King Charles’s coronation will be held at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, May 6, next year with Queen Camilla crowned alongside him, Buckingham Palace has said.
The ceremony, eight months after the King succeeded the late Queen Elizabeth, will be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The palace said that it would “reflect the monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry”.
The announcement follows widespread reports that the service will be shorter and simpler than the Queen’s coronation in 1953, which lasted about three hours and packed 8,000 people into the abbey, four times its normal capacity.
This led to complaints that Charles would have a “cut-price coronation”. However, palace insiders said it reflected how Britain had changed and the fact that many people were facing hardship. It would still, they said, be “a festival in the best traditions of a thousand years of history”.
It is not known whether there will be an extra bank holiday, but it seems unlikely given that there are already two bank holidays in May and the service is being held on a Saturday.