Now that the date of the next coronation has been announced, we have some seven months within which to plan everything leading up to May 2023. Charles III has already made known some suggestions for making the central event of the festivities more inclusive. Voices warning against ‘wokeness’ or inviting this or that important foreigner are raised. This is ample proof that the coronation debate has already begun.
It cannot proceed, however, unless and until some important questions have been posed and answered. It has to be now. The process is under way. Whitehall already has its own logistics and choreographic plans in place, reviewed every month and shared with appropriate partners and stakeholders such as the security services, the military and local government.
The purpose of the event is universally taken as read. It is all efficiently, even magnificently done but what is it all for?
Some sort of ceremony to mark the induction of a new head of state is staged by almost all cultures. The more historically aware, or the more monarchical, the more elaborate the rite. This is so even in the case of ostensibly non-royals such as the Pope who was until recently enthroned and mitred in astonishingly pharaonic style.
God save
But this particular example points to a problem shared by all of those communities which have, rather than term-limited presidents, crowned heads who have the job for life. This means that the people are expected to acclaim the enthronement without knowing for sure whether the new royal office-holder, ostensibly chosen by God, will turn out be worthy of acclamation, let alone successful. In short, they are stuck with her or him till death, a point which is firmly underlined in the coronation rite.
But of course the job-for-life (“May the king live for ever!”) is sometimes curtailed. Action to end an unsatisfactory reign, it is felt, by elites with the power to do so, becomes necessary. Time was, in western monarchies, when a legitimate reign (“chosen by God”) could be ended violently. In England this has been done variously by expulsion (James II), accidental homicide (William II), imprisonment and murder (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V), trial and execution (Charles I) or death in battle (Harold II, Richard III).
With one exception, all these deaths took place before 1650. Thereafter, monarchies’ power diminished, reign by reign, as first the aristocracy and then the people developed and exercised their counterweight. The Abdication of 1936 made this visible. It became unnecessary to subject the sovereign to any form of state violence. So the power, the importance of and influence of the crown declined. Historians have dismissed the period as being that of ‘a barely tolerated oligarchy.’ The last king of England to attempt any unilateral political action was William IV in 1831.
Only 36 years later, the ideal monarch’s function was definitively described by Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution, published in 1867. In it, he asserted that a constitution needed two parts, ‘one to excite and preserve the reverence of the population’ and the other to ’employ that homage in the work of government’. The first part he called ‘dignified’ and the second ‘efficient'(Google). This assessment holds true today.
Rebranding
For the Victorians, this status quo had risks. Monarchy seemed ineluctably doomed to slide into mediocracy; worse still, a real rebranding chance was being missed. The expanding empire needed a God-given person to symbolise it at the apex with all the appropriate panoply and ceremonial this required. Hence the deliberate expansion and refurbishment of, for example, the state opening of parliament, or Britain’s Indian Empire. Thus was proclaimed a message in every case, in code.
The concept of deploying pageantry to enact the salient features of the constitution survived the onset of the twentieth century and was solidly in place by the time television arrived, partly animating a slow decline in deference and other attitudes, as we shall see.
Let the people see
The long reign of Elizabeth II has revived interest in her coronation in 1953.
This was the country’s first national television event. Thousands participated virtually. That gathering had its effects, not least for Britons’ view of their polity. To watch it now is to be struck by the stately colour and majesty of the ceremony but also by nagging questions about certain features of it. The 1953 coronation included assumptions which, like all assumptions, inevitably modulated as time passed. Autre temps, autres mœurs.
Why, for example, are there so many peers and their coronets on display? Who was invited (apparently the queen was startled to be told that trade union leaders would be in the congregation)? What is the queen wearing? Why is there a canopy suddenly brought on stage, temporarily restricting our sight of the anointing? What anointing?
The answers to some of these questions are more easily proffered than others. The slow decline of the hereditary aristocracy and its gradual replacement by life peers (by the Life Peerages Act 1958) has had its visible effect. It is not inconceivable to assume that only a handful of peers, unencumbered by ermine, will be members of the 2,000-strong congregation in 2023.
By the same token, Britain’s multi-ethnic diversity will be conspicuously visible in a way that would have been inconceivable in 1953. So will the sight of faith leaders ranged in the chancel politely watching what will be, pace the king, the essentially Anglican ceremonial (including a mass). What in particular will they make of the anointing?
The will be no problem for the Chief Rabbi, for one. The Bible reverently “records that Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon king” (I Kings 1:28-53). Further pregnant symbolism marks this, the climax of the whole rite: just before the actual crowning, the king is presented with triumphant regalia: the orb and sceptre, the rod and cross. All signify lordship, dominion and power.
“Receive the Royal Sceptre, the ensign of kingly power and justice”, intones the Archbishop. The canopy has been drawn away and the king proceeds to the Eucharist.
At this point it’s worth reflecting on this and all the other parts of the liturgy which are certain to involve debate well before the coronation plan is finalised by the relevant working party.
God save the king
The most obvious features of the 1953 coronation http://www.oremus.org/liturgy/coronation/cor1953b.html are the assumptions on which it was based.
Chief among these is the notion that there has to be a coronation at all and that the monarch is ‘not real’ until this is carried out. Wrong. Then there is the assumption that the enthronement ceremony has to be of a religious nature, specifically Christian. Within this requirement is the fact that this means that it is the Church of England and not some other denomination which is in charge, using the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as its text. This book’s Oath section includes the question “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law?” followed by a clause specifying the C of E (and a very short mention of the Church of Scotland). This is not religion, but politics.
In1953 the queen was also asked, “Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?” Of the six independent nations briefly listed here – then members of the Commonwealth, though that term appears only once in the service – three have had troubled relations with the British in their time. That fact itself sounds strangely imperial.
In what has followed on from that era of Crown dependencies and decolonisation, it is startling to hear the exhortation which reads, “Receive this Orb set under the Cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the Power and Empire of Christ our Redeemer.” The Winds of Change speech was less than seven years away.
The list goes on. Every part of the service contains its antique surprises. One in particular catches the modern eye. As part of the Regalia section, the Anointing ceremony, as we have seen, takes place beneath a canopy, and involves the archbishop tabbing a special oil on the monarch’s head, breast, wrists etc out of sight of the congregation. This procedure borders on the shamanistic. In the archaic discourse of the 1953 ceremony, however, it does not particularly stand out; if it is included in 2023, it will seem very strange and intrusive, almost sinister.
Receive this crown
When I first heard the date of Charles’ coronation my initial reaction was to assume that the order of service would have to be revisited and amended where necessary, and that working parties were already on the job. Having now studied the 1953 service and also the 1902 one, my fondness for state occasions, historic events, parades and heraldry remains undiminished. I like the solemn majesty of it all, especially the British version. But there has to be a degree of realism.
Second, the 1953 service cannot possibly be retuned or amended for deployment in 2023. Too much context has changed. The service will have to be recast so that it becomes suitable and relevant for public acceptance as it is today: inclusive, multicultural, and clearly linked to the lives we all have now. If that means retaining some of the religious element in modern language but junking the regalia and the imperious tone then so be it.
We have been here before. In 1902 the relevant committee of bishops found it necessary to emphasise that the upcoming coronation of Edward VII should be dominated by its religious component in the way that 64 years before had not been an unrehearsed feature of Victoria’s coronation. Amidst all the imperial pageantry, so the bishops ruled, the sacred priority should prevail. The link between what Simon Jenkins has called ‘British Shinto’ and the supposed demands of the state has never been so clearly and emphatically forged.
Why should the service be religious at all? The steady decline of religious observance in our community means that for many, many onlookers (let alone those watching from abroad) the whole spectacle will be so much gobbledygook, some of it offensive.
Now it is time to engineer a wholesale change for the times we live in now and the people we have become, because without that corrective the whole national narrative risks being damaged irreparably. By all means keep the regalia on display in the Tower but inside and outside the Abbey let us celebrate who we really are. Let us have a new coronation that we can cheer.
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The serene light 