Coronations used to be about the future. It was a political event, not a cultural one. The ceremonies themselves gave a beguiling foretaste of the reign to come. Here’s what Gilbert Burnet, a prelate specially chosen by William III and Mary II, preached at their coronation in 1689:
Here are the true measures of Government; it is a Rule, and not an Absolute Dominion; it is a Rule over men, and not a Power, like that which we have over Beasts. In a word, it is the Conduct of free and reasonable Beings, who need indeed to be governed, but ought not to be broken by the force and weight of Power.
This was a promise to abide by the Bill of Rights, recently drawn up, and to resist impulses to absolutism – then in vogue in the rest of Europe. Even the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II promised a new Elizabethan age. Its ceremonies, its meanings, had not yet been consigned to historical curiosity. Aristocracy and the ancien regime were still just about extant in the Britain of 1953, and would only disappear for good in the high tragedy of Suez a few years later.
In the run-up to Charles III’s own coronation, royal publicists have made much of the ideas of ‘old’ and ‘new’. But this is absurd. Some of the more jangling features of the old ceremony are to be discarded. We learn that Charles will not wear knee-breeches, the style of the 18th century, and will instead appear in modern military uniform, as if the latter – a creation of the Napoleonic Wars – is somehow new.
In fact, Charles III’s coronation will be the first to look explicitly backwards. It will be the first coronation with its own idea of Britain. It has been said that the ceremony will reflect modern Britain, but its components – or shibboleths – precede Charles’s reign by several decades. It belongs firmly to the mid-20th century. One planned fixture, the NHS, is a health bureaucracy, founded four months before Charles’s birth. Another, immigration, begins with the landing of the HMT Windrush that same year.
The question for this coronation is not the past versus the present, but whose past? Charles’s coronation will look backwards, but not very far. This was a tone set by his mother. We are reminded by David Starkey that for Elizabeth II the succession of her grandfather George V is a Year Zero: everything before the turn of the century may as well not have existed.
Britain’s public doctrine in 2023 has no idea of the future, or the past, or even the present. It can only celebrate the recent past, that which is old enough to be tired but not old enough to be an artefact, or a legend. It’s stuck in a rut, and is too incurious to think of something else. It isn’t surprising then that Boris Johnson, ever promiscuous with metaphor, chose to describe the Windrush as Britain’s Mayflower.
Read More: Charles’s Coronation Will Symbolise a Culture in Regression
