Memo to King Charles: go big and splendid with your coronation
Unease is spreading – uncertain but palpable – regarding the forthcoming coronation. Because of the opaque nature of the preparations, conducted secretively behind palace walls, the precise details of the event remain obscure; but, as the date approaches, more information is becoming available and it is not reassuring. Among that part of the population – the vast but disregarded majority – that is instinctively royalist and celebratory, there is a growing dread that the coronation will be a drab, disappointing occasion that, so far from uplifting the nation, will be a dispiriting experience shaped by the acolytes of Britain’s managed decline.
There is a parallel with Brexit: the public had the courage to vote for a decisive restoration of national sovereignty, but the globalist establishment first tried to quash that emancipation, in defiance of the popular will, then used its deadening influence to suppress the spirit of regeneration and adventure that should have exploited the multifarious opportunities of Brexit. There are grounds for believing the same anti-national influences are similarly attempting to make the coronation a damp squib.
The facts that are known do nothing to dispel that fear. On grounds of “health and safety” the congregation of 8,000 that thronged Westminster Abbey at the late Queen’s crowning has been drastically reduced to 2,000. A reduction to 25 per cent of a known capacity cannot credibly be represented as a safety measure: it is part of a plan to minimise the ceremony, since the Abbey could clearly have accommodated, say, 4,000 or 5,000.
The procession route has been abbreviated to the absolute minimum, from the Abbey to the Palace, door to door, for just 1.3 miles over half an hour; blink and you could miss it. Queen Elizabeth processed for five miles, affording every one of her subjects in London an opportunity to see her. One excuse being deployed is that Britain now has insufficient soldiers to line the route (after 13 years of pseudo-Conservative government), which raises the question how we would resist an invasion by Vladimir Putin if we cannot even line a few streets in the capital.
Other commentators have suggested it is a security issue, which provokes equally challenging questions. The most concerning allegation is that the reduced procession route reflects the King’s desire for a “scaled-down” coronation; if so, it directly conflicts with the public’s desire for an occasion of great splendour, made clear by the reaction to the late Queen’s Jubilee celebrations and funeral.
Supposedly, the King does not want an extravagant spectacle at a time when the country is suffering from a cost-of-living crisis. If that is the case, it betrays an alarming lack of understanding of his subjects’ feelings: the most exuberant celebrations of the 1953 coronation took place at street parties in what were then East End slums. People need a splash of pageantry to raise their spirits. Are we to believe that a country that is spending £1.3bn a year on housing illegal immigrants in hotels cannot afford a decent coronation, especially considering there has not been such an event for 70 years?
None of these hypotheses can explain why the journey from the Palace to the Abbey is being undertaken not in the Gold State Coach, but in the Diamond Jubilee State Coach, which has heating, electric windows and air conditioning (an amenity that accounts for almost 4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and might therefore seem at odds with the King’s environmentalist preoccupations).
At the last coronation, the dazzling moment when the golden coach, complete with liveried postilions and grooms, dramatically emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace instantly transported the spectators into a world of faerie that endured for the remainder of the day. The Gold State Coach, however, is notoriously uncomfortable to travel in, so one hopes the motivation for this break with tradition is not royal comfort, which the late Queen always ignored, smiling radiantly throughout.
The most ominous rumours concern the exclusion of the majority of the peerage from the ceremony, a legally dubious move which will rob the occasion of much of its pageantry. Apart from the anointing, the most dramatic moment at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation came when, at the instant the crown was placed on her head, the peers all donned their coronets, in a beautifully choreographed movement, while acclaiming the new sovereign.
It also seems that those peers who are allowed to attend have been instructed to wear their parliamentary robes, instead of their coronation robes. Why? The coronation is not a parliamentary occasion, but a royal and state ceremony. Coronation robes are intended, uniquely, for wearing at a coronation; they are also much more impressive than the parliamentary version, with great ermine capes. Is that why the jobsworths in the Cabinet Office, the most woke department of state, which appears to have ousted the Earl Marshal from control of the event, are banning these historic robes? Is it an anti-fur fetish?
Already we have had the ludicrous objections to the Queen Consort holding an ivory sceptre that was made for Queen Mary of Modena in 1685, when elephants were not an endangered species. Is this beautiful piece of craftsmanship supposed to lie neglected in a safe, rather than be employed as it was designed to be, to appease a few cranks? In this nit-picking climate, we should be grateful that Just Stop Oil is not objecting to the anointing.
There are more extravagant rumours that peers who are attending have been encouraged not even to wear parliamentary robes but “standard business attire”, i.e. suits. Is that what millions of people around the world will be turning on their televisions to see – a sparsely attended church filled with suits? The Palace is said to see such a move as reflective of the 21st-century character of the monarchy. It would be no such thing. It would be a reflection of drab, globalist anonymity: suits are what are worn on supposedly formal occasions by EU apparatchiks, UN kleptocrats and other power brokers representing entities with no cultural identity.
As for rumours that the King objects to the traditional dress of tunic and knee breeches, as worn by his predecessors, it is actually a very simple, even austere costume, convenient for the anointing. If he wears knee breeches at state banquets at Windsor, why not at the coronation? If, as is rumoured, he intends to wear military uniform, how on earth is the full anointing to be done?
If the reign of Charles III begins with a disappointing, anticlimactic coronation similar to the mean “half-crowning” of William IV, from which his reputation never recovered, just when the monarchy is most vulnerable, following the death of Elizabeth II, it could have catastrophic consequences for the institution. Not only is the late Queen a hard act to follow, but the new King is perceived as being on probation, to a greater extent than any previous sovereign newly acceding to the throne.
His outright voicing of political opinions during his long period of waiting for the succession has made him a controversial figure. His first address to the nation was reassuring and he has publicly acknowledged he must behave differently as King. The public has given him the benefit of the doubt, in the hope that Prince Hal will successfully transform himself into Henry V. Nevertheless, he is still associated with the David Attenborough/Laurens van der Post axis of climate alarmism and eccentric mysticism.
This is especially dangerous, since low-growth, high cost of living Britain is about to be subjected to impositions of heat pumps, electric cars and every variety of hair-shirt austerity associated with the Net Zero cult. Climate scepticism is growing, as the junk science supporting the extremist version of climate alarmism becomes discredited and the cost in living standards of appeasing the net zero lobby is increasingly apparent. A decade from now, net zero proponents may become hunted animals, in the face of public rage.
An ancient monarchy such as Britain’s can endure a single reign in which it is out of sympathy with its sovereign; but the problem is that the Prince of Wales has been formed in the same mould, posing the risk of a dynasty of climate dogmatists divorced from public opinion. With that danger looming, it is even more challenging to the public for the monarch to attempt to alter the coronation ceremony in a woke direction, offending the established Church – and the relevant legislation – by desiring to introduce participation by non-Christian religions.
Although the coronation ceremony is more than a millennium old, the version in use for the past 700 years derives from the crowning of Edward II, later set out in a manual called the Liber Regalis. In pre-Reformation times the coronation took place in the context of a Mass, traces of which can still be detected in the modern usage. From the crowning of Elizabeth I a more Protestant style was introduced.
The coronation stands outside time, as an historic ritual. “Modernising” it would be an absurdity. The question might also be asked: why would the man whose heroic efforts saved Dumfries House, who created Poundbury as an assertion of the continuing relevance of traditional architecture and has championed similar values over decades wish to vandalise the sacring rite of Britain’s kings?
Behind even the most traditional performance of the coronation ritual lurks an uncomfortable reality. Since 1688 Britain has been a crowned republic. Behind the religious trappings, we have a Parliamentary Monarchy. At the so-called Glorious Revolution the “apostolic succession”, so to speak, of the monarchy was violently broken. That disruption was cushioned for the first quarter of a century by Parliament successively imposing two daughters of James II on the throne who, though usurpers, preserved at least an illusion of dynastic continuity.
In 1714, however, that illusion was shattered by the implementation of the Act of Settlement, a statute so controversial it had passed the House of Commons in 1701 by a majority of just one vote (118-117), that leapfrogged over the first 53 people and six European dynasties in rightful line of succession to the throne, on grounds of Catholicism, and imposed George I, the 54th in line, as king. In 1903 the Marquis de Ruvigny, a distinguished genealogist, calculated that by then 6,039 individuals had been excluded from the succession, of whom 858 were then alive, making Edward VII 859th in line for the throne he occupied.
With a title as precarious as that, the House of Windsor needs all the Anglican ceremonial it can command to present an appearance of legitimacy. And if the King is in the mood to hand out reparations for slavery and past misdeeds, he might consider allocating a tidy sum to the Catholic Church in reparation for all the beautiful abbeys destroyed at the Dissolution, which also created a criminal class of unsupported paupers, from the Reformation, possibly down to Dickensian times.
While we rightly pride ourselves on the glorious heritage that is our Monarchy, the ultimate embodiment of the nation, in dynastic terms there are certain historical inconsistencies that will not bear excessive scrutiny. The Coronation is the intermittent event that renews and celebrates the monarchy over generations: it is best left unchanged. Let it be an occasion of unapologetic and unrestrained pomp and pageantry. Vivat Rex in aeternum!
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