Isla Campbell on the ceremony that cost sixty million pounds, involved a golden coach, a very long Archbishop, and an oil made from oranges, and why she cried anyway
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I watched the Coronation from my sitting room in Central London with two friends, a substantial quantity of a sparkling wine that we had agreed beforehand was not champagne but was “celebratory in spirit,” and a printed order of service that I had obtained from the Internet and which proved useful in identifying which parts of the ceremony were Ancient Tradition and which parts were Invented in the Nineteenth Century, a distinction that turns out to be surprisingly blurry once you get into it.
The golden coach is, it should be noted, a genuinely extraordinary object. It was built in 1760, weighs four tonnes, is pulled by eight horses who have to be specifically trained not to be unsettled by its creaking, and is described by everyone who has ridden in it as extraordinarily uncomfortable, which makes it the perfect metaphor for the monarchy itself: magnificent, ancient, impractical, and maintained at considerable expense because getting rid of it would feel like a loss nobody is quite ready to name.
The Parts That Were Extraordinary
The anointing. The Archbishop of Canterbury performed the anointing of the King with holy oil — made from olives, sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, and orange blossom from the Duchy of Cornwall, a detail I find endlessly specific and perfect — behind a silk screen that blocked the television cameras, creating a moment of deliberate privacy at the heart of a televised spectacle that had approximately three hundred million viewers worldwide. The decision to preserve that moment from the cameras was, by all accounts, the King’s own, and it produced something unexpectedly moving in a ceremony that had a great deal of moving parts: the knowledge that some things are meant to be private even when everything else is public.
The choir. The choir in Westminster Abbey at the Coronation sounded the way that music sounds when it is performed in a building that was designed for it, which is to say like something from a different frequency of human experience. Whether you are religious or not, whether you support the monarchy or not, that specific combination of voices in that specific acoustic space in that specific historical moment is objectively extraordinary and I defy anyone to hear it in person and remain unmoved. I did not hear it in person. I heard it through my television speakers, which are not Westminster Abbey quality. I was moved anyway.
The Parts That Were Slightly Ridiculous
The golden orb. I understand what it symbolises — sovereignty, faith, the Christian monarch’s responsibility to God and country — and I understand that it has been part of the coronation regalia since medieval times. I also understand that it is a large gold ball with a cross on it, and that when the King was handed it and held it with the solemn expression of a man being handed something that he recognises is significant while also being a large gold ball, I felt the specific cognitive dissonance that defines the British constitutional settlement: the genuine and the absurd coexisting in a single moment with neither cancelling the other out.
The oath was also slightly strange, in the way that all public oaths are slightly strange because they are the most formal possible version of a conversation about values that most people have informally and privately, and making them formal and public both elevates them and makes them slightly theatrical. The King swearing to uphold the Protestant faith and the Church of England is a constitutional requirement with deep historical roots and also, when said aloud in the year 2023, a reminder that the constitution was written by people who were quite worried about Catholicism in a way that no longer entirely maps onto the country it governs.
Why I Cried Anyway
At the moment of the actual crowning — when the Archbishop placed St Edward’s Crown on the King’s head and the organ crashed and the Abbey erupted — I cried. This surprised me, as someone who had spent the preceding week being quite measured about the ceremony’s significance and quite articulate about its complications. What I felt was not royalist sentiment exactly. It was something more like the experience of witnessing a moment that is genuinely historic — that will be in history books and that I will be able to say I watched — combined with the particular emotional quality of ceremony done at the highest level, which is that it makes you feel the weight of time in a way that ordinary life does not. Britain does ceremony better than almost any country, and the Coronation was ceremony at its absolute maximum. That I found it both slightly ridiculous and genuinely moving is, I think, the correct response. Britain specialises in producing the correct response to its own contradictions.
The fifty million pounds that the Coronation cost is a figure that is correct in some accountings and disputed in others, depending on whether you include security costs that would have been incurred regardless, palace operational costs that are ongoing, and the economic activity generated by the event in London and across the country. The republican critique is that fifty million pounds is a large sum to spend on a ceremony for an institution whose justification is contested. The royalist response is that the sum is modest relative to the economic and cultural value of the event, and that the alternative — a republic’s presidential inauguration — would cost comparable amounts in different form. I find myself unable to get very worked up about the cost, partly because the alternatives cost money too and partly because the Coronation was one of those events that Britain does genuinely better than anywhere else and whose value is not fully captured in an economic analysis. The golden coach creaks. The ceremony is occasionally absurd. The choir is extraordinary. I cried at the crowning. All of these things are true. Britain is very good at producing all of them simultaneously, and I am not sure that quality is worth fifty million pounds, but I am also not sure it is not, and that uncertainty feels like the right relationship to have with an institution that specialises in making certainty difficult.
Isla Campbell writes from Central London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/isla-campbell.
Also crowned at NewsThump | The Daily Mash | The Poke
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/coronation-extraordinary-slightly-ridiculous-exactly-right-britain-isla/
