Lest We Forget

On the coronation of Charles III

I’m not a Brit. I’m not even a monarchist. So you should really take this post with a grain of salt. I have a terrible feeling I’m only writing it because everyone else has written a Thing about the coronation, and I’m coming down with a cold so I feel a bit lazy, and besides, I need to welcome you all back to the Stack after my little hiatus with something fun and buzzy. (Welcome back, by the way! Everything has been unpaused, so you may now spend that $5 or $50 that’s been just burning a hole in your pocket these past two weeks, as you wandered forlorn and subscriptionless…I’m assuming.) Anyway, like everyone else, I enjoyed watching the excitement from afar last weekend, and so I just thought oh heck, might as well get my bit of Content out of all this.

To begin with, I should confess that I’ve never had very warm feelings for Charles, now Charles III. Princess Di died when I was four, too young to be following Royal news, but her loss cast a long shadow over Royals discourse as I was growing up. I only ever saw Charles as the schmuck who did her wrong. To this day, scrolling through Twitter, I can see I’m not alone. One woman was venting her frustration that Camilla is receiving an undeserved crown, then laughing at herself for caring deeply about any of this. And still, she does care.

Why, though? Why does anyone care? And really, what does all this stuff even mean, in 2023? Of course, that’s the question everyone was left mulling. As with the late Queen’s funeral, we feasted our eyes and ears on a ritual that seemed out of time. Peter Hitchens, admiring Penny Mordaunt’s elegantly stoic vigil as Keeper of the Jeweled Sword, still wondered aloud what exactly the ceremony meant to her as a woman born in 1973. Clearly, it meant something to the King. Though no doubt Hitchens is right that he would have preferred to use the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, we got watered-down “churchofEnglandese,” to use a great phrase coined by the editors at First Things. For once, my sympathies are with Charles, who presumably has the original BCP language in muscle memory, part of the permanent furniture of his mind.

Of course, as a card-carrying Anglican Who Actually Believes Stuff, I don’t find my soul thrilled by the wibbly-wobbly, warbly tones of Justin Welby. Someone on Twitter posted a picture of him in his full bishop’s regalia with the question, “What is this outfit for? Wrong answers only.” “The Archbishop of Canterbury,” replied someone else too clever by half.

Where’s the lie, though? In the wake of the Kigali Commitment, it seemed almost farcical for Welby to make the King swear an oath to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof.” Doctrine? What doctrine? “Maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel”? As the kids say, wat means? Niall Gooch put it well:

What does it mean to have a monarch who has sworn to uphold the “Protestant Reformed Religion established by law” in a country as religiously diverse as Britain, where barely anyone under thirty has any meaningful connection with the Church of England? What is the point of having a Christian King as the fount of our law, when his subjects are routinely arrested and even prosecuted for praying in the wrong place, or for stating the basic moral teachings of the Christian faith?

Niall is no doubt thinking about the case of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce. The video of her arrest for the crime of praying in her head across from an abortion clinic is chilling. The arresting officer never raises his voice. He’s a perfectly polite instrument of the perfectly corrupt state. I could also add the case of Christian preacher Hatun Tash, whose ministry and shameful treatment I covered a couple years ago in the Spectator. It took until October of last year for the police to issue a formal apology and give her a payout for her wrongful arrests, plural.

All to say, it is 2023, and there is no meaningful sense in which England can be called “a Christian nation.” It can’t even seem to manage not being an aggressively anti-Christian nation. If Charles even halfway fulfilled his oath, he’d be deposed.

Anyway, back to the coronation. Back to the processions, the finery, the oath-taking, the anointing. Everyone was talking about the anointing: that ancient, intimate ritual where the monarch strips to nothing but a plain white shirt, then disappears behind a gilded wall of privacy, to receive oil from the Mount of Olives on his head, hands, and breast. Elizabeth II used a canopy, but Charles used a specially commissioned, embroidered privacy screen. It looked lovely, I must say, modeled on the stained-glass windows of St. James. And in the moments before and after he disappeared behind it, the King looked peculiarly, suddenly vulnerable. It struck you all at once that here stood an old man, flawed, exposed, putting one arm in his robe, then the other.

But it’s just Charles! part of me is thinking. It’s just Charles the Schmuck, except now he’s an old schmuck. Why? Why is he so special?

Well, why was Saul so special? This whole anointing business started with him, after all. Saul the insane. Saul the disappointment. Saul the Schmuck.

Now, William and Kate, that will make some sense. “We’re all waiting for William and Kate,” I saw someone say. I mean really, who doesn’t love William and Kate? And more importantly, Kate’s cape. And that sneaky silver tiara-that-isn’t-a-tiara. Darling, just look.

And look at little Prince George, now second in line to the throne, concentrating hard on his job as a Page of Honour.

And don’t even get me started on Charlotte and Louis. Don’t even.

“Star Wars prequel vibes,” someone said—naturally, because Star Wars is the story of one particular, special family.

“But all children are special.” Well, yes. But we sort of like the idea of certain children being a little more special. We like the idea of chosen ones. Don’t we?

Although, while we’re on the topic of randomly chosen people, I would sort of like to know what was so special about Jacob. Besides his being specially annoying, that is. “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated.” But why, though? Esau is a bit dim, granted, but is he such a bad bloke as all that? What’s really going on up there, in the divine Decision-Making Room? Does God throw darts? Does He close His eyes and spin a wheel?

Meanwhile, I’ve done some googling, and it turns out William might be a schmuck too. Not that anyone knows for sure, mind you. But people have been talking. People will talk. Pssst, pssst, pssst. Whisper, whisper.

“Thank you, William.” That moment didn’t look planned, after William had touched the crown and kissed his father on the cheek. Of course, as Hitchens notes, it feels odd that the cameras were zooming in close enough that everyone could see a moment like this and replay it, over and over. But then, it is 2023.

“William pays homage to King Charles” at the coronation concert, read the BBC headline. Then in the story, awkwardly, they used the same phrase for his pledge on Saturday, in which he was literally paying homage. Like, yes, we use the phrase in the former way most of the time, but this was the actual thing.

What’s that? You’re asking me what it means? I dunno. I have a cold, and I can’t hear you over the sound of “Zadok the Priest.” Please call me back at a better time.