King Charles to celebrate first birthday as monarch
The King will be celebrating his 74th birthday and his first without the Queen. He is expected to spend it privately after a tough few months since he took the throne.
The King will celebrate his first birthday as monarch on Monday and is expected to mark his 74th anniversary privately.
Charles became king after the death of the Queen in September and has since had a busy period.
As Prince of Wales, he was sometimes away on official foreign tours during his birthday and would celebrate it overseas with a cake.
Charles spent the day ahead of his 74th birthday leading the nation in honouring its war dead during the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph.
His floral tribute to the fallen left at the memorial in Whitehall featured the words ‘In memory of the glorious dead. Charles R’.
Last November he celebrated his birthday by releasing a photo of him sitting on a bench in Highgrove, as the Queen faced another health scare.
But despite the King having tea and cake for this annual birthday, it still hasn’t been confirmed whether he will also have a second birthday.
If he did he would be following the tradition of the Queen, who had both a summer and winter birthday
The tradition dates all the way back to 1748.
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The first royal ruler to have two birthday celebrations was the Queen’s distant relative, King George II – who wished to throw a public celebration, with a parade and plenty of pomp and circumstance to mark the occasion of his birthday.
However, having been born in November, the odds on the weather holding out for a huge outdoor bash in the UK were pretty slim.
It has been reported he may opt for a ‘slimmed down’ version of this due to his desire to scale back some of the pageantry of Royal occasions.
The King’s milestone will be marked by the Band of the Household Cavalry performing Happy Birthday during the Changing of the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
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Gun salutes will be fired across the capital in honour of his birthday for the first time, with the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery firing 41 volleys from midday at London’s Green Park, and immediately afterwards the Band of the Scots Guards will perform Happy Birthday in the park.
The King’s Troop is a mounted ceremonial unit in the British Army that fires salutes on royal anniversaries and major events like state visits, and provides a gun carriage and a team of black horses for state and military funerals.
An hour later the Honourable Artillery Company will fire a 62-gun salute at the Tower of London.
The Army’s oldest regiment has a demanding operational reconnaissance role in addition to its ceremonial responsibilities.
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