Coronation reflections: what a weekend Pt. 1
Some reflections on different aspects of the coronation of Charles III
So it is done. His Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, was crowned and anointed by the archbishop of Canterbury, amid immense splendour and solemnity at Westminster Abbey, the church first used for a coronation, that of William I, on Christmas Day 1066. It’s been a kaleidoscope weekend, with tight TV close-ups and wide shots of ancient ceremony and, let’s not beat about the bush, Olly Murs, but we are a kaleidoscope country in a kaleidoscope Commonwealth, as Speaker Bercow rather awkwardly put it in 2012.
I’ve been writing and tweeting and commentating and hectoring and “informing” since last week, so I wasn’t sure quite how to summate, how to gather all of this up into a digestible whole. I’m still not sure. Which being the case, I thought I would offer some reflections as they come to me, and offer a flavour of what has happened and what I think rather than strive for a comprehensive analysis. To make these digestible, rather than dropping a long essay on you all, I’ll send them in episodes over the next few days.
Most of you will know or have by now intuited where I’m coming from. In most things, I’m a traditionalist, I think tradition and the hallowing effect of age are important not merely as aesthetics but as a powerful factor in our emotions. Progressives like to think this isn’t true, but I disagree. To take a superficially banal example, why do restaurants or any other commercial enterprises trumpet their dates of foundation? Why does it matter unless longevity is somehow important to us? (Worth exploring, this, but at another time.) And I believe in the immanent power of institutions. As Enoch Powell said, a Tory is someone who thinks institutions are wiser than those who operate them. And I am assuredly a Tory.
I am also a monarchist. Tradition, yes, but pragmatism: I don’t think it is a coincidence that we have had a monarchy as long as there has been an England, Scotland or Britain (with the unhappy experiment from 1649 to 1660), and we have had a quite remarkably stable polity. Evolution, not revolution. See what works, quietly elide what doesn’t. I understand why republicans think as they do, and of course that’s one point of view, but it’s not mine, and—as the polling currently indicates—it is not that of the public. (Perhaps ‘yet’, who knows? Nothing is written unless you decide to write it.) I am by law a citizen, not a subject, but I have been a loyal subject of the late Queen and I will be one of her son, our King, too. The crown is a fundamental part of our institutions of state, albeit one we must treat carefully, and I think it is one of the elements which still offers balance and stability.
And I appreciate and adore ceremony. I wrote about the importance of ritual in the aftermath of Elizabeth II’s death, and would reiterate that traditions can be invaluable reminders of why we do things, and how things are done. They are a shorthand to our past, as even Tony Benn sometimes believed. When these things are well done, they are genuinely transcendent, much more than the sum of their parts. I have always loved grandeur and pomp, but also the moments of humility and simplicity that ceremony can contain (like the King’s anointing). I loved them at university, and took part in God-knows-how-many processions, graduations, debates and addresses. Even one of Eric Motley’s symposiums. And in the House of Commons, in my time as an associate serjeants at arms, I was in my element, even leading the Speaker’s Procession on a handful of Fridays. This is very much my thing.
Overall
I think it went pretty well. This was, for all its historical roots and ancient forms, in some ways unprecedented. The first coronation to be filmed was, of course, Elizabeth II’s in 1953, and that was done with enormous care, under considerable limitations (some of which the BBC broke), with relatively crude technology and in a wholly different Britain: only a fifth of households had a television set (many bought specifically for the coronation), rationing was still in place on some items and the UK still had 70 overseas territories, with British India still being a recent memory. So when the time finally came to stage another such ceremony, the organisers and the broadcasters would be effectively starting from scratch.
(For those who are interested, the person in charge of the arrangements of major ceremonial occasions like coronations is the Earl Marshal, one of the Great Officers of State, a position held in hereditary by the Fitzalan-Howard family and currently occupied by the 18th Duke of Norfolk. He was deputy Earl Marshal from 2000 to 2002, when he inherited the dukedom and the position of Marshal, so he’s been doing this a long time. In 1952 a formal organising committee of privy counsellors and an executive committee were created by proclamation; this time the committee has been convened informally but has included the archbishop of Canterbury. There was some criticism in Parliament and the media that the plans were being drawn up in relative secrecy.)
The coronation was watched by over 20 million people in the UK, according to the latest figures. This has been taken to mean whatever the commentator in question wants it to mean; I think it’s pretty impressive. True, it’s a lower figure than the audience for the late Queen’s funeral (about 28 million), but the final episode of Happy Valley in February, regarded as a big TV event, was seen by 7.5 million; and 20 million is still more than a quarter of the population, for an event which we were told was failing to generate much interest (and comes more than six months after the King’s accession). Moreover, it garnered around 90 per cent of those who were watching television at all. If I were a palace adviser—I’m always available, sir, and my rates are surprisingly affordable if you’ve blown the budget—I’d be quietly content with that.
The God inclusion
Many people forgot, or never thought about the fact, that the coronation is a religious service, intensely so, and more than that, it is a Protestant, Church of England ceremony. The coronation oath which the monarch swears is, firstly, a legal requirement and has been since 1688, but, moreover, requires the monarch to promise to “Maintaine the Laws of God the true Profession of the Gospell and the Protestant Reformed Religion Established by Law”. For all the chatter about the King’s supposed ecumenicalism, there is no leeway on this matter, nor, in fact, was there ever any serious suggestion that he might seek any. Those who have noted his deep interest in Islam—he tried to learn Arabic about 10 years ago, mainly so he could read the Qur’an, but, as many do, found the language challenging—his affection for Roman Catholicism and his strong appreciation for the Greek Orthodox faith in which his paternal grandmother was steeped missed the point: Charles III is a devout and committed Anglican. It’s not a phrase we hear much, the Church of England sometimes standing as an exemplar of fuzzy-minded and diffuse faith, but, like his mother, the King was brought up entirely steeped in the spirituality of the English Church. He may have more high-church instincts than Elizabeth II, but no-one should mistake the King’s loyalty to the institution of which he is now supreme governor.
The religious nature of the coronation meant that it could not be truncated beyond a certain size, however “slimmed down” some hoped it would be, and there was a limit to how far other denominations and faiths could be involved. In the end, I think it was done rather well. As is traditional, he was handed a special copy of the Bible by the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Rt Rev Dr Iain Greenshields, with, for my money, the best lines in the whole ceremony:
Here is wisdom;
This is the royal Law;
These are the lively Oracles of God.
(If you want my further opinion, not that I have a dog in this fight, the moderator came across as a little limp and lacklustre: one longed for booming, forbidding, condemnatory Calvinist tones in the tradition of the foul John Knox, but such is life. Weirdly, demonstrating that political life can have the oddest of third acts, had the coronation taken place a year ago, the moderator’s role would have been played by that well-kent face Lord Wallace of Tankerness, former deputy first minister of Scotland, and advocate general for Scotland under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. He was elected moderator as an elder of St Magnus’ Cathedral in Kirkwall rather than a clergyman, which has happened very rarely.)
The Church of Scotland is important. It is not quite an established church in the way that the Church of England is south of the border, but the monarch is represented at its annual ‘parliament’, the General Assembly, by a Lord High Commissioner, and the royal family worship as members of the Church of Scotland when they are there, including at Balmoral on Royal Deeside. The monarch must also take an oath “on the Security of the Church of Scotland”, not at his coronation, but at his Accession Council, that is, almost as soon as he has become monarch. There is no equivalent provision for the Church of England.
Non-Christian faiths were represented in the presentation of some of the Regalia to the King. Lord Kamall, a prominent Muslim peer, presented the Armills, Baroness Merron, a former chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, clothed the King in the Robe Royal, the Ring was given to him by Lord Patel, a prominent member of the Hindu community, and the Glove was presented by the Sikh leader Lord Singh of Wimbledon. In addition, the Archbishop of Armagh (Church of Ireland), the Anglican Archbishop of Wales and the Primus of Scotland, the presiding bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church, were given roles. There were also blessings from the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Thyateira & Great Britain, the Moderator of the Free Churches, the Secretary General of Churches Together in England and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. The Chief Rabbi also spoke a blessing but, as the ceremony fell on the Jewish Sabbath, he was unable to use any electric amplification.
This all struck me as well balanced. The other faith leaders were involved, indeed in some of the very central rituals of the coronation, but there was no suggestion that it was anything but an Anglican service—indeed, the Eucharist was celebrated—but the voices of other faiths were heard and their representatives given the chance to say some words of celebration in their own terms. It should not have offended any but the most sectarian of Anglicans (although the ghastly Calvin Robinson, a cleric of the deeply fringe Free Church of England, with fewer than 2,500 members, decided to stoke up hatred by objecting to the reading of a lesson by the Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, whom he described as a “heathen”). At the same time, non-Anglicans must surely have felt that a hand had been extended to them and their presence acknowledged.
Of course there were dissenters. Peter Hitchens, reliable source of red-faced reaction and contrariness, regretted that the prayers were not condemnatory enough (“one of the biggest mistakes this country's governing class ever made”) and lamented at length the “milk-and-water, soppy, dumbed-down direction” in which the ceremony had been taken. Dr David Starkey, whom I admire as an historian and rather like a contrarian but who has been sipping too freely at his own Kool-Aid of late, tried his best to be controversial by lecturing Calvin Robinson that the coronation was “utterly and absolutely explicitly Christian”. Well, so it was, David. Gavin Ashenden in The Catholic Herald mewed that “Charles cuts off his kingly roots at his peril”.
The warnings were predictable and slightly performative. They were also, I think, largely proven wrong by events, though some will cling to their horror and protest that it was woolly or too “modern”. The Spectator, hardly a slave to every leftist orthodoxy going, struck a very measured note. It noted of visitors and viewers alike that “the Britain they will see is one of tradition, tolerance, celebration of difference”, and that, I think, was right.
As ever, thank you so much for this. I enjoyed it very much and agree with it too. Did Starkey (who I used to know a little and admire for his intellect) nit also make some rather offensive observations about Mr Sunak being a 'heathen'?