The Queen and her presidents.

I know I’m going on a lot about this Royals thing because today Charles III was crowned in what I saw as a rather dreadful ceremony, but the day gives me a chance for an important confession: I am only about half Irish.

The other half is English.

If you’re keeping score at home, the pub in Mom’s ancestral home is the Lit le Moon (they’re missing one “t,” which fell off the sign) in Coolboy, County Wicklow, Ireland. If you’re in Asfordby, Leiceistershire, England, the local’s called The Horse Shoes.

That’s where the Gregorys came from, from the boring Midlands. Asfordby is famous for the demolition of the coal mine’s hoist towers (below) which was spectacular, and for a local mass murderer who, absent-minded, kept leaving body parts behind.

There were once Lord Gregorys in Asfordby. I’m not sure what happened to the family because the title lapsed. Maybe it was unpaid credit card bills.

The Tudors, those Welsh upstarts, killed poor Richard III nearby. A deep puncture wound, inflicted post-mortem at Bosworth Field, was discovered in the royal pelvis–sorry to use the term, but it was his arse– when his long-lost and sad little skeleton was exhumed in 2013. So the present King could do with better luck than Richard’s, shown below in a royal portrait and as reconstructed by a forensic pathologist/sculptor.

Charles III kept his birth name as his reign name. The first king named Charles, a Stuart, from Mary Queen of Scots’ line, was beheaded. Judging from the contemporary image below, his hat was spared.

His son Charles II, after a Cromwellian interruption–the Interregnum– was King when the Plague swept London in 1666. He ran into good luck when the Plague was followed by the Great Fire, which, in the process of consuming London, killed all the rats.

Charles II’s death yielded his little brother, James II, so odious that the English overthrew him and imported a new king. From Holland. (That was William; his wife, Mary, was at least a Stuart.)

And I hope that England has better luck with this Charles.

It’s petty, I know, but I note that the King has fingers like Vienna Sausages.

I miss his Mum. I miss her Corgis. I miss the way that Cpl. Cruschan IV, the black Shetland pony who’s the mascot for a Scots regiment, used to eat the floral arrangement she was carrying. She scolded him and then petted him. Then, later, he bit Harry. He’s Scots, all right.

This incredible video, from CBS’s Sunday Morning, profiles both the Queen and the actresses who’ve portrayed her. Jane Alexander is one of our finest actresses; look at her reaction when interviewer Ben Mankiewicz, one our finest film historians, interrupts to announce the Queen’s death.

And a plug: A Royal Night Out, about the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret partying on V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, 1945, is charming. I’m especially fond of it because my father spent much of his Army enlistment in London in World War II. That’s my Pop, below, and then the film trailer.

I think, in fact, that we’ve about run out the line of Royals. The Queen’s piper, playing as her coffin was lowered into the crypt at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, provided at least a satisfactory valedictory.

And that, I guess, concludes today’s English history lesson.