Headline from a usual suspect newspaper…
The words below come from a report in the Guardian, but other examples of very peculiar Britishness are available. Read on and try to tell yourself we live in an ordinary country…
“The king and the queen consort will be anointed behind a specially created screen of fine embroidery, held by poles hewn from an ancient windblown Windsor oak and mounted with eagles cast in bronze and gilded in gold leaf, Buckingham Palace has announced.”
Yes, this weekend’s coronation – and not, as you might suppose, some weird mash-up of Tolkien, CS Lewis and King Arthur.
The “specially created screen” will hide the king and his queen consort at a key point in Saturday’s service.
This anointing is “traditionally regarded as a moment between the sovereign and God, and the screen is to be used to give sanctity to this moment”, according again to the Guardian.
No television cameras or photographers’ lenses will be allowed to squeeze between Charles and his God.
I was playing badminton earlier, which has nothing much to do with anything, except that three of us sat out a game and discussed the coronation. None of us exactly young – and all expressing either no enthusiasm for the coronation, or downright hostility.
The story of how royalty are presented to us is a servile tale told endlessly by broadcasters, newspapers and their columnists, favour-currying politicians, and the toadying ranks of royal correspondents and experts.
So tight is their focus on royalty that it is easy to forget plenty of people are either indifferent to the monarchy or dislike the notion that we are still ruled over by kings and queens selected by birth – and, apparently, given the nod from God.
To be found at the bottom of the same page in the Guardian is a story reporting a survey by the National centre for Social Research. A recent poll conducted by the centre found that only 30% of Britons said the monarchy was “very important” to them.
Further, 45% of respondents said the monarchy should be abolished.
This was just one survey, it is true, and all surveys can be picked over to show the findings in a certain light. But it does suggest our purported love for the monarchy has been oversold.
Not only that but we are asked to swear an oath of allegiance to King Charles as follows: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”
Well, so help me God but I won’t be doing that, and I surely won’t be alone.
Such an oath is a solemn promise or statement calling on God to witness the truthfulness of the swearer’s testimony, according to Edward Vallance in a History Today essay from 2016.
But don’t go making that oath lightly…
“In the Tudor and Stuart period it was believed that those that swore falsely would be subject to divine punishment, not just in the next life but in this.”
Vallance mentions that in Dagon Demolished, a pamphlet published in 1660 by John Vicar, the grisly ends of those who broke their promise of allegiance to the king by swearing loyalty to the English republic in 1649 were detailed.
One Mr James Ashton of Oldham “became so full of Lice, continually, that all the shift and attendance that possible was used, could not cleanse him from this filthy Vermine”.
You have been warned.
More broadly, why are we all paying for this coronation at all? Its cost has been put at £100m, while Charles is estimated to be worth £2bn. He could easily have stumped up for the whole shindig himself.
Enjoy the long weekend; enjoy the coronation if it’s your thing; enjoy ignoring the musty, tradition-encrusted peculiar affair if it’s not. All options are fine, apart from the one that tells us what we feel when perhaps we don’t feel it at all.