![]() ![]() Princess Anne wore a cape halfway between Hogwarts supply teacher and Batman. Penny Mordaunt, a former contender for prime minister, looked like a Bajoran ambassador on Star Trek as she carried an eight-pound sword up the aisle. The clothes accompanying the coronation ritual were, of course, both absurd and incredible. The two-hour service brought together foreign royals, including King Mswati III of Eswatini and Hereditary Prince Alois of Liechtenstein homegrown aristocrats such as Merlin Hay, the 24th Earl of Erroll, and Edward Fitzalan-Howard, the 18th Duke of Norfolk officials, such as Han Zheng, the vice president of China, who represent genuine world powers and the British reality-show hosts Ant and Dec, whose most recent appearance on television featured them daring soap-opera stars to drink smoothies made out of a cow’s vagina. Lionel Richie was there, as was Katy Perry, wearing what one of my friends described as a “ very selfish ha t.” Britain might be a midsize economy in the north Atlantic, but it can still draw a crowd. Watching the crowd assemble in Westminster Abbey was a ceremony in itself. ![]() “I’ve been crowning anything that stood still long enough,” he told the British Broadcasting Corporation. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, prepared for his big moment with similar vigor. Edward’s Crown by wearing a bowler hat with a bag of flour inside. The new King had reportedly been practicing for the weight of St. Helen Lewis: Prince Harry’s unwitting case for abolishing the monarchyĮvery moment of the coronation had been drilled to perfection. If you need a “ unicorn pursuivant” at short notice, Britain has you covered. Did you know, for example, that there are such things as “drum horses,” which the riders steer with reins attached to their feet? We’ve also got heraldic trumpeters, master embroiderers, and someone who can fix the suspension on a gold coach. ![]() That default miserabilism isn’t really fair-if the coronation proved anything, it’s that a great number of people in Britain are incredibly talented, albeit at skills that were last useful in the 18th century. At one point today, a gold coach drove under an arch that read HAPPY & GLORIOUS, in the pouring rain. Britain might now seem like a fading power, but we are a world-beating exporter of metaphors about the state of our nation. I bet the chair even creaks in a manner reminiscent of imperial decline. ![]() It’s almost too much, isn’t it? The British monarchy is at once a symbol of colonialist plunder, a tradition that many Britons profess to love while cheerfully disrespecting, and an institution that has been dented but not defeated by the forces of social change. The Coronation Chair, as it’s officially known, also has damage from a 1914 bomb attack attributed to militant suffragettes. According to one scrawl from 1800, someone named “P. The British throne, the centerpiece of today’s coronation of Charles III, not only houses a sacred artifact forcibly removed from its owners-the Stone of Destiny, taken from the Scots by Edward I in 1296-but is covered in schoolboy graffiti. Sometimes the scriptwriters of reality are a little too on the nose. ![]()
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