Coronation reflections: what a weekend Pt. 2
Some reflections on different aspects of the coronation of Charles III
Welcome back, dearest readers. Having considered the coronation overall, and looked at the religious meaning at the heart of the ceremony, I want to share some more thoughts on Saturday’s events which may interest you, and may, perhaps, strike a chord with some of you.
Some things are still sacred
I must have said a thousand times that I’m not an Anglican, but I do appreciate the importance of the sacred and the divine for those who do believe. As discussed above, the coronation, while certainly a great state event, is primarily a religious ceremony, the confirmation of the monarch’s position through his anointing and his swearing of the oath required by law. And the anointing is the most holy part of all, the archbishop of Canterbury putting holy oil on to the monarch’s head, chest and hands. This is the point at which the sovereign is closest to God, and is a rite which takes its cues from the deepest parts of the Bible.
In 1953, the decision was made that the Act of Consecration would not be filmed, unlike the rest of the coronation ceremony (the communion was also not captured). To afford Elizabeth II privacy, she was covered with a canopy which was borne by four Knights of the Garter (the most senior order of chivalry): Viscount Allendale, Earl Fortescue, the Duke of Wellington and the Duke of Portland (all of them Etonians, by the by). Charles III made a similar decision that his anointing would not be filmed, and as he knelt for the archbishop to perform the rite, a three-sided screen was erected around them; it was designed by Aidan Hart, a Greek Orthodox iconographer, made under the direction of the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and gifted by the City of London Corporation and the City Livery Companies.
I wrote a little about the anointing in my Coronation Miscellany last week; it is performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, assisted by the Dean of Westminster, and uses the oldest (and only pre-Restoration) part of the regalia, the Coronation Spoon, which dates to at least the 14th century but was regarded as old even then. It may have been made for the coronation of Henry II (1154) or Richard I (1189). For the ceremony, Charles wore a plain white shirt—Elizabeth put on a plain anointing gown—to symbolise his humility before God. While this is going on, the choir sang, as they have done at every coronation since it was introduced in 1727, George Frideric Handel’s shiveringly majestic anthem Zadok the Priest, written for the coronation of George II. But the roots of this go much, much deeper: the text, in one form or another, derived from 1 Kings 1:38-40, has been sung at every coronation since that of King Edgar at Bath Abbey in AD 973.
On Saturday, whether by accident or design, the screen was removed as the King was still kneeling where he had been anointed. I found that glimpse of the monarch at prayer, stripped of his regalia and robes, very moving. At the beginning of the ceremony, after he was welcomed to the abbey by a chorister of the Chapel Royal, the King had made the following vow:
In his name,
and after his example,
I come not to be served but to serve.
That emphasis on duty, service and obedience to God was echoed in the sight of the kneeling King. Because all through this ceremony there was—rightly—a duality between office and man. Yes, the coronation is about the monarch, the holder of an ancient dignity, ordained by God; but he is also a 74-year-old man, 70 of whose years have been spent as heir to this crown and this throne, a man at least as fallible as us all: passionate, demanding, hard-working, sometimes seized by temper, but above all desperate, at last, to do his duty, the reason for his very existence. Even as an atheist, I felt both of those elements powerfully watching, if only for a moment, the greyed head bowed in prayer, the chrism still slick upon him.
It was common, especially in her later years, to talk about Elizabeth II’s devotion to duty. Frequently commentators would refer to the broadcast she had made when still Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday, 21 April 1947. Speaking from Cape Town during a tour of South Africa withe King and Queen, she had spoken gravely of her sense of duty and commitment.
I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.
Listening to that broadcast I still find it intensely moving. Of course she cannot have dreamed just how long that “whole life” would be, nor that she would be queen within five years of speaking those words; nevertheless, the solemnity of a young woman, not yet engaged, let alone married, facing up to responsibilities which were genuinely awesome. Her father, George VI, was still—just—Emperor of India, so it was a global role which she contemplated.
I think we have, understandably, been fixated on this aspect of the late Queen that we have overlooked it in Charles III. Yet this is a man whose life has been dominated, consumed by his role as heir to the throne. He was only three-and-a-half when his mother succeeded, making him Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland. I don’t think any ‘civilian’ can really understand the impact of that change of status on a young child, but it is certainly fair to imagine that his whole life has been lived in the shadow of his future responsibilities. Just as Elizabeth II cannot have imagined her time would come so soon, Charles cannot have thought he would spend longer as heir to the throne than anyone in our history, just over 70 years.
We have also tended to focus on some of the King’s more eccentric habits: his passion for conservation, his loathing of modern architecture, his “black spider” memos. But he is a deeply conventional man, personally, professionally, socially and religiously. His interest in other faiths and in non-religious philosophy, much of it cultivated under the tutelage of the South African writer, philosopher and conservationist Sir Laurens van der Post, is not a replacement for but an addition to his Anglicanism; even his (in)famous pondering whether he could be “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith”, never more than an off-the-cuff remark, was couched in terms of the protection of minorities being a duty of his Anglican spirituality.
All of this leads me to believe that the glimpse of the kneeling King, maybe 30 seconds of footage from the whole ceremony, is the central and defining image of Charles as monarch. The coronation gives the sovereign no extra powers in legal or constitutional terms; indeed, Edward VIII never underwent the experience in his 325-day reign, yet was fully and completely monarch. But I have no doubt that Charles found that moment, the experience of his consecration by Archbishop Welby in the manner of Solomon by Zadok, transformative, the hinge of his reign, when he fully came into his spiritual inheritance. And in these days of access-all-areas total exposure, I think it’s appropriate and refreshing that this was shared between the King, the archbishop, the Dean of Westminster and, in their view, the Almighty. We do not always need to see everything.
Banquo’s ghost
It was late in the day that Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, confirmed that he would attend the coronation, but that he would do so alone, his wife and children remaining in the United States. This was a matter which was never going to have a good outcome: there would have been outrage among the vociferous Sussex partisans if no invitation had been extended (and indeed it is unlikely the King would have snubbed his younger son in that way, despite all that has happened); declining the invitation would have been interpreted as a pointed and ungrateful message by the Sussexes to the rest of the royal family; the Duchess of Sussex (for whom i have absolutely no brief) was probably right to imagine that her presence would have ramped up the soap-opera element of proceedings. So the solution of Harry attending alone was probably the best way through the presentational minefield.
That notwithstanding, it was inevitable that the Duke of Sussex would play no formal role in the coronation. He is, after all, no longer a working royal, at his own decision, and while he is the son of the monarch, and while he was scrutinised in minute detail as it was, the microscope would have been more powerful still if he had been given a speaking part.
In 1953, once the Queen had been crowned, there had been a long paying of homage: first the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher had sworn fealty to the new ruler, followed by all the other bishops present; then the Duke of Edinburgh had declared himself “your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship”, followed by homage from the Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and her cousin, the Duke of Kent. Then the senior peer of each of the five ranks of the peerage (duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron) had similarly paid homage. Replicating this exactly for Charles’s coronation would have been doubly problematic. Not only would the Duke of Sussex have been expected to pay homage, as a royal duke, but so too would the Duke of York. Even the newest public relations intern would have spotted the potential bad press likely if Prince Andrew had been actively involved (though there seems never to have been any question of his not being invited at all).
An elegant solution was to have the Prince of Wales pay homage on behalf of the whole royal family and peerage. He declared himself the King’s “liege man of life and limb”, after which he kissed the King on the cheek. Much has been read into this kiss, that it “defines the royal family’s future”, that it “clearly moved” the King and that it was a “tender moment” between father and son. But it is also a standard part of the process of paying homage: the Duke of Edinburgh kissed Elizabeth II at her coronation in 1953, and the then-Prince of Wales (later George V) kissed his father Edward VII at his coronation in 1902. Moreover, as is sometimes the way in aristocratic circles, the King has long greeted his sons with a kiss on the cheek, so the gesture at the coronation was not completely out of the ordinary.
Was Prince Harry poorly treated at the coronation? I don’t think so. He has no official role in the royal family, he has chosen to live abroad, and he has, at the most charitable reading, contributed to familial tension with his revelatory memoir, Spare, and his and his wife’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey and their Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan. It would have expected too much of human nature for him to be welcomed with open arms; but his position, two rows behind the Prince of Wales, between Jack Brooksbank (husband of Princess Eugenie) and Princess Alexandra (cousin of the late Queen), was hardly social Siberia. That his visit to the UK was fleeting was his own decision—was he really rushing back to California for Prince Archie’s fourth birthday?—but was, again, probably diplomatic. In the end, for all the potential horrors in presentational and social terms, I think everyone involved managed the situation about as well as they could.
At that point I will conclude for now. More reflections to follow in my next essay…