The Coronation of King Charles III (BBC-TV, aired. May 6, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In the wee hours of Saturday, May 6 I had trouble sleeping and gave up at nearly 2 a.m. to watch the KPBS telecast of King Charles III’s coronation, live from London via the BBC. I lasted three hours and got to see this literally once-in-a-lifetime experience (the last time Britain crowned a new monarch it was Charles’s late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, it was June 2, 1953, and I was still inside my mother’s womb!) with all the predictable pomp and circumstance. It was a long spectacle indeed, with a procession through the streets of London in which some of the riders were having visible difficulty controlling their horses. I was amused by the announcers’ audible confusion as to what to call Charles’s wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, because when Charles married her in the first place after divorcing Princess Diana he had to get Queen Elizabeth’s permission. The Queen, who had never liked Camilla and prevented Charles from marrying her when he was still a bachelor because she’d been in a previous marriage and therefore was no longer a virgin, reluctantly gave her assent but insisted as a condition of her approval that Camilla could never be called “Queen.” Instead she would have to have the title “Queen Consort,” and I noticed that in the opening pre-game segments the announcers were ignoring that circumlocution and calling her “Queen,” while during the ceremony itself they mostly called her “Queen Consort” but sometimes reverted to calling her “Queen.”

The event took place in a drizzle and the royals and their honored guests (including U.S. First Lady Jill Biden, there to represent the U.S. since her husband decided to stay home, knowing he’d be damned if he did and damned if he didn’t; if he’d gone the Republicans would have criticized him for leaving Washington, D.C. in the middle of the debt ceiling crisis, the end of Trump’s restrictive asylum policy Title 42, and other pending issues; as it is, the Republicans have been equally vociferous in attacking him for snubbing the former mother country with whom we’re supposed to have a “special relationship”) needed the special glass awning to protect themselves from the rain – though I believe one of the commentators said that Queen Elizabeth II had been crowned in a worse rainstorm than this. It was held in Westminster Abbey, site of every British coronation since William the Conqueror’s in 1066 (nearly a thousand years ago!), which I didn’t realize is not only a site for major political ceremonies but a working church. It even has a gift shop that was readily visible on some of the shots of the royal party entering the building. Charles was presented with various ceremonial objects, including a stole, a robe, a ring, an orb, a sceptre (I remember hearing as a child from Fred C. Baxter’s introductions to the U.S. showing of the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings that the orb and sceptre were the only royal objects that survived Oliver Cromwell’s revolution and the destruction of the royal relics he ordered during his 10-year reign as “Protector”), and a rod, before he received the actual crown.

It was officiated by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Portal Welby, who to my surprise led a Communion service towards the end, though only he and a couple of the other Anglican clergymen who were assisting him actually partook of the wine and wafer that are supposed to symbolize the blood and body of Christ. Throughout the ceremony there were various nods to inclusion, including the presence of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh clergy; the presence of women in the choir (since the Church of England still restricts its choirs to men and boys, they had to borrow girl singers from a Methodist choir to satisfy Charles’s request that the singing at the service be inclusive); and the presence of a Black vocal group doing a portion of “Alleluia” by Debbie Wiseman (and the presence of a woman composer in the program was itself a sign of Charles’s demand for inclusivity). Wiseman wrote “Alleluia” specifically for this ceremony, and she wrote it in two parts: the first sung by mostly white choristers (there were a sprinkling of Blacks and other people of color in the choirs) and the second by a Black vocal group who were billed as the first gospel singers ever to perform at a British coronation – though they didn’t sound much like gospel music to me. There was another woman composer contributing to the musical program of the ceremony: Roxanna Panufnik, daughter of Polish immigrant composer and conductor Sir Andrzej Panufnik. Roxanna contributed the “Sanctus” movement of a multi-composer setting of the Mass. By far the best-known of the composers who wrote original music for the coronation was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who at Charles’s request wrote a setting of Psalm 98, “O Make a Joyful Noise.” I’ve long been mystified at the strong reactions in both directions to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, with some praising him as the salvation of the musical theatre and others denouncing him as its destroyer. My own feeling about Lloyd Webber is that he’s written some great songs, some terrible songs and some mediocre songs; when he wrote a Requiem with Sarah Brightman (then-Mrs. Lloyd Webber) and Plácido Domingo as vocal soloists, I found the work quite moving except for one movement which sounded hopelessly banal.

Of course it’s impossible to write about the coronation without commenting on the, shall we say, advanced ages of the principals. King Charles III is 75 years old and Camilla is even older, and though I don’t recall what she looked like previously, today Camilla is a harsh-faced woman who seems to have her face locked into a perpetual scowl of bitterness. Given how much she’s been denounced in the British press – especially by comparison to the almost sanctified Diana – I can understand that. Charles himself looked oddly befuddled, especially for a man who has literally been waiting his entire life for this to happen to him. He’s well aware that his mother had the Queen gig for 70 years, longer than any other monarch in British history, and judging from what I’ve heard about him he has some definite priorities – notably protecting the environment and strengthening Britain’s ties to the rest of the world (one thing I was surprised by is the heavy representation of the European Union among the honored guests, especially given the acrimony surrounding “Brexit”) as well as supporting and encouraging the arts (Charles is an amateur painter and a fan of different kinds of music, especially classical; I remember in the 1980’s Columbia, before it was acquired by Sony, did a series of CD reissues of Leonard Bernstein’s recordings for which Charles contributed the cover art). But just how much he’s going to be able to fulfill the principal constitutional function of the monarchy, taking a politically divided country and uniting it in a sense of common purpose, is still a mystery.

The whole ceremony seemed uncertain, as part of it stemmed from traditions literally centuries old while other parts were added by Charles himself or his staff to symbolize the reinvention of Great Britain as a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community. One commentator said that if you were setting up a new country and inventing its political system from scratch, picking out one family and giving them untold riches and power is hardly the way you’d do it today, however common that was throughout most of human history. (You’d probably make at least a feint towards democracy; plenty of countries, even authoritarian ones like China, Russia and Iran, go through the formality of elections even when the people don’t have any real choices. In the age of monarchy it was assumed that the authority to rule stemmed from a “mandate from Heaven”; today it’s assumed that the authority stems from a “mandate from the people,” however guarded and tenuous that may be in reality. Even a country that has as long a tradition of democratic self-rule, however limited, as ours is now afflicted with a major political party that is determined to have its own way no matter what majorities of the people want or how they vote, or would vote if they could, since part of the Republican program is to make it insanely difficult for people who would vote against them to be able to vote at all.)

It’s hard for me to watch the sheer number of gold objects, including the huge plates that adorn the cathedral altar as well as the gold trim on the black carriage that carried Charles and Camilla to the ceremony, and not think of all the ostentation that surrounds the British monarchy, just as I found it ironic to hear Charles take the oaths of office, including the one in which he pledged to maintain the Protestant character of the Church of England. (That was one of the big problems with the two previous Kings Charles, both of whom were Stuarts, descendants of Mary, Queen of Scots, and more or less determined to bring Britain back into the Roman Catholic fold – though Charles II’s successor, his brother James II, was the most determined Catholic-restorationist of all, so much so that he was overthrown in a coup d’état and replaced by the safely Protestant Dutch William of Orange.) Though I didn’t stay up long enough to see it, Charles and Camilla were scheduled to ride in the parade back from the coronation in an even more preposterous (and excruciatingly uncomfortable, the commentators told us) solid gold carriage. One can readily understand why Cromwell wanted to melt down all the royal relics, and yet it’s also easy to see why Americans, who decided early on in their political evolution to dispense with a monarchy of their own, have more or less adopted the British royal family as their own and follow its doings and misdoings with, I suspect, far more fascination than the average Brit does!