THE royal family has started making preparations for the Prince of Wales to become king by secretly devising sweeping changes to modernise the coronation and other ceremonies marking his accession.

Under the review, courtiers are considering pruning “Ruritanian” elements of the coronation ceremonial and creating a new role for leaders of non-Christian religions in the service.

“A lot has happened since the (Queen’s) coronation in 1953. There will be a large number of differences. I don’t mind the word modernising,” said the Duke of Norfolk, who as earl marshal will organise Charles’s coronation.

Although he emphasised that at 78 the Queen remains in robust good health, the duke said: “I have been secretly planning and secretly thinking and secretly consulting and secretly liaising.” He has already completed a revised plan for her funeral.

The duke will discuss the plans in the new year with Prince Charles’s office, which is conducting a parallel review of the accession ceremonies. These are held immediately after the death of a monarch.

The Queen’s willingness to permit the review will give scope to Charles, 56, to assert himself after a miserable year. In recent months his aides’ efforts to polish his image have been hampered by bad publicity at an industrial tribunal and by his refusal to attend a society wedding with other members of the royal family because he could not be seated with Camilla Parker Bowles, his companion.

There was further positive news for him this weekend as a senior figure in the Church of England raised the possibility of a resolution to his marital status by proposing a register office wedding.

David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury, said: “If the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker Bowles expressed a wish to marry, the proper pastoral approach should be to advise them to seek a civil ceremony which may be followed by prayers of dedication in church.”

This suggestion, which he said was supported by the majority of the episcopate, marks a significant development from the position taken a year ago by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams indicated that the couple might not meet the criteria for a remarriage in church.

According to Stancliffe, the church’s expert on liturgy, the dedication ceremony would be appropriate for a future supreme governor of the Church of England. “That can be a solemn and splendid affirmation of their new marriage.”

An act of parliament would be required because at present there is no provision for the royal family to marry in a register office.

Although the earl marshal said detailed plans for Charles’s coronation would remain flexible, in order to “judge the (public) mood correctly”, he disclosed that Charles will not have to wait as long as his mother did to be crowned after her death. The Queen waited 16 months from the death of her father, George VI, in February 1952, until her coronation in 1953.

“It will all happen much quicker,” the earl marshal said. “I don’t envisage anything like that gap again.”

On the death of the Queen, a new monarch will be proclaimed as soon as possible at an accession council to be held at St James’s Palace to which all members of the privy council will be summoned. Its meeting will be televised for the first time and the new king may also make a broadcast.

Under existing rules, parliament is suspended on the death of the monarch, but it meets again to enable MPs to take an oath to the new sovereign.

The traditional pageantry accompanying public proclamations of a new monarch in Windsor, York and the City of London is likely to be pruned, however. In the capital, the city marshal traditionally makes a show of challenging a carriage procession led by the Household Cavalry. To the sound of marching trumpeters, and the reverberation of gun salutes from Hyde Park and the Tower of London, the common cryer and the serjeant at arms of the City read the proclamation.

This weekend, spokesmen for Buckingham Palace and Clarence House confirmed the review of the accession arrangements, which they described as “contingency planning”. Neither was able to say when the plans had last been reviewed.

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