The King and us
It’s the mythic timeless Britishness of the coronation that people buy into.
Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole.
— Sir Harold Nicolson
On the 2nd of June, 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom and her other realms.
The United Kingdom was, at the time, in the doldrums. Still living in the shadow of the recent Second World War the public purse was lighter than it had ever been before, the rationing of some products hadn’t yet ended, and the foundations of a world-spanning empire were far from as sturdy as once they’d been. The confidence of the British was shaken.
But, even given the troubles of the time, the British still knew who they were. We were secure in our culture, our identity, and our place in the world. Having been faced with an existential threat to Anglo civilisation by a civilisational force and vision so alien to it in the form of Nazism, it was probably one of the points in history when what it meant to be British — the descendants and inheritors of a specific set of values, traditions, religious beliefs and presuppositions largely unique and distinct from those of other places and peoples — had been most crystallised in the minds of the nation.
When a young and radiant Queen Elizabeth II had the crown placed upon her head, there was little thought amongst the British public that what was happening was old-fashioned or anachronistic, there was little whinging that the Monarch as our head of state wasn’t democratically elected. We’d just seen the potential consequences of having an elected head of state in the form of Herr Hitler. “Democracy” didn’t have the unthinking moral component to it that it has now acquired.
What the British public saw when they watched the coronation on black and white television screens was the continuance of something special, of the civilisation to which they belonged, for which they’d fought so hard. They saw a young princess, who had selflessly served alongside her peers, whose home had been struck by a bomb in the Blitz, who had just lost her father, become a Queen and become a symbol.
One can still watch the old footage of the late Queen’s coronation now, and happier scenes you’ll be hard-pressed to view. An ecstatic people took a brief moment out of the mundanity and difficulty of their everyday lives to celebrate not just a new Queen being placed on the throne, but the continuation of a civilisation and a people against all the odds.
For 70 years and 214 days, Queen Elizabeth II reigned over the United Kingdom. Little could she have known on the day of her coronation, and little could those celebrating have known, that when she died the civilisation which they’d been celebrating, which had survived the Nazi onslaught, would die with her.
Following her ascendancy to the throne, Britain changed a lot. Under strenuous pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union and the newly independent India in the fledgling United Nations, we backed away from our imperial responsibility and, for better or worse, ceased to be an empire. Technology rapidly changed the way we live and work and consume information and allowed a rapid influx and the democratisation of largely alien ideas from places like the United States and the Soviet Union, many of which felt persuasive to an increasingly discombobulated people.
With this influx of new technology and new ideas came an influx of new people. First, they came from the former colonies, and later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Great Britain’s membership of the European Union, from continental Europe. For the first time in our island’s history, we had a significant number of people living amongst us who had little connection to our national history, and who weren’t natural inheritors of our traditions and identity. Indeed, some of them felt (and feel) themselves to be inheritors of identities defined in part by their opposition to the British, the descendants of “victims” of colonialism and “freedom fighters” against the British Empire and the Crown.
As King Charles III prepares for his coronation, he does so in a country that would be almost unrecognisable to the bowler-hatted gentlemen who strolled the streets of London in the early 1950s. The sense of shared identity, the sense of belonging to a civilisational continuum of which the Monarchy of the United Kingdom was the most tangible part, is largely lost. The identities of many young people are no longer British, they’re globalised, or perhaps Americanised. They’re products of Hollywood, just as much as anyone from California.
The Coronation is due to take place on May 6, and already we’re getting news details that it’s being modernised. Traditional dress is being foregone, it’s multicultural and multifaith, shearing it from its British and religious roots, and the Homage of Peers will be replaced with a Homage of the People.
The popular Scottish YouTube movie reviewer Will Jordan, known online as The Critical Drinker, once made a video titled Why Modern Movies Suck — The Myth Of The “Modern Audience” in which he explains the “Modern Audience” doesn’t really exist. Movie viewers don’t really want entertainment that “reflects the world we live in today”, they don’t want moralising ‘current thing’ messaging inserted into everything they’re watching, they want the same things they wanted when great movies were still being made. There’s a certain timelessness and universality to great storytelling quite disconnected from the fleetingness of right now.
I fear the same is true of the coronation. The great story is its specificity, the fact it is part of a unique continuum. It’s the mythic timeless Britishness of it that people buy into. An other-worldly magic disconnected from the world we live in today. The type of people who might have wanted it updated to reflect “modern audiences” largely don’t want a coronation in the first place. The modern audience for whom the updates are being made doesn’t really exist. They’re cynical materialists who don’t believe in magic. That audience would rather abolish the monarchy.
I do genuinely wish the King the best. I see him as the remnants of an order we’ve all too carelessly and thoughtlessly thrown away. Of a beautiful culture we’ve allowed to be decimated. The last vestige of Britishness not yet completely corrupted by the arrogant blandness of American universal egalitarian liberalism. The Monarchy, while it lasts, will be the last representation of something we once had and once were, and I’d like to hope can find our way closer to becoming again — which is why there’s now such a furore amongst some activists to have it abolished, none of the Four Olds may remain — but I do worry that the “updated” dramatisation for modern audiences may be weakening the power of the spectacle, rather than strengthening it.
God Save the King.