It was the call to swear an oath of allegiance to the king that did it.
Until then it had been possible just to let all the coronation chatter about spinach quiches and gold sticks-in-waiting and who is wearing which tiara drift painlessly over your head if you weren’t entirely gripped, as polling suggests most of us aren’t. (A sizeable 64% of Britons care either not at all or not very much about the coronation, according to the pollsters at YouGov.) But with the idea of encouraging viewers watching the ceremony at home to let out a cry of loyal devotion to the king, in unison with the abbey crowd, something audibly cracked. A public act of homage? How positively feudal.
The palace was quick to stress that this was very much an invitation, not a requirement, ironically designed to modernise things by involving the public instead of getting peers to swear the oath on their behalf. (Though it would be even more modern surely to scrap the oath altogether, acknowledging that monarchs now must earn our loyalty rather than demand it.) But the irritated response shows what a tightrope they’re walking.
Years of thought and care have rightly gone into making this ceremony more inclusive, with its female bishops and multi-faith representatives and forswearing of the Koh-i-noor diamond associated with colonial plunder. What seems to have been overlooked in the anxiety to get all that right, however, is that while this may literally be the crowning event in King Charles’s life, it’s not that big a deal to most people, and trying too hard to whip up emotion round it risks triggering an irritated backlash instead.
So far, the public mood has been mostly one of polite apathy. Some will be camping out to secure prime flag-waving territory on the Mall and some actively protesting (around one in five Britons wants an elected head of state). But most of the country loiters in between, accepting the monarchy’s continued existence with varying degrees of enthusiasm or resignation while generally being preoccupied with other things entirely. While last year 38% of Britons still felt the royal family was “very important” to the country, the National Centre for Social Research finds that figure has now fallen to 29%, its lowest point since records began, 40 years ago.
Coronation day itself won’t be a flop, if only because the nation badly needs an excuse to party. If the rain holds off there will be plenty of cake and bunting and turning on the telly to see if they’ve hidden Prince Harry behind a pillar. Big national events have their own gravitational pull, which is why the World Cup sucks in people who never normally watch football, and YouGov found 46% of respondents were still likely to watch or take part in the thing they apparently don’t care about. But getting cheerfully plastered on a bank holiday weekend doth not in itself a profound relationship to the monarchy make.
Royal births, marriages and funerals can be opportunities to connect with the public because they’re reminders of shared humanity (as are scandals, splits and family estrangements). The Queen’s death was a genuinely profound moment for the nation, particularly perhaps after a period of Covid-19-era funerals when so many families couldn’t grieve their own losses collectively.
But there’s no relatable, real-life equivalent of a coronation. This ceremony is about the institution of monarchy, stripped of its human softening edges: it formalises what is essentially a fait accompli, a handover of power that happened at the moment of the previous monarch’s death and is now being ratified before the people and before God. As such, it’s traditionally a moment both of celebration and of jeopardy, like the moment in a wedding when the vicar asks if anyone in the congregation objects.
Oaths of allegiance may feel like a tame historical hangover from the days when brand new monarchs feared some rebellious duke raising an army against them. But actively prompting the nation to consider how loyal it feels to the monarchy isn’t entirely without risks, even now. We’re trained to regard royalty as a spectacle, something that pulls in tourists and occasionally sends up fireworks but can generally be safely forgotten. But coronations are a reminder of its deeper constitutional significance, a comforting thought for royalists but to others a provocative reminder of the king’s right to rule over them.
I’m not personally a republican (too worried about who we’d get as president instead). But I find the public “shushing” of those who are, in the context of a coronation, uncomfortable. The Queen’s death, republicans were told, wasn’t the right time to discuss this; not while people are grieving. But if a coronation isn’t the right time either, when is? It doubtless wasn’t the palace’s intent in promoting the oath to silence dissent – MPs, soldiers and new British citizens already swear similar forms of allegiance – but they should have realised that’s how it would sound to some.
The less obvious risk here for the monarchy, however, is of stirring a pot better left alone. Taking public acquiescence for granted, in this case, may well be safer than challenging people to express it out loud, only for some to realise with a start how odd that sounds in 2023. We are citizens now, not serfs. While the fuss over the oath will doubtless be forgotten soon enough, a wise king would take this as a warning not to push his luck.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist