The silver sovereign

Charles III is the oldest British monarch ever to be crowned. But his reign begins in a kingdom under a cloud

- Jonathan Freedland

NO ONE UNDER THE AGE OF 75 can have anything but the haziest memory of the last time we did this. Britain has not witnessed a coronation since 1953, and even those who remember the crowning of Elizabeth II will have little to guide them today. It is a different country, and Charles a very different prospective monarch - if only because of one simple, unavoidable fact: he is an old king.

Start not with him, but with the people. The Britain of 1953 would scarcely recognise itself in the Britain of 2023. Obviously the entire world has transformed. Ask someone who recalls the last coronation and they'll soon tell you about the novel thrill of seeing the ceremony on live television, perhaps at the home of a neighbour who was the one person on the street lucky enough to own a "set". Today, almost every one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket, complete with a screen able to carry live colour pictures from anywhere on Earth - or even of a distant planet.

The changes wrought in Britain are especially sharp. Not long before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, she had dedicated herself to a life of service to the "great imperial family to which we all belong". In 1953, India was only six years into its newly won independence and the British empire still reached across the globe. True, the country had been drained by the war against fascism but Britain remained a military power of serious heft. More than 40,000 troops took part in Elizabeth's coronation - drawn from a military that numbered more than 850,000 with 24 military bands, and a naval review at Spithead involving 190 ships.

Today the headcount of the UK armed forces has shrunk to fewer than 150,000. As the Constitution Unit at University College London put it in a recent paper, the UK "still has an international monarchy, with the king being head of state of 14 other countries" but "it is no longer a major international power".