It’s less than two months until the King’s coronation and Buckingham Palace has been sharing more details about the ceremony in the run-up.
Those include fascinating details about the coronation chair, as seen in the clip below, and the consecration of the coronation oil which will be used to anoint King Charles.
Members of the royal family will gather at the service on 6 May, but what will the Prince of Wales’s role be?
While Prince William’s role at his father’s coronation is still to be officially confirmed by the palace, he is expected to be the only royal liege man at the ceremony.
According to The Sunday Times, Charles has scrapped the act of the royal dukes kneeling to “pay homage” before touching the crown and kissing the monarch’s right cheek, with only William being the one to perform the tradition.
While Charles’s coronation will follow many of the traditions seen at his mother Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, there are also expected to be significant differences.
Charles’s modernized coronation is expected to be a “reflection” of the monarch’s role in today’s society while being “rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry”.
The length of the ceremony itself has been cut down to 60 minutes, in comparison to the late Queen’s four-hour service.
And while the Queen had over 8,000 attendees, Charles has reportedly slashed his guestlist to just 2,000 guests.
The coronation of the King and Queen Consort will take place at Westminster Abbey on Saturday 6 May, conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
According to the palace, it will be “a solemn religious service, as well as an occasion for celebration and pageantry”.
Sunday 7 May will see a coronation concert, similar to the Party at the Palace of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, outside Windsor Castle and promises to feature “global music icons and contemporary stars”.
