronation at all, and reluctantly held one that became known as “the Penny Coronation”, costing just £43,000, or £3.6m in today’s pounds.
Taxpayers foot the bill for coronations in Britain and a recent YouGov poll shows 51 cent of Britons do not think it should be funded by the government.
This figure is likely to rise, given that another YouGov poll last October found only 55 per cent of the population believed the monarchy was good for Britain compared to 88 per cent in 1969.
This drop in support is most apparent with those under 35, with 43 per cent of under-35s now preferring a monarchy to a republic compared with 70 per cent in Ipsos’ polls in 2012.
But the flip-side of these trends is that polls also show that many people who opposed or were indifferent to the monarchy when they were young become more supportive of it as they age.
We may have seen the last of the truly extravagant coronations, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The Brits still love an over-the-top royal gala and there are two reasons why they would be happy to have another one: William and Kate.
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