It was a moment David Beckham had been awaiting for a very long time. At Windsor Castle on Tuesday morning, King Charles finally made him Sir David.
Under the vaulted ceilings of the Garter throne room, Beckham bent one knee and dipped his famously well-coiffed head as the King touched each shoulder with the ceremonial sword.
Victoria Beckham (who made his suit) and his parents, Sandra and Ted, looked on from the sidelines.
Beckham, 50, first became an Officer of the British Empire in 2003. Since then he has turned himself into a global statesman of soft power—a UNICEF ambassador and, most recently, a court favorite of the new King.
The ceremony on Tuesday was the culmination of a 14-year odyssey. First nominated for a knighthood in 2011, Beckham was quietly blacklisted after becoming entangled in a tax avoidance scheme, an episode that saw his name scribbled onto the “amber list” of those deemed unsuitable for honor.
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs cleared him in 2021, reopening the path to the sword.
Quite how deeply the snub wounded him became clear in 2017, when leaked emails showed Beckham raging privately about the block. “It’s a disgrace,” he reportedly wrote, adding that if he were American, “I would have got something like this 10 years ago.”
His team insisted the messages had been taken out of context, but the yearning behind them was unmistakable.
The honor cements his role in the King’s inner circle. Last year, Beckham was appointed as an ambassador for the King’s Foundation, the charitable umbrella through which Charles funds heritage restoration, education, and sustainable farming.
The pair have bonded, improbably, over beekeeping—Beckham keeps hives on his Cotswolds estate, the King in his gardens at Highgrove—and have been photographed together at events from the Chelsea Flower Show to Buckingham Palace banquets.
Beckham’s sharply cut navy morning suit is thought to be the work of his wife—a debut, perhaps, for Victoria Beckham’s long-rumored menswear line. The Telegraph’s fashion critic Stephen Doig noted approvingly that her label “knows the power of good tailoring—soft-structured, slouchy suiting that flatters the wearer.”
In this case, the wearer was her husband, the most practiced mannequin in Britain, and the result was—unsurprisingly—immaculate.
For all the pomp, there were moments of genuine warmth between the two men. Photographs show Charles and Beckham exchanging a few words after the sword tap, the King smiling broadly, Beckham’s face lit with something like boyish awe.
Beckham’s publicists would never admit it, but the scene also offered a quiet corrective to the years when the former soccer player’s name was more likely to appear in the tabloids than in the Court Circular.
The tax rows, the leaked emails, the endless gossip about affairs—all are now buried beneath a knighthood’s burnished sheen.
For the King, the sight of Beckham kneeling in Windsor’s great hall was usefully symbolic as he attempts to course correct after a bruising few months of dither over the fate of ex Prince Andrew. Here was a modern British export, polished and global, folded back into the institution that still defines the nation’s sense of itself.
Arise, Sir David!
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The post David Beckham Knighted—Finally—By King Charles appeared first on The Daily Beast.
