That's Westminster Abbey. Every English and British monarch since ten sixty-six has been crowned in that building — forty of them, right up to King Charles a couple of years ago. Nearly a thousand years of putting crowns on people's heads in the same room. But forget the crownings for a minute. The best thing in that building is a chair.
There's a wooden chair in there, the Coronation Chair, seven hundred years old, the single most important piece of furniture in the country. Every monarch is crowned sitting in it. It's also covered in graffiti, because for two centuries the Westminster schoolboys were left alone with it and treated the throne of England like a school desk. One carving is still perfectly legible. A boy scratched in "P. Abbott slept in this chair," and dated it, because he wanted the credit. P. Abbott. Slept in the Coronation Chair, signed his work, and vanished into history having done nothing else. He is my favorite person on this entire tour. Another boy carved a no
te that he'd hidden in the chair to escape a long sermon — so the throne of England carries, among its inscriptions, what amounts to a review: good place to nap.
Underneath that chair, for seven hundred years, sat a lump of sandstone called the Stone of Scoon — the stone Scottish kings were crowned on, which England seized centuries ago and shoved under the English throne as a trophy. And on Chri
