On Saturday, a 74-year-old eccentric will be crowned king of the UK and 14 Commonwealth realms following the longest apprenticeship in history. The Archbishop of Canterbury will anoint Charles with holy oil, made according to a secret recipe, and present him with various symbolic objects, including an orb and a scepter. He will then place a heavy gold crown on the king’s head — so heavy in fact that it can only be worn briefly.
Camilla will then be anointed and crowned in the same way as the queen consort.
The heart of the ceremony — the unction or anointing with holy oil — will take place behind a golden cloth. The rest will be as public as possible — a spectacular celebration broadcast to the world.
Illustration: Mountain People
Charles and Camilla will arrive at Westminster Abbey via a grand procession. Six thousand soldiers will protect them from harm. People across the UK will hold street parties to celebrate the crowning of the new monarch. A few old people will reminisce about Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
Many millions of people will watch the ceremony — dubbed “Operation Golden Orb” by its planners, but what is really going on here? What does the coronation mean behind the anointing and swearing?
The most obvious interpretation — that Britain is creating a new king — is constitutional balderdash. The Prince of Wales became Charles III the moment Queen Elizabeth II breathed her last. The queen is dead, long live the king. Edward VIII never had a coronation — he gave up the throne for the divorcee he loved before it could take place.
Historically, the ceremony was used to make it absolutely clear who was the monarch and marginalize rival claimants. A failed succession could plunge the kingdom into civil war, but today there do not seem to be any rival claimants eager to deprive the Windsors of their job.
A cynical interpretation is that the coronation is a distraction from routine troubles — an excuse for dressing up in elaborate outfits (something the British have a great weakness for) and throwing street parties. Many left-wingers think that the monarchy legitimizes an unjust society by transforming it into a costume drama and drawing attention away from the ruthless exercise of power behind the theatrics.
Surprisingly, one of the great defenders of British royalty thought much the same thing. In The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot defended the monarchy on the grounds that it legitimized the social order through a cunning combination of mystery and distraction. The royal family enveloped power in mystery.
“The English monarchy strengthens our government with the strength of religion,” he said at one point and warned that “we must not let daylight in on magic.”
However, it also distracted attention from the real workings of power by keeping people’s attention fixated on ceremonies. These rites had the advantage of being both quotidian and irrelevant. They were quotidian in that they celebrated life events that almost everybody enjoys (we may not all be crowned, but most of us get jobs and promotions). They were irrelevant in that they were divorced from the real work of governing a kingdom such as setting tax rates or intervening abroad.
This argument might have had some force when Bagehot made it in the mid-Victorian age, when deference was in the water and most people did not have the benefit of education, but is there any evidence that the masses would be raving Corbynites if they were not bewitched by the royal stardust?
People these days are quite aware that the real business of government is done by politicians (and giant corporations) rather than kings and dukes. They temper their courtesies to the king with a furious cynicism about the behavior of some members of his family (and indeed his own behavior when he cheated on his previous wife).
A more plausible explanation is based on the notion of “social solidarity.” That concept requires two things: The acceptance of common moral rules and the affirmation of the bonds that bind us together as members of a common community.
“There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and affirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality,” wrote Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of the discipline of sociology. “Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.”
The coronation is a Durkheimian ceremony par excellence. The king agrees to observe the canons of a good society — mercy, charity, justice and protective affection. The ceremony was arguably the result of the taming of the warrior kings by the religious authorities. At the same time, the British people reaffirm their social bonds not only by participating in the ceremony as spectators, but also by holding all sorts of celebrations. Towns fly their bunting. Communities organize tea parties. There is a great effort to make sure that old people are not left alone.
The broader society recommits itself, in Durkheim’s phrase, to its higher collective ideals. The coronation and all its attendant flummery is not so much a national ceremony as a national communion.
Edmund Burke famously argued that society is a contract between the living and the dead as well as the living and the unborn. The coronation also involves tightening intergenerational bonds. Royalists love to dwell on the historical nature of the ceremony — the Coronation Chair is 700 years old; the solid-gold St Edward’s crown is from the 17th century; the golden stage coach that will bear the royal couple back to the palace has been used in every coronation since 1830 — because they feel deeply attached to kings down the ages and traditions that have survived the passage of time.
However, for royalists, the ceremony is also tinged with anxiety: Will the British still be performing the ceremony in 100 years’ time? Britain is now the last state in the world that preserves a full-blown coronation along with anointing oil and golden orbs.
In their classic account of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, Edward Shills and Michael Young wrote that “the central fact is that Britain came into the coronation period with a degree of moral consensus such as few large societies have ever experienced.”
The war against Nazism united society. The aristocracy and the working classes accepted the welfare state consensus. Today’s Britain is much more fractured. Brexit has embittered political arguments. There are fierce culture wars about race, gender and — reaching to the very heart of the monarchy’s concerns — empire and national identity.
So affirming social solidarity is far trickier today than it was in 1953. King Charles’ strategy is both to broaden and narrow the monarchy. He is broadening it by embracing ethnic minorities and different religious traditions: The lineal successor of Henry VIII has made great play of being a defender of faith in general rather than the Church of England. Significantly, Michelle O’Neill, the vice president of Sinn Fein, the traditional party of Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic population, has accepted an invitation.
Charles has thrown himself into causes such as environmentalism and corporate social responsibility. The wonderfully designed and fully recycled invitations to the ceremony feature the Green Man, surrounded by ivy, hawthorn and oak leaves, a figure from ancient folklore who symbolizes spring, birth and renewal. The Palace goes out of its way to point out that the secret anointing oil does not contain any ingredients resulting from harm to animals. These reportedly include ambergris — a natural by-product of sperm whales — orange flowers, roses, jasmine and cinnamon. A concert on Monday next week will feature Katy Perry, Take That and Lionel Richie, all a far cry from Handel’s Zadok the Priest.
King Charles’ commitment to slimming down the monarchy and sidelining excrescences such as his brother Andrew, the Duke of York, is underlined by the ceremony. It is shorter than his mother’s three-hour marathon, and the number of people invited is much smaller. The modernizing king and consort will be carried to the ceremony in a “relatively modern horse drawn carriage” equipped with electric windows and air-conditioning.
Whether Charles can do enough to save the monarchy from the erosion of time remains in doubt. The proportion of the population that supports the institution is once more drifting downward after the outpouring of affection for the queen on her death on Sept. 8 last year.
However, Britain arguably needs a force that can reaffirm social bonds today more than ever.
Modernity is plagued by anomie, as Durkheim liked to point out. The institution of the family is more fragile than in the past, particularly among poorer Britons. Levels of civil engagement are declining. Social media is a contradiction in terms: In looking for friends online, social media users are alienated from their immediate environment and isolated in narrow pseudo-communities. Incidence of mental health problems among young people have reached worrying highs.
The monarchy is arguably uniquely suited to provide a centripetal force in a centrifugal society, bringing people together rather than spinning them away. It is a public organization that floats above the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics. Although it is rooted in the past, it has succeeded in changing dramatically over the years, surviving the end of the divine right of kings and the arrival of democracy.
Charles III might well be the right man at the right time. He recognized from an early age that the monarchy needs to come to terms with multiculturalism and “political correctness” if it is to survive. That instinct is all-important. The monarchy’s most important function today is not just to embody tradition in a rapidly changing world, but to provide a force for cohesion in a society plagued by atomization and anomie.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former writer at The Economist.
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