Charles’s Coronation Will Symbolise a Culture in Regression

 Coronations used to be about the future. It was a political event, not a cultural one. The ceremonies themselves gave a beguiling foretaste of the reign to come. Here’s what Gilbert Burnet, a prelate specially chosen by William III and Mary II, preached at their coronation in 1689:

Here are the true measures of Government; it is a Rule, and not an Absolute Dominion; it is a Rule over men, and not a Power, like that which we have over Beasts. In a word, it is the Conduct of free and reasonable Beings, who need indeed to be governed, but ought not to be broken by the force and weight of Power.

This was a promise to abide by the Bill of Rights, recently drawn up, and to resist impulses to absolutism – then in vogue in the rest of Europe. Even the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth II promised a new Elizabethan age. Its ceremonies, its meanings, had not yet been consigned to historical curiosity. Aristocracy and the ancien regime were still just about extant in the Britain of 1953, and would only disappear for good in the high tragedy of Suez a few years later....<<<Read More>>>...