King Charles III opened the new legislative session of Parliament in the U.K. on Wednesday, as London ground to a halt for a day of pomp, ceremony, gun salutes, mock hostage taking, and slammed doors in a series of extraordinary and ancient customs designed to telegraph lawmakers’ independence from the Crown.
The day, many of the mechanics of which would be broadly familiar to a time traveler arriving from the 1700s, began long before the king and queen arrived to the sound of gun salutes in a horse-drawn carriage pulled by six gray horses in the glorious sunshine at around 11 a.m. to deliver the king’s speech (which is not written by him, but by the government, and outlines their program for the legislative session).
By then, the basements of the Houses of Parliament had been ceremonially searched by the Yeomen of the Guard, dressed in their distinctive Tudor-style scarlet uniforms. The symbolic gesture (MI5 isn’t about to delegate national security) commemorates the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the Westminster Palaces.
