Pomp, Circumstance, Hard-Fought Invites, And The Endless Battle Between The New King’s Sons

Even stripped down with a shortened carriage route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, Charles III’s historic coronation on May 6 is going to be a party of gargantuan proportion, occurring as it will on what the British call a “bank holiday” (read: four-day) weekend and boosting the British tourism economy alone by an estimated $1.25 billion. Or, put another way, by something like $312 million for every 24 hours over the course of the festivities. Never mind the anti-monarchists in Scotland, England, and Wales then, or the planned secessions from the Commonwealth, $312 million a day pouring in is a fair royalist argument for the British hospitality industry.

On the ground within the royal family, the picture of the long — very long — weekend is more nuanced and fraught. We can argue that Coronation Weekend is shaping up as if framed by Shakespeare, in aspect, not in actual plot: It’s one part Lear, because Charles, assuming the throne well into his eighth decade, knows he is having to work fast; and two parts The Tempest, because his two sons are forever at war and that war, 400 years on from Prospero, is sometimes comedic and oddly magical, spinning out books, podcasts, reality shows, accusatory broadsides and treacherously close-to-the-bone televised interviews with the younger of the two.

Coronation weekend is, supposedly, also, being billed as a time for a truce, or at least a cease-fire between William and Harry, but if things tumble wrong and get any more combative, there can emerge a more austere Shakespearean whiff of the Wars of the Roses’ tetralogy, the three Henry VI parts and Richard III, minus the battle for succession. Finally, as a bonus character in this May 6 coronation staging, there is a Kate, but rather than a forbiddingly tart romantic prospect, she’s a future queen of England. That is down the road a piece, but still, upon her father-in-law’s death, one of the two thrones being invested with new sitters in the Abbey on May 6 will be hers. This latter-day Kate is a sort of understudy in the May 6 proceedings, but a seasoned and very central one. She is important because she will be important.

How Shakespearean is it all? Very. Some of the immediate jockeying in the last weeks has made it more so.

Briefly, here is the state of play: The invitations to the ceremony in Westminster Abbey is the hot ticket. As in any ground war, the situation in this particular social war — angling-while-not-pretending-to-angle for a last-minute seat in the Abbey — is a very fluid one. Given the monarch’s last-minute extensions of invitations to various individuals, which will only sharpen the coming days of social handicapping in London and in various big houses out in the country, the number has been capped on or about 2000 people. The strain among the non-invited is immense. The popping of buttons off the waistcoats of those excellently-cut Savile Row suits is very nearly transatlantically audible.

Which has only provided good sport for the coursing dogs of Fleet Street’s royal-beat press to weigh who among the peerage has and has not made the grade. Notably, in a move that would have made Prince Philip crack a flinty smile, Buckingham Palace has not invited Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s estranged but not-so-estranged ex, although of course Andrew and Ms. Ferguson’s daughters are invited.

Arguably more shockingly, in slimming down the list, Charles has instituted a ‘cull’ out among what’s called the non-royal peerage, very much including the hereditary dukes strewn across the kingdom. That cull has included the well-scrubbed 11th Duke of Rutland — aka, David Manners, squire of the 365-room Belvoir Castle and sire of the socialites Lady Violet, Lady Eliza, and Lady Alice Manners — whose ancestors have played roles in roughly a millennium of coronations to the point that the Rutland dukes have their own sets of crowns and ermine-trimmed coronation robes. The 11th Duke’s mother was a canopy bearer in the Abbey for Charles’ mother’s unapologetically fabulous coronation in 1952. That’s what we call a solid cull.

Which brings us to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. While it’s not every day that Britain gets a new monarch — some 62 in the last 1200 years — it’s also not every day that the British royal family gets a Prince Harry. Looked at this way, it’s possible to argue that there have been exactly zero Harrys in the last 1200 years, kicking themselves out of the line of duty in the name of, according to Harry’s repeatedly stated line of thinking, mental health and family well-being. With no judgement on the validity of his stance, that’s how rare Harry’s withdrawal is.

In a sense, Charles doesn’t have to carry the sum of institutional or personal anger at Harry because William, from his now-famous fraternal squaring-off against Harry in the Frogmore kitchen and on from there, has studiously nurtured the flame of anger at Harry for both himself and the king. As noted Charles is, also, using the coronation as a sort of table over which to broker a cease-fire between the brothers, however temporary, and that has meant that invitations to the coronation were most graciously extended to Harry and to Meghan Markle. Put differently, having just stripped the couple of Frogmore House, Charles and the Palace very much do not want to pour additional supertankers of fuel on the always simmering fire of defensiveness and ire at the monarchy out among the Windsors of Montecito by not inviting Meghan Markle.

In the event, the newly-minted Prince of Sussex, Archie, has unwittingly provided his mother a semi-gracious out in that the coronation weekend is, also, the weekend of his fourth birthday celebration, so that Harry can carry the burden of attending by himself. That Meghan Markle has chosen not to attend is understandably in character — why commit to four uncomfortable days of ‘celebration’ among the in-laws when one’s reception would be chilly at best.

As would be the emblem of his outsider-ness in a Shakespeare production, in addition to flying solo at the coronation, Harry will be forbidden from military dress and will take no part in the ceremony. The weekend of May 6 will be his last weekend in Frogmore House. In a slow seismic shift, the landscape of Britain has changed for Harry. By that is meant, much to the relief of many of the British, that the dialogue over and about the monarchy in Britain is not about Prince Harry and has not been for some time. It is about what Charles is doing, and he’s doing a very great deal.

From being generally and heartily beloved a few short years back, Harry has become egregious, dropping in for this or that show, but, like mosquitoes at an outdoor cocktail do, he’s not much wanted or even very well liked in Britain, according to his rock-bottom You.Gov poll favorability rating of -44 in the weeks following the publication of his as-told-to ‘autobiography’ Spare. The prince must still feel the itch of duty to the Crown, or at least to his beloved military, and he obviously still owns the scarlet- and white-trimmed uniforms both honorary and real, that he’s now forbidden to wear.

Bluntly put, there are many things about his life that Harry has changed — his work, his country of residence chief among them — but he cannot change his home ground, nor can he change the fact that it has changed under his feet. It’s unclear whether he knows this. Harry has become a stranger in his own land. And that, more than anything else about him, will be on display over the highly theatrical weekend of his father’s coronation.

More Shakespearean than that is hard to get.