What science says about the coronation of Charles III

Adrian Wooldridge, Tribune News Service

On May 6, a 74-year-old eccentric will be crowned king of the United Kingdom and 14 Commonwealth realms following the longest apprenticeship in history. The Archbishop of Canterbury will anoint Charles with holy oil, made according to a secret recipe, and present him with various symbolic objects, including an orb and a scepter. He will then place a heavy gold crown on the king’s head (so heavy in fact that it can only be worn briefly).

Camilla will then be anointed and crowned in the same way as the Queen Consort.

The heart of the ceremony — the unction, or anointing with holy oil — will take place behind a golden cloth. The rest will be as public as possible — a spectacular celebration broadcast to the nation and the world. Charles and Camilla will arrive at Westminster Abbey via a grand procession. Six thousand soldiers will protect them from harm. People across the country will hold street parties to celebrate the crowning of the new monarch. A few old people will reminisce about Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.

Many millions of people will watch the ceremony — dubbed “Operation Golden Orb” by its planners. But what is really going on here? What does the coronation mean behind the anointing and swearing? The most obvious interpretation — that Britain is creating a new king — is constitutional balderdash. The Prince of Wales became Charles III the moment Queen Elizabeth breathed her last. The Queen is dead, long live the King. Edward VIII never had a coronation — he gave up the throne for the divorcee he loved before it could take place. Historically, the ceremony was used to make it absolutely clear who was the monarch, and marginalise rival claimants. A failed succession could plunge the country into civil war. But today there do not seem to be any rival claimants eager to deprive the Windsors of their job.

A cynical interpretation is that the coronation is a distraction from our routine troubles — an excuse for dressing up in elaborate outfits (something the British have a great weakness for) and throwing street parties. Many leftwingers think that the monarchy legitimises an unjust society by transforming it into a costume drama and drawing attention away from the ruthless exercise of power behind the theatrics.

Surprisingly, one of the great defenders of British royalty thought much the same thing. In The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot defended the monarchy on the grounds that it legitimised the social order through a cunning combination of mystery and distraction. The royal family enveloped power in mystery. “The English Monarchy strengthens our government with the strength of religion,” he said at one point and warned that “we must not let daylight in on magic.” But it also distracted attention from the real workings of power by keeping people’s attention fixated on ceremonies. These rites had the advantage of being both quotidian and irrelevant. They were quotidian in that they celebrated life events that almost everybody enjoys (we may not all be crowned but most of us get jobs and promotions). They were irrelevant in that they were divorced from the real work of governing a country such as setting tax rates or intervening abroad.

This argument might have had some force when Bagehot made it in the mid-Victorian age, when deference was in the water and most people didn’t have the benefit of education. But is there any evidence that the masses would be raving Corbynites if they weren’t bewitched by the royal stardust? People these days are quite aware that the real business of government is done by politicians (and giant corporations) rather than kings and dukes. They temper their courtesies to the king with a furious cynicism about the behaviour of some members of his family (and indeed his own behaviour when he cheated on his previous wife).

A more plausible explanation is based on the notion of “social solidarity.” That concept requires two things: the acceptance of common moral rules and the affirmation of the bonds that bind us together as members of a common community. “There can be no society,” wrote Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, “which does not feel the need of upholding and affirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.

Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments.” The coronation is a Durkheimian ceremony par excellence. The king agrees to observe the canons of a good society — mercy, charity, justice and protective affection. (The ceremony was arguably the result of the taming of the warrior kings by the religious authorities).

At the same time, the British people reaffirm their social bonds not only by participating in the ceremony as spectators but also by holding all sorts of celebrations. Towns fly their bunting. Communities organise tea parties. There is a great effort to make sure that old people are not left alone. The broader society recommits itself, in Durkheim’s phrase, to its higher collective ideals. The coronation and all its attendant flummery is not so much a national ceremony as a national communion.

Edmund Burke famously argued that society is a contract between the living and the dead as well as the living and the unborn. The coronation also involves tightening intergenerational bonds. Royalists love to dwell on the historical nature of the ceremony — the Coronation Chair is 700 years old; the solid gold St. Edward’s crown is from the 17th century; the golden stage coach that will bear the royal couple back to the Palace has been used in every coronation since 1830 — because they feel deeply attached to kings down the ages and traditions that have survived the passage of time. But for royalists, the ceremony is also tinged with anxiety: Will the British still be performing the ceremony in a hundred years’ time? Britain is now the last country in the world that preserves a full-blown coronation along with anointing oil and golden orbs.

In their classic account of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, Edward Shills and Michael Young wrote that “the central fact is that Britain came into the coronation period with a degree of moral consensus such as few large societies have ever experienced.” The war against Nazism united society. Both the aristocracy and the working classes accepted the welfare state consensus. Today’s Britain is much more fractured. Brexit has embittered political arguments. There are fierce culture wars about race, gender and — reaching to the very heart of the monarchy’s concerns — empire and national identity.