‘Coronation Maids’, on BBC Radio 4 this week, was an absolute delight. It brought together five of the six women who were the Queen’s young maids of honour at her coronation. And no, I didn’t know she had them either. In the plumiest of tones, the Queen’s maids recounted some fabulous little anecdotes concerning the preparation for the coronation service — of the meticulousness of the master of ceremonies, the 16th Duke of Norfolk, Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalen-Howard; of the grumpiness of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who surprised them all by producing a bottle of brandy from under his robes, of how much they all enjoyed having Coronation Chicken for the first time back at the Palace after the ceremony.
The programme, part of Sue MacGregor’s Reunion series, brought home how much like a wedding the whole thing was. The Coronation ring, placed on the fourth finger of her right hand, is also known as “The wedding ring of England”. It is a union of sorts, being struck between the Queen and her subjects. And back in 1952, both sides enthusiastically consented. The Pathé newsreel of the time spoke of “The happy heartbeat of the cockney crowd. London is royal and gay.”
It’s not just our language that has radically changed since then. The aristocracy is no longer treated with deference, the Church of England has been substantially abandoned, Coronation is a street in Manchester, and Coronation Chicken has becomer retro at best, and an embarrassing empire hangover at worst. Which raises the question: are the British people ready to get married again, and to get married like this?
This is not an academic question. The Queen was 94 this week. And the presence of Covid-19 within the palace walls was a reminder of her mortality. The Queen retains the love and admiration of her people — but what on earth would 21st-century Britain make of the Coronation service itself. It’s a ceremony that exposes in liturgical form the nature of the British state, and, in particular, its intimate relationship to God?
At the beginning of the service, the archbishop asks the people present of they are “willing” to “do homage and service”? As Archbishop Charles Le Grice preached in 1821 on the day of George VI’s coronation:
“The solemn ceremony of this day is not the pageant of a Monarch receiving the homage of his vassals; it is not the triumph of despotic power …. The poorest subject is a party to the covenant which the King now makes.”
In other words, consent is vital to the delicate constitution balance as played out in the coronation. Indeed, it is even there in the National Anthem itself: “May she defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the Queen.” (Not that everybody knows that verse.) But here we sing of the hope that the monarch will always give us a good reason to defend her; subtly suggesting, of course, that if she doesn’t, we won’t.
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