King Charles begins Holyrood Week with traditional Ceremony of the Keys
A guard of honour and a Royal Salute marked King Charles III’s return to Holyrood, where Edinburgh’s lord provost handed over the city’s keys. The week also included his opening of the Scottish Parliament’s new session.
A guard of honour, a Royal Salute and the formal handover of Edinburgh’s keys opened King Charles III’s Holyrood Week in the gardens of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The ceremony, staged at the King’s official residence in Scotland at the end of the Royal Mile, is the traditional first act of a week built around royal visibility in Edinburgh.
Robert Aldridge, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, presented the keys to the King in the ceremony known as the Ceremony of the Keys. King Charles then returned the keys in the traditional exchange, a symbolic gesture that underscores the city’s formal welcome and the trust placed in civic authorities. The palace gardens were turned into a parade ground for the event, and the King met senior military and uniformed figures before the salute was fired in his honour.
The Balaklava Company, 5 SCOTS, the 5th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, provided the guard of honour. The military display and civic ritual together gave the ceremony its fixed place in Holyrood Week, which always begins at Holyroodhouse and has long served as the monarchy’s most visible annual engagement in Scotland’s capital.
For Scotland, the day’s choreography carried political as well as ceremonial weight. Holyrood Week places the Crown in the middle of Edinburgh’s civic life while the Scottish Parliament runs its own constitutional business nearby, a reminder that royal symbolism still has a public role in a devolved nation where questions of identity and authority remain sharply felt. The palace, beside the Royal Mile in central Edinburgh, is both a working royal residence and a stage for that continued balancing act.
Royal Week usually includes an investiture in the Great Gallery at Holyroodhouse, but its opening ritual remains the same: a public welcome from the city’s top civic office, a military presence in the palace grounds and the King’s formal recognition of Edinburgh as the place where Scotland receives him. On Saturday, Charles also opened the new session of the Scottish Parliament, the seventh since the parliament was established in 1999, placing ceremony and state business side by side at the start of the week.
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