He’s been through grief, scorn, divorce, vilification, and-much more hazardous to the soul-grotesque entitlement. It’s the face of a survivor, because Charles has been through it. Her face had a kind of atomic composure.īut Charles’s face, his broad, earnest, pampered, beleaguered face, scored by sorrows, pickled in self-pity and self-discovery, full of connective longing, full of strange humors and tantrums, with even the subdued glint of wisdom in it … It’s almost improperly interesting. “How nice,” she would say, and that would be that. She was fascinating, but she was not interesting. His mother, the Queen, of course, was not interesting. I mages of Charles III’s face have been everywhere. I think about it, this distant fact of history, and it staggers me in the cells of my Englishness. K ing Charles I: They chopped his head off. Who are they to rule over us?” Any chance Charles might do it differently? “Nah, they’re all the same, aren’t they?”įrom the December 2022 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on Britain’s petulant new king What do you think of this coronation business, Sandra? “Load of bollocks, mate. Gray-haired Sandra is talkative, in nonstop motion. Sandra and Leo, rough sleepers, true citizens of London’s West End, have established momentary residence in a doorway on Gerrard Street. Celestial foreclosure, and a weak drizzly shine on the pavements of Soho.
Which means, early on coronation morning, skies of sealed grayness over London. A bit hit-or-miss, said the rueful forecaster. W hat will the weather be like for the coronation of King Charles III? Ah, the weather, the upside-down English weather.
We’ll never get over it, will we? And it goes through the generations, too. The whole place was carpeted with flowers and medieval with grief. Chatting with an older man by his camp, I mention that the last time I was floating around the Mall like this, at night, was more than 25 years ago, after the death of Princess Diana. From a patch of untended ground across the road comes the mild night smell of cow parsley.Īll very friendly. Their bulblike tents are up against the metal railings, a couple hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, and they’re sitting in their collapsible chairs, under the gaze of benevolent police officers, with their flags and their bunting and their life-size cardboard cutouts of Charles and Camilla. Wednesday night, the eve of the eve of the eve, they’re already camping out on the Mall: they, the people, the hard-core and faintly crazed, the ones most at home in this event, the ones who understand it best.
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