There are things that one sees, and if one is lucky, only once in a lifetime. An aurora borealis of many colors, as if it were a painter’s palette, a total solar eclipse, a ring of fire in the sky when the Moon comes between the Earth and the Sun… The total conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn it last happened 400 years ago. Halley’s comet is only visible every three quarters of a century. And the most recent coronation of an English monarch had taken place seven decades ago.
Comet Halley is not expected until 2062, but hundreds of millions of people around the world yesterday were able to follow the coronation of Charles III, the first monarch not only post-imperial (Elizabeth II was already), but also post-colonial of the United Kingdom, an anachronistic, feudal ceremony, with liturgy and rituals more than a millennium old dating back to the time of the medieval King Edgar. But at the same time the greatest show in the world, an opportunity, for many people, to enter a kind of fairy tale, escape from reality and be for a few hours an extra in a movie about princes and princesses, step out through the crack in the door into a fantastic world of horse-drawn carriages, golden robes, diamond crowns, oaths, swords, sceptres, holy oils, silk cloaks… Or like visiting a zoo and finding- suddenly a tyrannosaurus rex. A trip to the tunnel of time, and perhaps of memories. And at the end murmur, without needing to be a fervent monarchist, a timid God save the king.
Seventy years, those that have passed from coronation to coronation, is a long time, and yesterday a Britain in crisis took a look at the past and history, hoping that it will be returned to her, or at least deserve a smile. Sometimes it’s this way when it’s easy to realize how he’s changed. Very little remains of that country in 1953, which had just come out of the war, with rubble still in the streets, almost no televisions, with an empire where the sun never set and which had just conquered the summit of Everest. The ascension to the throne of the young Elizabeth II was a catharsis, bringing down the curtain on an era and entering a new act full of optimism. But the blows would not take long to arrive: the defeat of Suez, the cold war and the drop-by-drop loss, decade by decade, of the colonies (from East Africa, Ceylon, Pakistan…), until nothing was left of the empire but the bones, and the Sun, rather than setting, did not rise.
Great Britain has gone through many ups and downs since that rainy and chilly day in June 1953 (not much different from yesterday) when Elizabeth II was crowned. The great social conflicts of the sixties and seventies, the death of Churchill, the arrival and fall of Thatcherism, Tony Blair and his third way, the authoritarian populism of Boris Johnson, the entry and exit of the EU, Brexit… .The common link is the slow evolution of one of the winning powers of the Second World War into a major but diminished country with nuclear weapons, a powerful military and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the sixth largest economy in the world, with weight, but a declining influence, and a currency that is not what it used to be. Seven decades ago, Stalin was about to die and the structure of DNA was discovered, a complete revolution. Today, Putin threatens Europe, everyone is glued to a mobile phone, the sustainability of the planet is questionable and artificial intelligence threatens to swallow up jobs and dehumanize society.
Charles III was crowned monarch yesterday of a United Kingdom that is going through a depression and an existential crisis, in the midst of a psychological debate between imperial fiction and the reality of modern Britain, which signed up for Brexit to reissue unrealistic dreams of supremacy and she has woken up suddenly, drenched in sweat, with no money to pay for the welfare state, despite the biggest tax burden since Elizabeth came to the throne, with public services saturated, health care destroyed, nurses’ strikes, doctors, train drivers and customs officials that have been going on for months and with no prospect of resolution. Half of Scots want independence, Ireland is considering reunification, the end of 13 years of Tory governments, one in five Britons officially poor, and a rise in the cost of living that has sent the price of bread and mortgages, and has made many people dependent on food banks. Speculation has meant that housing, both owned and rented, is only available to the privileged few. “Farewell pride, pomp and circumstance of a glorious war…” says William Shakespeare’s Othello nostalgically.
There was no shortage of pomp and circumstance precisely since at 10.20 a.m. Charles and Camilla boarded a six-horse carriage at Buckingham Palace and toured a Mall decorated with Union Jack flags, through the Admiralty Arch, along the south side of Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament, until reaching Westminster Abbey, hailed by tens of thousands of people (visceral monarchists, tourists , curious…), many of whom had arrived at dawn to find a good place, or had even spent the night in the open. A typical spring day, changeable, grey, with rain from time to time and temperatures of 14 degrees did not hamper the festive atmosphere.
In the sky, drones flew over the area; on the roofs of the tallest buildings, snipers watched through the peepholes of semi-automatic rifles; in the crowd, undercover agents looked for suspicious objects and behavior; streets closed to traffic, metro stations closed and fences everywhere, as part of the Orbe d’Or security operation, which for the first time has used facial recognition techniques and applied a controversial law that makes it easier to make arrests for disturbing public order. Even before the ceremony began, several militants of the Republic group, including the leader, Graham Smith, were arrested in front of the statue of Charles I, the king who was beheaded in 1649. Dressed in a striking yellow , they carried banners with inscriptions such as “He is not my king”, “Who voted for him?” and “Let’s privatize the Windsors”.
From the early hours of the morning, the guests began to arrive at the abbey – who had to spend five hours sitting -, dressed in various ways, some in colorful African clothing, others as if they were going to a classy wedding, the Ascot horse races or the Oscars gala. Politicians, aristocrats, foreign dignitaries, members of other royal houses, diplomats and celebrities such as actress Emma Thompson and singers Lionel Ritchie and Nick Cave. If it hadn’t been for the clothes, the rest of the ceremony would have been like a trip to the Middle Ages, to a feudal, sacred and divine ritual aimed at presenting the monarchy as something almost supernatural.
The most imposing coronation was that of George IV, to outshine Napoleon and show British supremacy. Charles III wanted a more modest one (which, despite this, has cost 125 million euros to a country in a serious economic crisis that does not even have the money to finance public health and pay nurses a decent salary). He proclaimed himself Defender of the Anglican Protestant Faith to a secular and mostly agnostic people, where only half the believers are Christians, with the small ecumenical concession of making a cameo to representatives of the Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Muslim religions. In the abbey there were the British, Irish and Scottish prime ministers (Rishi Sunak, Leo Varadkar and Humza Yousaf), the first two of Indian origin, and the third, Pakistani, as well as the mayor of London, Sa-, exponents of a totally multicultural society.
In a modernizing gesture, Charles wanted the oath of loyalty not to be taken by the nobles, as is tradition, but by the whole town, a “chorus of millions”, starting with the guests at the abbey, followed by the people who it was in the adjacent streets, and ending with the subjects in their homes, on the other side of the televisions. But in a nation that, even if it is essentially monarchical, is above all individualistic, paying tribute to the king in the middle of the 21st century did not please everyone. If there were many people on the route of the procession with great enthusiasm, it is also true that millions have escaped the coronation by disconnecting their mobile phones or taking the opportunity to spend the weekend (tomorrow is a holiday) in the countryside or abroad. Even the BBC offered a guide on “how to escapeâ€.
Once the ceremony began, it was indeed a journey of centuries into the past, especially the moment of the anointing of Charles III behind a screen to preserve the magic of the moment, its most theological aspect. He took off his military uniform, the golden “Supertunic” and the “imperial cloak” inherited from George VI, was left in shirt sleeves and the Archbishop of Canterbury applied it to his hands, face and chest an organic and vegan consecrated oil, brought expressly from Jerusalem. All this on a medieval throne on the so-called “stone of destiny”, which dates back to the coronation of Edward I in 1296, and which was stolen in 1950 by some Scottish nationalist students, which caused the temporary closure of the border between the two countries. Then the king appeared, he put on the crown of Saint Edward, made of solid gold and inlaid with precious stones (amethysts, sapphires, rubies, topazes…), he received bracelets, swords, rings, a glove, the scepter as a symbol of his power and the orb to represent that his authority comes directly from God, and trumpets, cannons and bells sounded. God save the King!
Not only was Charles III crowned, so was what is now officially Queen Camilla, his definitive victory over Diana and Diana’s ghost, something that would have been unthinkable when the People’s Princess died in 1997. With the his own crown and many family jewels, but not the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, claimed by several countries and with huge imperial and colonial connotations that the new monarch wants to combat, amid the controversy over whether British royalty he should apologize for how he encouraged and profited from slavery. The English king is today the head of state of 14 other countries, but it is very likely that there will soon be a few less. Jamaica and Belize have already announced plans to break this link and elect a president, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has indicated that Australia also wants to end this anachronism.
Charles III is already crowned, feeding the privileged place of the monarchy in the national imagination, its role (which not all share, there are 25% republicans) as a counterweight to the innate turbulence of a parliamentary democracy, in a nation that murdered a king, but generally throughout history has preferred evolution to revolution. Its challenge, in the secular, multi-ethnic and digital society of the 21st century, is to demonstrate that it continues to be useful, that it offers a unique service, has added value and that the euro with fifty cents that it costs each citizen annually is a good investment . For this reason, he will probably have to slim it down, reduce staff and perhaps get rid of some castles and residences. Elizabeth II had already begun the process of creating a hard core of the royal family, with Guillem, Catherine and their children, Anna, Eduard and Sofia, in addition to Charles and Camilla, relegating the others to increasingly secondary roles royals For this, and for many other things, Enric and Meghan “abdicated” and went to California. Yesterday he was not invited to greet the people from the balcony of Buckingham Palace at the end of the party, marginalized from a photo for the story in which there was also no Andrew, the black sheep of the Windsors.
It is almost 40 years until Halley’s Comet appears again, and it is not even known how many until the next total conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky. What is certain is that the next coronation of a British king will not take seven decades, but the country and the world will have changed even more. Maybe artificial intelligence will organize the ceremony and even draw up the guest list…
