A detail much noted in the commentary on Saturday‘s coronation was that His Majesty decided against making his first trip to the Abbey in the Gold State Coach. Who can blame him? His mother described riding in that particular wagon as ‘horrible’, and even Queen Victoria had as little to do with it as she could get away with.

It may be traditional, and it may look impressive in an antiquated, grotesquely ostentatious, fountains-of-gold-leaf-kind of a way. But by all accounts it is monstrously uncomfortable for its passengers. It was designed for the malnourished and inbred shorties who comprised the royals of a previous generation. It’s freezing cold and has no suspension to cushion the ride so it rattles its occupants half to death.

Very expensive, gaudy on the outside, and miserable to travel in. I don’t imagine they intended it as a metaphor for the monarchy itself when they built it, but my goodness it slips easily into the role now. And its putative passenger certainly seemed to feel that way.

I’m a little haunted by imagining what went on after the ceremony was over

Once delivered of the rote view that all this money could be better spent giving nurses a pay rise, even the grouchiest republican will have found things to enjoy in Saturday’s ceremony, from the sublime (which was pretty much all of the music) to the lovably ridiculous (Penny Mordaunt’s Spacefleet Commander cosplay; all those artefacts solemnly presented on cushions). The great, moving, silly machinery of centuries of tradition did its work. If you’re going to do pageantry, here was how to do it. If you’re going to seek to make space for all faiths and none in an Anglican ceremony, here too, with gentle dignity, was how to do it.

But at the centre of the whole thing, King Charles really didn’t seem to be having much fun at all. He looked peevish when he didn’t look mournful. He looked bewildered when he didn’t look peevish. He looked mournful when he didn’t look bewildered. Now he glumly inspected a set of spurs on a cushion. Now he wiggled his fingers wearily into a fourteenth-century ovenglove. Here’s a sceptre… and give us a break, now here comes another one.

‘Is there much more of this nonsense?’ his expression seemed to ask. Of course nobody expected smiles and giggles: this was an occasion of solemn grandeur. But you can be serious without looking like you wished you were anywhere else on earth. ‘This new and gorgeous garment, majesty/ Sits not so easy on me as you think…’

Again, can you blame him? On a personal level, imagine having your entire life consecrated to a single purpose and then being in your autumn years when it arrives. Imagine its arrival being linked, as it was always going to be, to the loss of your beloved and admired mother. Imagine how tired he must be, how lonely, how conflicted about the what-might-have-beens. Imagine how hard it must be to find more in the tank, to see all this fol-de-rol as the dawn of a glorious and purposeful new Carolean Age rather than the overture to a pregnant-widow decade or two of neither quite one thing nor another.

And he must have been all too aware that the vague enervation was not confined to the Abbey. It’s vain to pretend this coronation produced a feeling of national unity and renewal comparable to the last one – when a young woman took the throne amid a postwar thirst for optimism and modernity. The times could not be more different and nor could the monarch. Country in doldrums. Royal family at odds with each other: a King whose relationships with his brother and younger son are both strained, both fraught with public and private anxiety alike. A King shuffling gamely but wearily along under the weight of all his baggage.

There was a sense, too, of pageantry-fatigue after first the Jubilee and then the mourning for the late Queen last year. Those events overshadowed this one. We were not, most of us, throwing street parties, baking coronation quiches, or queuing up for hour upon hour upon hour to wave flags or pay tribute. The threat to the institution doesn’t come from the ‘Not My King’ brigade so much as from the many younger people who just don’t feel much of a connection with the stiff old fellow on the throne: the people who will have put the ceremony on the telly in the background in a spirit of benign curiosity, or to share a few laughs on social media, rather than with any great sense of collective feeling, and will have flipped over to the football after the main show was done.

I make no apology, by the way, for basing this argument on what might haughtily be written off as ‘vibes’. Vibes is everything when it comes to the ceremonial pomp of monarchy; which is to say, monarchy itself. It’s vibes all the way down. ‘Efficient’ is the territory of institutions; ‘dignified’ is, when you get down to it, all about the vibes. And the vibes here had a bass-note of subdued sadness.

I’m a little haunted by imagining what went on after the ceremony was over: the Saturday evening comedown. After the cavalry horses clip-clopped back to their stables, the crowds drifted off leaving a scattering of paper flags crumpled on the Mall, and the TV crews were spooling their cables into their vans. Slight chill, drizzle. Guardsmen, somewhere, taking off their stiff boots and rubbing their sore feet. Rory Stewart finishing his late lunch in Pizza Express. Charles and Camilla, back in Clarence House, away from the cameras. So that was that, then, perhaps they’ll have thought. I’m imagining deep tiredness, sore necks, a very stiff G & T, and perhaps a companionable private supper of the sort Noel Coward called ‘a little eggy something on a tray’.

His Majesty did take the Gold State Coach back to the Palace afterwards, incidentally. Tradition demanded it got an outing. And the poor old thing will be in that comfortlessly luxurious carriage, metaphorically speaking, whether he likes it or not, for the rest of his life. God save him.