hereditary king is but an ordinary person, upon an average, at best’; ‘hereditary royal families gather from the repeated influence of their corrupting situation some dark taint in the blood, some transmitted and growing poison which hurts their judgements’; ‘For the most part, a constitutional king is a damaged common man’. Then, just as you imagine Bagehot will crush himself with his own rationality, he vanishes in a puff of smoke, only to reappear a moment later in the front row of the Royal Circle. ‘This illusion has been and still is of incalculable benefit to the human race,’ he announces to the startled auditorium.
In a magic act, it is the inexplicable that matters. Superstition, Bagehot conceded, is of no use in electing rulers, but it renders possible the existence of unelected rulers. The rationalists and empiricists must have been shaking their heads at such mystical mumbo-jumbo, but the showman had more tricks up his sleeve. ‘English people yield a deference,’ he continued, ‘to what we may call the theatrical show of society.’ With a flourish of his rhetorical wand Bagehot added: ‘The climax of the play is the Queen.’
It was a breathtakingly bold argument. An old and complicated society like England required something more than mundane, dreary logic. It deserved a true monarchy, sparkling with mystic reverence and religious allegiance, imaginative sentiments that no legislature could manufacture. ‘You might as well adopt a father as make a monarchy.’
Bagehot had identified and exploited a developing national characteristic. As colonial power and the riches of empire declined, there was a desire to define greatness as more than wealth and territory. Britain wanted to believe in magic. As J. M. Barrie put it in
A conjuror knows that convincing your audience to suspend its disbelief requires a balance of flamboyance and mystery. The committee that convened to organise the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took a full year to finalise the details amid argument as to how to maximise its impact. The Prime Minister Winston Churchill was reportedly horrified at the idea that ‘modern mechanical arrangements’ (television) should be used to broadcast from inside Westminster Abbey. He told the House of Commons: ‘It would be unfitting that the whole ceremony, not only in its secular but also in its religious and spiritual aspects, should be presented as if it were a theatrical performance.’ Perhaps Churchill recalled Bagehot’s advice: ‘We must not let in daylight upon magic.’ But the Queen and her advisors decided the cameras should be allowed to relay every moment of the meticulously planned ceremony — with one exception.
The television audience missed nothing of the pomp and pageantry, feathers and fur, golden spurs, jewel- encrusted orb, bracelets of sincerity and wisdom, ritual swords, anthems and trumpets. From the quiet of a choir softly singing ‘Come Holy Ghost, Our Souls Inspire’, to the shouts, bells and cannons that greeted the crowning moment, the organisers didn’t miss an emotional trick in trying to inspire the tens of millions crowded around small black and white TV sets. But, in the middle of it all, a section of the service was conducted in secrecy.
The Act of Consecration is the most magical aspect of an English coronation, so extraordinary that history (and the 1953 Coronation Committee) decreed it must remain out of sight. In preparation, the Queen was disrobed of her crimson cloak, her jewellery was removed and the young Elizabeth was seated in King Edward’s chair, an ancient and simple throne, clothed in a dress of purest white. It was a moment of high theatre. A golden canopy held by four Knights of the Garter was suspended above and around the monarch, a grander version of the cloth cabinet a conjuror might wheel onto stage before making his glamorous assistant disappear.
With the Abbey almost silent, the Archbishop of Canterbury was handed the Holy Ampulla, a flask in the shape of an eagle, wrought in solid gold. Legend had it that the vessel had been given to St Thomas a Becket by the Virgin Mary in a vision while travelling in France, was lost and later recovered by the Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. A more credible version has it that the object was crafted in 1661 for the coronation of Charles II. A spoon was also passed to the Archbishop, a relic that had survived the civil war and was probably made for Henry II or Richard I. The props dripped with provenance: antique, sacred, mythical.
From the flask, the Archbishop poured some ‘blessed oil’ of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris, and anointed the Queen in the form of a cross, on the palms of her hand, on the breast and on the crown of her head. As he did so, he whispered these words: ‘Be thy Head anointed with Holy Oil: as Kings, Priests, and Prophets were anointed. And as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be you anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern.’
In that instant, the viewing public were meant to believe that their queen was transformed. As a newsreel commentator put it: ‘The hallowing: a moment so old history can barely go deep enough to contain it.’ When the golden pall was removed and the cameras rolled on the monarch once more, hey presto and hallelujah, Elizabeth had become associated with the divine.
A few days later, two sociologists began writing an academic essay on how all this had gone down with the wider audience. Englishman Michael Young and American Ed Shils had joined the crowds in the East End of London, dropping in on street parties and chatting to local people. Grappling with the challenges of postwar rationing and austerity, how had the masses responded to the extravagant and elaborate show in the Abbey? ‘The Coronation provided at one time and for practically the entire society such an intensive contact with the sacred that we believe we are justified in interpreting it as we have done in this essay, as a great act of national communion,’ they wrote.
Their thesis, entitled ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, admitted that some had dismissed the whole affair as the product of commercial exploitation, media manipulation, hysteria, obsession with tradition, or just an excuse for a knees-up. Such hecklers, Young and Shils argued, ‘all overlook the element of communion with the sacred, in which the commitment to values is reaffirmed and fortified’.
The idea of a communion with the sacred was at odds with what modern historians have painted as a period of increasing secularisation in post-war Britain. Church attendances were falling: on Easter Sunday 1953 there were 14 per cent fewer people in Anglican congregations than the equivalent service in 1939. And yet the country did appear to have relished the quasi-religious ritual of the Coronation.
In trying to understand this paradox, some sociologists suggested the phenomenon had its origins in the state-run festivals of ancient Athens. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had developed the theory, coining the term ‘civil religion’ to describe the way that societies unified themselves by weaving a sacred authority into the calendar and symbols of a nation. We see it in the reverence afforded to flag, anthem, patriotic ceremony and historical monument. Each may be invested with mystical or religious significance.
In Britain, the monarch is the constitutional, religious and symbolic core of the nation: the Central Office of Information once described the Queen as ‘the living symbol of national unity’. Her routine marks out the rhythm of the country. Among the spring daffodils of Royal Maundy at Easter, Trooping the Colour in high summer, the autumnal solemnity of the Festival of Remembrance and the Christmas Broadcast, the crown is placed at the centre of seasonal ritual. From stamps and coins to warships and pots of marmalade, the Queen’s head and coat of arms are imprinted upon national life so that British identity becomes almost indivisible from monarchical tradition. The American sociologist Peter Berger described a ‘sacred canopy’ of civil religion that is able to unify the disparate elements of a modern society. It was a phrase, of course, which echoed the golden pall used to such great effect in the Abbey on 2 June 1953.
Affection for the Queen has remained high and virtually constant since she acceded to the throne sixty years ago. The pollsters MORI reported in 2002 that support for the monarchy was probably the most stable trend they had ever measured, consistently around 72 per cent over three decades of opinion surveys. Despite scandal, misjudgement and tragedy, a significant majority of the British people have remained loyal to a family whose privileged position and power is quite at odds with a meritocratic democracy.
As a suitably rebellious teenager in 1977,I worried my mum and dad by purchasing a copy of ‘God Save The Queen’, a punk anthem by the Sex Pistols. The song, with its nihilistic anti-Establishment message, was banned by the BBC and thus guaranteed widespread attention. Even without airplay it reached number two in the charts, and there were reports (never denied) that the singles chart was fixed to keep it from reaching number one.
But the Queen needn’t have worried about a sweeping mood of republicanism. Within days of buying my copy of the record, I joined in the Silver Jubilee celebrations marking the Queen’s twenty-fifth year on the throne. My local village in Hampshire was bedecked with red, white and blue bunting. The parish had spent months organising parades and parties and I remember my own father, a church warden, having some important role in lighting one of the hill-top beacons that formed a visible network around Britain. I am sure I gave a cynical teenage shrug at much of it, but the national enthusiasm for the event and its ritual appeared to transcend the ephemeral appeal of popular culture. It wasn’t cool but it felt important: I participated in the same way I would have done at a family christening
