Princess Elizabeth and her son Charles, in London, 1948. In June 1953, the photographer received a call from the palace informing him that the Queen wanted him to take the official photos of her coronation. Famous for his fashion photos, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) infused theatricality, glamour and closeness to the portraits of Elizabeth II, who succeeded her father, George VI. CECIL BEATON / VICTORIA & ALBERT
Constitutional scholar Robert Hazell founded the Constitution Unit at University College London (UCL), a research center specializing in British parliamentary democracy. He has recently launched a major research project on monarchies in Europe.
Of the eight parliamentary monarchies – Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Sweden – that exist in Europe, the United Kingdom is the only one to have retained a coronation ceremony. Why is this so?
It is about traditions, it is such an ancient ceremony going all the way back to Anglo-Saxon kings. All schoolchildren in Britain learn that kings are crowned. The first King to be crowned in Westminster Abbey was actually a Frenchman who we call William the Conqueror. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day in 1066. But the coronation is older than that and some historians dated it to the sixth century AD, the first properly recorded coronation dates from AD 973. That was a coronation conducted by Saint Dunstan, then Archbishop of Canterbury, not at Westminster but in Bath Abbey.
