This weekend, someone has been asked to reign long over us, because they – that’s the royal “we”, not a pronoun indicating gender-neutrality – have the right blood. An archbishop, using an anointing spoon, allegedly drizzled them with holy oil, custom-blessed in Jerusalem, made to a secret, ancient (but this time, vegan) recipe. “Allegedly”, because the actual anointing – unlike, say, the moment the first human stepped onto the Moon – was too magical for muggles to watch on telly, so we just had to take it on trust.
It must have seemed less strange at the last coronation. While the royal “we” was unique in 1953, it was quite common to refer to yourself as “one”. In the post-war United Kingdom, one was not an individual in the modern sense. If one were male, one would be called up, which might mean a couple of years fighting communist rebels in the Malaysian jungles, one’s choice in the matter was non-existent. Only one in 400 marriages broke up; a divorced mother, of whatever class, was dubious. If one’s husband got physically violent, one just got on with it.
After all, one was British. The empire, even after the loss of India, was vast. Our military power was third in the world, and now included our very own A-bomb. And “our” meant what it said, because the flipside of one’s lack of individual freedom was that one really felt one of us: at the general election of 1951, Plaid Cymru and the SNP put together garnered barely 18,000 votes. In this still-united kingdom, the hereditary principle and the sacred objects were just extreme versions of the many near-sacral assumptions which encompassed one’s life.
Today, “we” (whatever that means) are as clever as clever, so we know the ritual is nonsense. Except that if you plan on leaving anything in your will to a person or institution whom you believe transmits something of you, biological or cultural, to posterity, you do, in fact, accept the hereditary principle. If you think a First Folio remains a treasure even when it is high-res digitally searchable in the public domain, you are thinking in the same box as those who call the royal anointing spoon “sacred”. And if you’ve ever stood at Stonehenge and felt something, you might as well believe in the holy oil, vegan or not. The crowds who lined King Charles III’s route yesterday were simply longing, as we all do, to connect with something that offers an intimation of immortality.
They’re looking in the wrong place, though. For there is nothing timeless or sacral about our monarchy. Charles is only king because in 1701, the Act of Settlement announced that henceforth, parliament, not bloodline, decided who was our sovereign. Otherwise, our monarch would be Nazi concentration-camp survivor Franz, Duke of Bavaria – with, presumably, his longtime partner Dr Thomas Greinwald (a dead ringer for George Clooney) as consort.
Duke Franz’s ancestors lost out because, in 1688, the Whigs – heirs to Cromwell’s parliamentarians – invited the Dutch to invade and kick out James II. In the fallout, a German princeling was fetched over from Hanover in 1714 to become King George I of a brand-new state called Great Britain and, separately, of Ireland. He was greeted by violent protests in the south-west and north of England and by outright rebellion in Scotland. For these Jacobites grasped that the coronation of a blatantly foreign monarch, at the behest of parliament, was the final play in the long game which had begun with the Tudors, aimed at winning total control of the Anglo-Celtic archipelago for the south-east of England.
It worked until 1919, when the Irish declared that they were actually themselves and we’d have to fight them to keep them one of us. We did, and we lost. Since the UK had been founded for the sole purpose of making Ireland “us”, it was, at this point, logically defunct.
Elizabeth II’s reign, and her person, were characterised by her iron determination to preserve things which were growing ever-more meaningless: the empire, the Commonwealth – and the UK itself. At her coronation, everybody except those laughable 18,000 Plaid Cymru/SNP voters waved the Union Jack. It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to see that the endgame of the UK is in sight. And Charles III is the perfect king to preside over its dissolution. For he, however often he calls himself “we”, is a modern individual to whom nothing, really, is more sacred than his own desires.
Our king has divorced, remarried, not looked too closely at where the money has come from, had huge bust-ups with his children and chosen for his wife exactly the title he wants her to have, precedent or no. The drama of our royal family has become a soap opera. Charles has used his position to influence town planning and environmental policies. If Elizabeth was the Queen of Impersonal Duty, Charles is the King of Self-Enactment. We are no longer “one”, grammatically or socially, but consider that our right to decide who we are, is the most important thing in the world.
This coronation weekend is truly special. We should avidly watch every moment – well, the bits that aren’t too magical for us – because there may never be anything like it again. This really is history.
