The Coronation - Inevitably! - Celia Rees

Coronation Mug - 1953

I'm not a royalist, by any means, but as my allotted History Girls post falls the day before the Coronation, I didn't think that I could ignore this great national occasion. Whatever one's thoughts are about the monarchy (and I have views) this is the History Girls Blog after all and the ritual which is the coronation reaches back deep into history. The order of service and the liturgy extends back to the 10th Century and the ultimate roots of the ritual lie in the Bronze Age, as explained by Tom Holland on The Rest Is History, the superb podcast he shares with Dominic Sandbrook. If you don't already listen, you are missing a treat. 

Coronation Mug - 2023 (attr.Adèle Geras)

 By tomorrow evening, I will have witnessed two coronations. I was three when Elizabeth was crowned Queen in 1953. The world is very different now.  For me, this is neatly illustrated by the different coronation mug designs. There are plenty of mugs for this coronation of traditional design but in 1953 this 2023 design would have been unimaginable.

So very much has changed between now and then. The 1953 Coronation is my clearest early memory.  All the neighbours crowded into the McCauley's sitting room because they were the one of the few families in the street with a television. It was in the corner of the room, encased in a polished wooden cabinet. The screen was very small, the picture black and white and very fuzzy (but that might have been the McCauley's set). I'd never seen television before. I went to see where the horses' legs were then I decided I didn't like it and hid behind the settee. I was eventually coaxed out to sit on my father's knee and watch what seemed like an endless procession of soldiers, sailors, coaches and men on horses. The parading of our own armed forces and those of the Commonwealth. 

For Charles' coronation, the procession through London has been shortened, parred down, modernised. The ceremony inside Westminster Abbey, however, will remain the same.  The robes, regalia, the order of service, go back at least a thousand years. There are two changes: ambergris has been omitted from the holy oil (to make it vegan friendly) and the central ritual, the anointing, will take place behind a screen, not under a canopy. Screen or canopy, the anointing of the monarch with holy oil goes back to the Old Testament, a ritual so sacred that it is kept away from public eyes. In 1953 it was not even televised. All this reminds us that we live in a monarchy and that the monarch is marked out from the rest of us by God. Awesome, in the true sense of the word, and profoundly odd - an ancient mystery being carried out in the twenty-first century.  

To mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, children were given little models of the State Coach as souvenirs. Time and wear have taken a toll on these mementoes but they were much prized and a few have survived. I still have mine and so does my friend, Rachel. 

Coronation coach - attr. Rachel Bagley

Coronation Day, 1953, it rained but everyone went out in the afternoon to celebrate this great occasion. There was an ox roast in the park and a street party which was moved into the Mills' garage when the rain intensified. There were sandwiches, cake, jelly, peaches and evaporated milk. There will be street parties tomorrow, although fewer than in 1953. How will the table differ? I doubt there will be jelly and evaporated milk. No crisps in 1953, no nibbles of any kind. Apparently, the popular 2023 celebratory choices are Quiche and Fizz, unimaginable in 1953, but Coronation Chicken is up there with them.  

1953 Street Party

1n 1953, Coronation Chicken had only just been invented by celebrated cookery writer Constance Spry for the official Coronation Luncheon. It has since become a stalwart of the buffet and a popular sandwich filling. This concoction of chicken, mayonnaise, apricot jam (or mango chutney) and curry powder will be served at street parties on Saturday (see above), a tenuous link to the last coronation. A very 2023 hack on the Coronation Chicken is M&S's Coronation Scotch Egg. A delicacy not dreamed of in 1953.

Coronation Chicken

M&S Coronation Scotch Egg

Enjoy the Coronation of Charles III however you choose to celebrate it and bon appetite!

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

King Charles III and the Importance of Writing Things Down by Catherine Hokin

“But now I’ll rise to how things have to be.

The Queen is dead; Long live the King — that’s me.”

 Tim Piggot-Smith as King Charles, BBC 

"Mike Bartlett's play is a reminder that, even for Republicans, the Queen's death will loom large." This was the Guardian's comment on Bartlett's 'foreboding' play King Charles III, screened just a few days after a twitter melt-down over a Buckingham Palace press-statement so shrouded in anticipation that the Sun 'newspaper's' website pre-empted the news of Prince Philip's retirement with the announcement of his death. Sometimes you can't help but long for the days when even discussing a royal demise was treason and punished as such.

If you haven't had a chance to see the play (airing on the BBC in the UK and Masterpiece in the US), it is a remarkable thing. Written in blank verse to deliberately underline its Shakespearean-style machinations and betrayals, the play concerns the accession of Prince Charles and the consequent constitutional crisis which develops as he tries to find more meaning than mummery in his role. It is plausibly-played and, since it was written in 2014, seems to have found new layers of meaning as revelations have broken over the 'black-spider memos' and the two princes have spoken publicly about the toll their mother's death has taken. 

 The House comes tumbling down, BBC

Without giving too much away, the plot hinges on the United Kingdom's lack of a constitution and the ramifications of that 

if a monarch decides not to play ball. The moment when the Commons realises how powerless they really are against the heavy knock on the chamber door is chilling and was not helped for me by my American husband's response to my horrified outrage: 'that's what you get if you base your country on a gentlemen's agreement.' Given the amount of stick he's taken over Trump and the idiocy of our failure to actually enshrine the "set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed [which] make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is” in writing, I had to suck it up. 

 Sophia of Hanover

Constitutional monarchy (where the monarch acts as head of state within the parameters of a democratically-derived constitution) has its roots in the Magna Carta and was enshrined following the 1688 'Glorious Revolution' and the 1701 Act of Settlement which passed the crown to the family of Sophia, Electress of Hanover. In Europe, 
Napoleon Bonaparte is considered as the first constitutional monarch as he proclaimed himself as an embodiment of the nation, rather than as a divinely-appointed ruler in contrast to the Divine Right following French Kings before him. The role of the British monarch is understood as a ceremonial and politically neutral one: the current Queen holds weekly (closed and undocumented) meetings with the Prime Minister and can suggest/advise on policy matters and she gives the royal assent to bills and to the appointing of prime ministers but, since the passing of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act in 2011, she can no longer use the royal prerogative to dissolve parliament.

Ah, the royal prerogative - a strange and wonderful beast sometimes exercised by ministers (it was used by Margaret Thatcher to go war over the Falklands) and still available to the monarch (although, obviously, we can trust them not to do anything silly with it). The royal prerogative has been described as a notoriously difficult concept to define adequately (Select Committee on Public Administration, 16 March 2004) and originates in the time of King Alfred as the personal power of the monarch as gifted by God. Curbing the extent of this prerogative in favour of a democratic voice has been a central theme throughout British history and tracing the efforts to stop the monarch dissolving the parliaments trying to stop the monarch is like watching a wonderful game of historical cat and mouse.

 Political Cartoon 1832

The last monarch to physically march into parliament and dissolve it was William IV in 1831. William IV succeeded his brother George IV to the throne on 26th June 1830 at the age of 64. At that time the death of a monarch required a general election: Lord Grey was elected, began trying to push electoral reform through, was defeated and went to the King to ask him to dissolve parliament so it could be better built with his supporters. The descriptions of the King marching into parliament, putting on his crown as he went are astonishing: The Times said it was "utterly impossible to describe the scene ... The violent tones and gestures of noble Lords ... astonished the spectators, and affected the ladies who were present with visible alarm." Lord Londonderry was seen brandishing a whip, threatening to thrash government supporters and had to be forcibly restrained, violent riots erupted and the King's carriage was pelted with rubbish. Bartlett uses this episode as the precedent to Charles's actions in the play and and the spreading shock is palpable.

Could this happen again and art play itself out as history? It would be a risky move and the Windsors are nothing if not brilliant at survival. However, the extent of royal prerogative remains unclear and suspension and summoning seems still to be within the monarch's power even if dissolving is not. The current Queen is very adapt at keeping her feelings hidden despite the media looking for constant hints - the speculation over her attitude to Scottish independence stirred up a hornet's nest - but Charles is certainly a lesser-known, or perhaps too well-known, quantity. For outsiders and republicans like me whose interest in a royal family is purely historic, the relationship between Britain and its its royal family is a curious one. A lot of its 'loyalty' (as Bartlett uses in his play) seems to be tied up with the Queen herself - perhaps, given that 83% of us have spent our whole lives with her as Queen and she has kept well away from controversy, there is an inbred sense of trust. However, when the news blackout and the twitter-storm really does herald the big sea-change, I wonder how many of us will come to regret that those rather ambiguous powers were recorded as starkly as the black-edged announcement. We can't say we weren't warned...