What’s the point of a coronation? Charles III is about to show us
The coronation rites of Edward the Confessor in 1043, Edward I in 1274 and Edward II in 1308, as imagined in a souvenir book for the 1902 coronation of Edward VII.On June 2, 1953, hundreds of thousands of people stood in the rain, tight as sardines, many of them in place since the day before, along the 12.2-kilometre long procession route for Elizabeth II’s coronation.
As for what the guests at King Edgar of Wessex’s coronation in 973, often judged the first in English history, would have thought of the entire business, it’s impossible to guess. Such is the chasm of time that stretches between that day, more than a 1,000 years ago, and May 6, 2023. Today, vanishingly few things in our modern world connect us with the distant past. There is, of course, the genetic legacy of our forebears: Each of us has ancestors who were alive, somewhere on the planet, in 973. There is the natural world around us, whose human-made manipulations and depredations offer ample evidence of the past millennium of human history.
Edward VI rides through London for his coronation in 1547. The nine-year-old was the first monarch to be raised in the Protestant church established his father, Henry VIII.Charles I is anointed with holy oil in 1626. He had hoped his queen, Henrietta Maria, would be crowned with him, but as a Catholic she refused the Protestant service and watched it from a distance.George II receives the imperial mantle in 1727.
The second part of the ceremony, in which the monarch is anointed with holy oil and conferred with the grace of God, is considered so holy, so ineffable, that it has never been filmed; the question of whether the King will allow it to be recorded is, as I write this, as yet unknown. Queen Elizabeth is thought to have considered it the most significant moment of her life, and I expect Charles will think of it in the same way.
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