The mood of the nation, if I read correctly, has been one of subdued glee in recent weeks. We are not in ecstasy. We are not in a state of hysterical euphoria. We are not like Catholics awaiting the accession of a pope, much less like music fans in an arena awaiting the arrival of our favorite rock star.
We certainly don’t treat the coronation as an excuse to say how much we love the king personally, or indeed any member of the royal family, whose members are not only bad jokes in and of themselves, but threaten to make the whole monarchical system appear itself like a bad joke. But even so, we’re still quiet and strangely happy.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” said the nice young woman at a lending library I visit every few weeks. If she had been in her late middle age, this remark would not have struck me as surprising. But she can’t be older than 25. She’s from Bangladesh I guess. She wears the hijab. “We’re all looking forward to it, aren’t we?”
The barista who sells me my coffee every morning, on the other hand, is not your stereotypical royalist. He and his friend march for gay pride every year and it’s usually about such events or the holidays he’s returned from when he talks when he hands me my flat white. But his words were almost word for word the same as the librarian’s. ‘I am looking forward to. Everyone will have fun.’
On buses and trains, where I am unashamedly a curious parker and listen to the conversations of my fellow passengers, I notice that people have been talking about it for weeks.
Pictured: The Imperial State Crown. King Charles III will change from St Edward’s Crown to the lighter Imperial Crown before leaving the Abbey at the end of the service
Right, just last week I heard a young man say how ridiculous he found this – why couldn’t we just have a humble accession ceremony like they do with the Scandinavian monarchies, where the incoming king or queen swears an oath that the Constitution? Why all the palaver?
But most of the conversations I’ve heard have been different. People plan family reunions or parties with their neighbors. Some of the really old crocks (ie a bit older than me) have spoken about their memories of the last coronation, when of course very few people on the street had a TV.
But most people – the middle-aged and the young – have absolutely no memory of the last coronation and just look forward to it.
I get more and more cynical as I get older, and I have to admit, if you had asked me earlier this year what I thought of the upcoming coronation, the answer would have been a groan.
Why? I suppose my answer would have been that Britain has changed so irrevocably since the last coronation that any attempt to recreate the atmosphere of 1953 would be chilling.
At the last coronation, a weary, proud, poverty-stricken nation had just emerged from World War II.
The nation was united by the harsh experience of seeing its cities bombed and its young people killed in battle. While there was genuine class bitterness before the war, the experience of fighting Hitler had welded the nation together.
All lived on the same food rations each week. Everyone has had similar experiences of fear and grief. And when it was over, everyone was proud that Britain had done the right thing, stood up to the dictators and rid Europe of fascism.
Pictured: The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953
In contrast, the nation of 2023 is not united. Brexit and the culture wars have shown us that we are at odds. Old versus young. Pro-Europe versus Anti-Europe. Social liberals versus those who, because of their age or their religious beliefs, have the feeling that “it has gone too far” in many areas.
In 1953 a majority of the population claimed to be of the Church of England, so it made sense to continue the tradition of the coronation, a religious ceremony performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with other bishops in tow.
Compare that to Britain today, where only a tiny fraction of the population are regular Anglican churchgoers; if the majority of churchgoers are in fact Roman Catholic; and where, since the migrations of peoples that began in the 1950s, large numbers of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs are now fellow citizens alongside Christians.
So a few months ago I would have said: what right does the C of E have to cast the show? How does an Archbishop of Canterbury, dressed in mysterious attire and engaging in strange rituals that seem like hoax to most people, represent the nation? Is this really the most appropriate way of inaugurating a head of state in the 21st century?
And while we’re at it, how can we justify electing a head of state solely on the basis of hereditary principles?
At the final coronation, the heirs of old staggered into the abbey in the moth-eaten robes of their ancestors, who have been rotting in their mansions since 1937, when they were last fished out for service. At the moment of the coronation, the peers – all men, of course – lifted their crowns and shouted, “Long live the Queen!” In Latin only.
If anything tells us we live in another world, it’s the thought of those old peers shouting “Vivat!” in 1953.
The British have always taken the class system with a pinch of salt, made snobbery the target of their jokes and only half accepted the hierarchy of society.
Pictured: Queen Elizabeth II, wearing the Imperial State Crown, and the Duke of Edinburgh, dressed in the uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, wave to onlookers from the balcony outside the gates of Buckingham Palace after the coronation, 2 June 1953 to
But now the class system is pretty much over and done with. Only a small fraction of the hereditary peers remain in the House of Lords, which is mostly made up of political appointments nominated by Prime Ministers for their own odd reasons.
So the folks organizing today’s coronation were in a pickle. They couldn’t get the old nobility out of mothballs and make him shout “Vivat!” to King Charles. But on the other hand, if they gathered a couple of companions, preferably chosen for their religious and ethnic diversity, what was that supposed to symbolize?
It would show that the principle of inheritance was dead as a doornail. And if so, what are we all doing when we watch a ceremony in which we elect a head of state on a purely hereditary basis?
The funny thing is that while it’s always easy to poke holes in these kinds of events and poke fun at them, I changed my mind as this one got closer – and I suspect most of us don’t feel like it will make fun of it.
The coronation ceremonies will speak for themselves, and whether they’ll be performed, like in the 1950s, by an old geezer whose family have been landowners for generations, or by a newly appointed spouse.
That’s the great thing about ceremonies when they’re solemn. They are impersonal.
The oddly dressed contestants, wearing the priceless Crown Jewels and accompanying regalia, will appear like puppets in a beautifully choreographed puppet show. And so will the central character.
Today’s coronation reminds me of two wise observations made by 20th-century journalist and poet GK Chesterton. One is that “man was a ritualist before he could speak” – the fact is, rituals like today’s ceremony are more eloquent than words, and it will likely be months or years before we get the feelings we felt watching , into English can translate this spectacle.
Chesterton also noted that he would have liked to have elected the head of state simply by opening a phone book with his eyes closed and sticking a pin in someone’s name. Then, after making the observation, he realized that the principle of inheritance is just as arbitrary as this.
It is true that we are no longer living in the age of reverence, and hereditary nobility plays a very small role in our Parliament and less and less in the way our society is run.
Pictured: Queen Elizabeth II sits on the throne at her coronation in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953
But the sheer arbitrariness of how we elect the head of state actually speaks volumes for our constitution.
The coronation is not a King Charles Fan Club rally. It would go on anyway, whatever our views of the man might be – although surely the majority of the British people, at least this week, would recognize that Charles was a public-spirited person who, through his many charitable causes, cared about his life to make people better.
However, that’s not why he’s the king. He’s king simply because someone blindfolded stuck a pin in a list of names. Only it wasn’t a person, it was fate or destiny or luck.
At the time when most of Europe was getting rid of its kings, queens and emperors, there were a great many Brits who felt we should do the same. Why not be like the Russians and have Comrade Lenin? Or, when the fascists came to power, why not have a proud, uniformed despot to solve unemployment and make sure the trains ran on time?
But as the tangled bloodbath of the 20th century unfolded, history provided some clear answers. Many Britons were very thankful that we didn’t have a communist or fascist government. And the reason we didn’t do that was in large part because we kept the idea of a constitutional monarchy.
In this system, the crown – the symbol of power – is “above politics”. The person who wears it is a custodian of the institutions that keep us free – namely the rule of law, the judiciary, jury trial and parliament. The monarch works alongside the political establishment, often as a ringing bloc, having laboriously plowed through the government papers brought to him in the red boxes.
Our kings and queens have the advantage of being an embodied link to the great weight of history – of all their ancestors and that of the British people – stretching back to Alfred the Great. For this reason, at the time of national celebrations, the monarch is a much greater person than an elected president could ever be.
The crown is not placed on the head of the most powerful person in the country. We don’t crown a king because he’s the smartest, handsomest, or most popular in the kingdom.
Instead, we ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to invest power in a randomly chosen human with the symbols of the crown, orb and scepter.
Pictured: King Charles III. and Camilla, Queen Consort, pose for a portrait in the Blue Room at Buckingham Palace on April 4, 2023
During World War II, when Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini wreaked havoc on millions of lives, Britain had a king who was the polar opposite of dictators.
George VI, a petty chain smoker with a stutter who clearly loathed the idea of being cast into that role by his selfish brother’s abdication, was the perfect symbolic definition of why we cherished our constitutional monarchy.
The absolute power symbolized by the crown was turned on its head by someone who did not want it and who was quite weak by human standards – as his biographer Philip Ziegler suggested, he was “extraordinary in his ordinariness”.
But after the abdication crisis of 1936 he was determined to restore the monarchy as a paradigm of decency and reliability, which was exactly what his subjects wanted.
This coronation will inevitably prompt reflections on our history and, in my case, feelings of gratitude that we had a monarchy and not some of the cruel political alternatives.
But it will also cheer us up. The vast majority of people in Britain want our society to work, to be fair and compassionate, orderly and just. We want to get along with our neighbors and work colleagues.
The coronation celebrations are an expression of all these harmless hopes. The ceremony itself is actually only a small part of what will make us happy on Coronation Day. The real reason for rejoicing is that, for all our troubles in Britain, we live in a reasonably prosperous, reasonably peaceful society.
If you sometimes feel depressed about the state of the nation, imagine you’re an American who’s likely to have to choose between a dodderer and an old crook in his next presidential election. Imagine you are in Putin’s Russia or Macron’s torn France. Think of the countries of the Middle East; Think of Sudan.
The British owe a lot. Without saying exactly what these things are, they are mysteriously expressed, not only through the coronation ceremonies we watch on television, but also at street festivals, family gatherings and merry bangs from pubs. Life! Life!
Protest for the death of Jordan Neely this Thursday in New York EDUARDO MUNOZ (Portal)
Protesters are demanding that the ex-Marine be charged before the Manhattan Attorney’s Office this Thursday. JUSTIN LANE (EFE)
