Will Charles be the first multicultural monarch?

Tim Walker

25 October 2006

I am told that, in the early years of the 21st century, Prince Charles is of the view that much will have to be done differently from the coronation of 1953. It will not be possible, for instance, for the five tiers of the hereditary peerage to wait in attendance on him in the way they did for his mother. Tony Blair’s ‘reforms’ have, of course, rendered them all but obsolete. Although his mother permitted television cameras from the BBC into Westminster Abbey to transmit live pictures of her coronation, they were required to withdraw at certain points in the ceremony which she felt, together with Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to be too sacred. Prince Charles, for his part, recognises that such deference no longer pertains. He understands that if the event is to be accorded full live coverage by the major channels, it must be truncated from the three hours of pomp and circumstance that kept more than 20 million Englishmen and women enthralled in drab, postwar Britain into a ‘less unwieldy’ and more ‘focused and telecentric’ event for blasé modern viewers.

He wants the event also to acknowledge the religious diversity of the country that he will be ruling. In 1953 the Queen pledged solemnly to do her utmost to ‘maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law’. In what will be regarded as a dramatic break with convention, I am told Prince Charles is drawn to the idea that, following the formal Christian ceremony in the Abbey, in which he will be crowned ‘by the grace of God’, there should be a separate interdenominational ceremony in Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster to reflect his desire to represent the peoples of all religions. The proposed separate gathering would be unlikely to take place immediately after the formal Christian coronation, but at a later date.

In doing this he would simply be fulfilling his promise to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in the 1994 television documentary Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role, that he wished to be seen as a ‘defender of faith’ rather than ‘defender of the faith’, the form of words used since the time of Henry VIII.