It’s not so much a documenting of history as it is a gratefulness for material. A swirl of corporate marketing and a media grateful for some rolling coverage that requires the sort of banal, cliche-ridden commentary that will not exercise a single brain cell.
Some of this is just event hysteria, of course, like an England World Cup final, if we ever see that again in our lifetimes. Police arrest a man who appeared to be calling for a petition to make the monarch elected rather than hereditary. For the first time in history, the nation had been invited to pledge “true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. Schools have recruited students to the cause of coronation celebration in such a dizzying variety of ways that an absolute monarchy would be impressed. Even more so under Charles, who doesn’t enjoy the sort of affection his mother did, there has been a need to sell the celebrations. In subtle and explicit ways, consent is manufactured and dissent is stigmatised. People flock to these diversions because, in a way, we are forced to. The problem isn’t the escapism, but why escapism is necessary. Who can begrudge people, as a cost of living crisis rages, a few hours of harmless escapism? It’s not only stomachs that need feeding, morale does too. A place of filial connection and a galvanising national identity. In that moment we can see our own country in their image: a country that is sober, benign and loaded. What those funds bought was a coronation, much like the screens assembled to hide King Charles as he derobed, that for a moment erected an ornate cover that hid the nation’s hunger.Īnd my God, doesn’t it feel good? For a few moments to think of the country as the place of sacred ointments and special spoons, grand cathedrals and epically wealthy, exquisitely dressed people. The historian David Cannadine, in an essay on the “invented traditions” of royal ceremonies, wrote: “in a period of change, conflict or crisis”, unchanging ritual “might be deliberately unaltered so as to give an impression of continuity, community and comfort, despite overwhelming contextual evidence to the contrary.” That evidence to the contrary cannot be more overwhelming than reports that money for food banks has been diverted to pay for coronation events. It is to an entire system of political decline and economic inequality that cannot withstand closer scrutiny, and so it must be embellished and cloaked in ceremony.Īnd it was ever thus. The monarchy does provide a service, but not to us. We have the worst of both worlds: the royal family gives us nothing, and we in turn legitimise it, give it meaning and audience and pay, through subsidies and tax exemptions, for its ability to wow us. We are, of course, in a way we need to be for the institution of monarchy to have any meaning at all.
T he biggest illusion – and utility – of royal events such as the coronation is that we are somehow a part of them.
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