Unfortunately,the King has made it plain that he sees himself as a. He is the septuagenarian who would sweep the stale from his superannuated institution. His is to be a new monarchy,shorn of pointless pomp and frivolous flummery. A new cut-down Crown for a more earnest age.
Illustration:Simon Letch.
As a historian,my view is that this is a mistake.
The British monarchy,like every other monarchy,lives or dies on its respect for tradition – that handing down of customs from generation to generation. By snubbing process and protocol in petty ways,the King shows scant respect for his predecessors. He also denies his subjects the chance to take their place in a great human chain that spans the centuries.
We may have done no coronating for 70 years,but the ceremony itself has very deep roots. Harold was (probably) the first man made king in the Abbey in 1066. The idea of anointing a sovereign goes back much further – to the prophet Samuel in the Bible.
Crowning is thus a sacred Christian liturgy,but in England it has also long since been a rite of contract. Kings since Henry I in 1100 have sworn oaths in front of their people to uphold their laws. The rule of law. It is surely right that Charles formally acknowledges his solemn duty to guard it in front of all of us.
Modernising the monarchy risks alienating those who buy into its religious character or constitutional significance.AP
Of course,not every English king has upheld his oaths with equal faithfulness. The wise king,like Canute on the beach,must grasp his limitations in his role:he must see that the institution of monarchy itself is bigger than him or his times.
Critics of monarchy carp on about how much of the coronation pageantry is barely a century old. Perhaps it’s really no big deal if Charles wants to pare down,especially if it saves money? Wrong.
Making monarchy cheaper is unlikely to sway those who dislike it – and would abolish it – but it risks alienating those who do buy into its religious character or constitutional significance. The better lesson Charles could learn from pageantry’s novelty is this:it was developed at the dawn of the democratic age precisely because it gave the people who loved his great-great-grandfather the sort of spectacle they were asking for.
Charles will not generate much good long-term PR by taking the fun or the majesty away. Not even for having spared us the exquisite irony of Harry performing fealty to him on his knees,as would have happened under the old rite.
No. Instead,we’re told this will be an inclusive coronation with multi-faith elements and all kinds of other nods to the diversity of modern Britain and the Commonwealth.
I’m sorry,but a coronation is inherently exclusive. The whole thing is predicated on the idea of investing office and authority in a firstborn male simply because he is those things. No other attributes or qualities required.
How do you make that seem fair? Or modern? You can’t.
I’m reminded of the annoying plots of the Daniel Craig-era Bond films which seemed intended to make him seem real (aka “modern”) and gritty. In fact,all they did was destroy the magic within the secret agent fantasy. Gritty,modern Bond was not likeable and all his surliness did was draw attention to the fact that the stories about him were not remotely believable.
My fear is that the King will do something similar to the Crown – and hasten on perceptions of its mundanity more effectively than even Peter Morgan and his eponymous Netflix series.
Victoria Arbiter talks us through the incredible royal jewels and regalia that will be a centrepiece of King Charles' coronation.
As Australians,maybe we don’t care:we want to cut the umbilical cord,go our own way,have our own head of state. I have some sympathy with these arguments. But we also ought to acknowledge what will be lost when we do so:our collective connection to that great generational chain,to the antecedents and ancestors back in the Old Country,to values,and rites of passage.
The King’s cut-price coronation will make that easier:by depriving us of our full fat formalities he does the republicans’ work for them. And the same is sadly true of his wider approach of pandering to critics and highlighting the manifest absurdities of his own gloriously archaic position.
We Australians should make the most of this coronation because it’s likely to be our last.
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