It was the call to swear an oath of allegiance to the king that did it.
Until then it had been possible just to let all the coronation chatter about spinach quiches and gold sticks-in-waiting and who is wearing which tiara drift painlessly over your head if you weren’t entirely gripped, as polling suggests most of us aren’t. (A sizeable 64% of Britons care either not at all or not very much about the coronation, according to the pollsters at YouGov.) But with the idea of encouraging viewers watching the ceremony at home to let out a cry of loyal devotion to the king, in unison with the abbey crowd, something audibly cracked. A public act of homage? How positively feudal.
