'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it.
So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.
Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.
I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have.
In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?
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