By Henry Hill
On Friday, March 3, 2023, the sacred Chrism oil which will be used to anoint King Charles III at his coronation was consecrated at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. As illustrations of what makes the British monarchy special go, it was hard to beat.
The photographs tweeted by the Royal Family show the Patriarch of Jerusalem, alongside the Anglican archbishop, engaging in a ritual which hasn’t been performed at all since the late Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1953, and will deo volente not be performed again for many years yet.
To some, it will doubtless seem absurd. The pomp and pageantry that accompanies the monarchy is often criticised, not only by explicit republicans but those who hold what we might call republican attitudes. Even if the head of state is not elected, ought not the office be more modern? More relevant to life in Britain today?
The coronation has become a locus for such complaints. Not only has the ritual come under predictable attack, but the cost—estimated at some £50 million (about $60.2 million)—denounced as inappropriate given the cost-of-living crisis facing many of His Majesty’s subjects as spiralling energy costs and our broken housing market squeeze the incomes of working people.
Yet both these arguments entirely miss the point of monarchy, especially a constitutional monarchy in a modern, democratic state. The splendour is the point.
The financial cost is, in the grand scheme of things, trivial. Even if the entire event were scrapped entirely, a few tens of millions is a drop in the ocean relative to the vast expenditure of the British state.
It is also great value for money. As mentioned above, we haven’t had a coronation since 1953. Contrast this with a republic which must stage an inauguration every four or eight years. The Biden Inauguration Committee reportedly raised $61.8 million—and that was just the most recent presidential handover!
Yes, of course the coronation could be staged more cheaply. Half of the face cost of it is security costs, but presumably the military and police could throw up their ring of steel around a registry office, or similarly spartan venue, wherein the King and Archbishop of Canterbury could get the whole thing done and dusted in half an hour.
At a stroke, £25 million or so saved for the public purse! That’s enough to run the National Health Service for, er, about three hours.
But to approach the question as an accountant is to risk, as was sometimes said of Margaret Thatcher, seeing the price of something but not the value of it. For the truth is that the Crown’s subjects would not only gain very little from disenchanting the monarchy, but they would lose much.
There is no alternative stock of magic in the British constitution. The royal family is at the centre of all our pageantry, not just rarities such as coronations but more regular events such as the state opening of Parliament and the Trooping of the Colour.
A big advantage of this is that such events can thus—with the obvious but relatively minor exception of republicans–be enjoyed equally by everyone, because at the centre of them is a nonpartisan individual rather than a politician.
By contrast, even in a country as steeped in barely-concealed monarchical sentiment as France, the great ceremonies of the state must necessarily, by dint of their republican constitution, have at their heart a political figure, for whom many citizens did not vote and whose policies many may bitterly oppose.
This is one factor which has allowed royal occasions to becoming unifying moments, time stamps in the memories of the British people—a chance to remember where you where when, and who you were with.
Another is that unlike the mechanical timetable of politics, with its regular elections, the pattern of royal occasions is an irregular, organic and very human one, marked by births, weddings, funerals, and jubilees. The Royal Family is a family, the monarch a human being, and it is that human element which has helped the House of Windsor maintain that enduring connection with its subjects that so baffles the rationalists and the modernisers.
People like pageantry, they cherish beauty, they remember spectacle. That’s why so many republics invest so heavily in pageantry, for all that British republicans seem to forget it. The splendour of monarchy plays into these strengths, and in a manner that if anything has far less capacity for malicious misuse than the inherently political deployment of national iconography a republic entails.
Besides which, the last thing people need is for the monarchy to reflect their day-to-day lives—they encounter the everyday. The pomp and circumstance of the Crown is a sprinkling of national magic.
Asset-strip the Crown, and we would soon find only that our count of enchanted objects—kings and queens, princes and princesses, coronations and jubilees—had diminished, and by more than one.
We would also lose an irreplaceable connection to the history of one of the most ancient constitutions on Earth. The preparations in Jerusalem is just a particularly vivid example of the deeper truth that participation in shared ritual is a way of building a connection with our ancestors, and of giving our descendants the same opportunity for a moment of common feeling with our own day.
As British society has grown more diverse, and the rise of the Internet has broken the oligopolies of traditional media, such shared moments are rarer than they used to be. We can no longer, as our ancestors might, assume our fellow citizens have served in the Armed Forces, or attended church, or read certain books, or learned in school a common narrative about our country.
That makes those instances that remain the more precious, and with occasional exceptions such as hosting the Olympics in 2012, the monarchy is the custodian of nearly all of them. And in turn we, the people, are the custodians of the monarchy and our other ancient institutions. It is not just great folly but great vanity to cast away this inheritance, and deny it to future generations, by demanding that the United Kingdom reflect in every particular our fleeting image of what modernity looks like.
It’s true that the sovereign no longer rules over us, and that the nobility in their ermine are no longer the great power brokers they were when their forefathers fought or bought their way to the table however many centuries ago. Nor is today’s Britain the overwhelmingly Anglican nation that it was even a generation ago.
Yet that doesn’t mean that those institutions aren’t important, as reminders of from whence we have come and thus, inevitably if only in part, of who we are. Inevitably, George Orwell put it best when he wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn:
“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”
On Saturday, May 6, 2023, I will join tens of millions of my fellow Britons, tens of millions more of his subjects in the Commonwealth realms, and likely hundreds of millions of people around the world to watch the coronation of Charles III. In my whole life, it is unlikely I will share such a moment with that many people more than a handful of times.
Alongside the vast majority of them, I will repeat what Winston Churchill called “the prayer and the anthem”: God Save the King. And if you think it matters whether or not those who say it believe in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s God, or any, you have again missed the point.
This piece and others on King Charles III’s coronation, appeared in the Fellowship & Fairydust issue Happy & Glorious: A Royal Celebration.