Hardcore royalists in Jamaica will be up by 1.30am on Saturday to watch live coverage of the prolonged build-up to the coronation of King Charles III.
Two hours and 45 minutes later, it will be time for the main event. Royalists will revel in all of the pomp and ceremony. They will be dazzled by the regalia: the silver maces carried before the king; the Sword of State; the Sword of Temporal Justice; the Sword of Spiritual Justice; the Sword of Mercy; the Sovereign’s Ring made of a sapphire with a ruby cross set in diamonds; and the golden sceptres.
Most of all, the crowns! The St Edward’s, for the king, has a solid gold frame, decorated with rubies, amethysts, sapphires, garnet, topazes and tourmalines. Camilla, the queen consort, was to wear the Crown of Queen Mary, blinging with the infamous Kohinoor diamond, but after the Indian government let it be known that this would elicit “painful memories of the colonial past,” the palace announced she would swap it for a less contentious stone. Blinkered royalists will not be at all troubled by unsettling questions about how the monarchy accumulated the gross wealth that will be so conspicuously displayed at the coronation.
