MICHAEL WOOD ON… Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series, and is the author of several books including The Story of China (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His Twitter handle is@mayavision
THE CROWNING OF CHARLES III
SO THE CORONATION IS OVER, AND WE ENTER a new era for the monarchy and the nation. What struck me first was how religious the ceremony was – conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury and entirely framed in the language of the church. An Anglo-Saxon time traveller would have felt perfectly at home with the core of the service – though back then, of course, it was conducted in Latin, with the coupling of royal law with ‘the law of god’.
But I had a lingering sense of a cognitive dissonance (as the psychoanalysts call it). Britain is now, we are told, among the world’s least religious societies. In a time of crisis, can an archaic religious service still express the central constitutional fact of our body politic? The ceremony spoke to many of the continuity of our past, but it was also about nostalgia, class and deference, compounded by the ill-judged idea that we should swear allegiance in front of our TV sets.
As a medievalist, I was enthralled by watching rituals that might have been seen a thousand years ago. The Garter King of Arms and his helpers – which include Rouge Dragon, Bluemantle, Portcullis and Rouge Croix – were created in the Middle Ages. And the consecration itself, with sword, sceptre, rod and crown – the king stripped down to his shirt for the anointing – went back to the service devised late in Alfred’s reign for his son Edward, and then used for Æthelstan and the other 10th-century kings.
These early medieval coronations, of course, were not for the people. No one saw the king crowned, save those present at the ceremony in Kingston upon Thames or Bath. Coronations were political: invented to ensure the succession for Alfred’s branch of the royal kin in defiance of rivals with better claims to the crown (who included the sons of Alfred’s older brothers). The pointed repetition in the ceremony of “our undoubted king” is a reminder of the threat that these rival claimants posed.
That’s where the Church of England comes in. The church no longer has power over our daily lives, but the coronation underlined its central role in the Middle Ages. It was the church that conferred kingship. In more recent centuries, the Protestant monarch has had to swear to guarantee the Protestant faith – a stark political statement about
