Buckingham Palace has announced that King Charles III’s coronation will take place on Saturday, 6th May 2023.
It is expected The King will be crowned at a smaller ceremony than that which took place on June 2nd 1953 for his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. And the guest list at Her Late Majesty’s Coronation provides some hints as to who can be expected to attend the crowning of King Charles III.
It is rare for other monarchs to attend the Coronation of a Sovereign. Instead, representatives from their family may attend. In 1953, for example, the then Crown Prince of Norway, Olav, attended on behalf of his father, King Haakon VII. Denmark sent Prince Axel while Sweden’s royals sent the Duke of Halland and Belgium was represented by the Prince of Liege, later King Albert II.
It is likely to be a very different guest list from that seen at Westminster Abbey for the State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II when sovereigns from Europe and all around the world were in attendance.
Family links also play a part. It is possible that non-reigning royals could be asked given strong family ties so we may see members of the Greek Royal Family, although it seems unlikely that King Constantine will be making the trip from Greece. The Tsar of Bulgaria, the Crown Prince of Serbia and the Custodian of the Crown of Romania, among others could also be at the Abbey.
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which took place on the 2nd of June 1953, is the last concrete example the public can base their hypotheses about what will happen on the 6th of May 2023.
And His Majesty has stated that, although the ceremony will be rooted in tradition, there will also be elements that will make it an event that keeps in mind the entire group of people of whom he will be becoming King.
One of the changes in this Coronation could be the presence of representatives from charities that King Charles has close ties to.
However, there could also be a possibility for the Coronation to be more similar to the accession ceremonies that took place in Belgium and Spain in 2013 and 2014 respectively, where no foreign Royals were present, and the focus was solely on the constitutional transition from one Monarch to the next.
Only time (and specifically the 200 days that separate us from the ceremony) will tell exactly what the Coronation ceremony will look like.
