King Charles’ Coronation Shows Just How Out of Touch He Is

LONDON—Any lingering thoughts that America may have been too hasty in dumping King George III should now be put to rest by the unfolding farrago of King Charles III’s coronation.

Piece by piece as they are disclosed, the details of Saturday’s crowning in Westminster Abbey show a monarch seriously out of touch with his subjects.

Whether this reflects his own insularity or the work of courtiers trying to pump up the pomp and circumstance as part of a re-branding based on a kind of zealous flag-wrapped nationalism is unclear. It may well be a combination of both, in which Charles is being willingly manipulated into a more assertive role as head of state than his mother thought right.

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Nothing more clearly warned of this that his agreeing to the idea of making a brazen break from the protocols of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. In place of the tradition of requiring only aristocrats to pay homage to the throne, at the same point in the cathedral ritual all of his subjects will be invited to take a personal vow of allegiance to him, “in heart and voice to their undoubted king”—a move with more than a whiff of the “dear leader” in North Korea.

The actual order of service reads, “All who so desire, in the Abbey, and elsewhere, say together: I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”

This has had the result of needlessly polarizing views about the monarchy beyond anything previously seen. It also reflects (and exacerbates) the same deep political and cultural divide that led to Brexit, between the Rule Britannia xenophobes of the right believing in a single sovereignty and those who wanted to keep the country following the European ideal of a collective sovereignty.

At one extreme a leading republican, Priyamvada Gopal, professor of postcolonial studies at Cambridge, said it was a direction to “the peasants” to “pay allegiance to Rule by Wealth, and to all who profiteer and siphon off money from the public weal, according to law or not.”

At the other extreme the response of the opposite camp was led, predictably, by the Daily Mail, who called the dissenters “spoilsports”—a patronizing term that might be used by the captain of a cricket club after losing a game to a team of lesser breeding.

But Gopal’s comments are not just republican rhetoric. They reflect that people are only now discovering that the king’s personal wealth has soared to almost obscene levels while their own, at best, has barely moved in 15 years. The coronation occurs at a time of rising destitution – former Prime Minister Gordon Brown listed 7.5 million households in fuel poverty, 14 million living in damp or substandard housing, 400,000 children without a bed of their own, and nearly 10 million people cutting back on food for want of the ability to pay for it.

It is against that background that Charles and Camilla chose quiche for the traditional coronation dish to be served at street parties—Elizabeth II’s was coronation chicken. They offered a recipe for it: “a crisp, light pastry case and delicate flavors of spinach, broad beans and fresh tarragon.”

It is in such banal details that the condescension of the king and queen consort is revealed and becomes most offensive—in effect, this is the “let them eat quiche” coronation.

Not only that. Hanging over Charles’s future is how much he is ready to acknowledge the darkest parts of the monarchy’s history. The direct role of Charles’ royal ancestors in developing slavery has been tracked in detail by The Guardian, leading to his conceding for the first time that he took the issue “profoundly seriously” and supported continued research into the consequences of this “appalling atrocity.”

However, a Palace spokesperson said that more could not be said until the workload of the coronation was behind them. And, so far, there has never been any hint that the mounting calls for reparations from the Caribbean, where the islanders suffered centuries of cruelty and exploitation, will be even considered.

Princess Anne—who usually comes across as the straight-talking sibling who never rocks the boat and is most like her father, Prince Philip—suddenly seemed to be singing from a different hymn sheet when she told the CBC this week that it would be a mistake to slim down the monarchy—an intention that Charles has publicly declared but has yet to execute—perhaps because the family remains divided over how far they can really dismantle an edifice that Elizabeth II never wanted to change.

As soon as Charles succeeded his mother it was obvious that the coronation would be a crucial test of how well he grasped how different his kingdom is to the Britain of 1953.

That coronation was also used as an exercise in rebranding, not just of the monarchy but of a nation that was exhausted by the attrition of winning a war, followed by nine years of austerity and extensive rationing. At the same time, Britain began the process of unwinding a world empire.

Hailed as “the New Elizabethan Age” the Tory government, led for the second time by Winston Churchill, no mean spinmeister himself, deliberately summoned memories of the energy and nationalism of a time when a small island of 4 million people rose, under Elizabeth I, to become a European power (with a lot of help from state-sponsored piracy).

These had been bleak years, and Churchill wanted a pageant that would cheer people up. In 1953 many basic needs continued to be rationed: meat, eggs, fuel—and candy. Churchill demanded that candy rationing should end. He overrode ministers who warned that the country would run out of sugar. Candy was freed from rationing just in time for the coronation. There was no sugar shortage.

It will take more than a sugar high to sweeten public opinion on the monarchy this time.

For those of us who remember 1953, the most striking contrast with the present public mood is, back then, how deeply embedded reflexive deference to the monarchy was. Indeed, a third of the people still believed that the monarch was chosen by God.

Elizabeth was also widely supported by the people because of her youth and glamour and the sense that, as inexperienced as she was, she was devoting the whole of herself and her life to duty. Even those hostile to the monarchy appreciated her guts and the stresses placed upon her by the relentless decline of British power.

Today, King Charles seems to struggle most with the loss of that public deference to the throne. He’s always believed in the simple superiority of royal rank, no matter that in his case it is automatically bestowed, not earned. As soon as he puts on a uniform, with a carapace of medals and heavy with trimmings of gold braid, he seems reinforced in his own sense of stature, if not exactly a commander-in-chief, an imperial viceroy with a striking resemblance to his uncle and mentor Lord Louis Mountbatten.

And yet he must surely know that this is not his mother’s nation, particularly in the way that it regards him. The danger is not that he will be swept aside by a wave of republicanism, which is far from happening. While 38 percent of Gen Z respondents to a YouGov poll wanted to replace the monarch with an elected head of state, 78 percent of those 65 and older are unshakeable royalists.

But the generational divide shows most clearly in the king’s personal popularity rating. He languishes at fourth, with 56 percent. Kate, at 68 percent, and William, 67 percent, are the favored team, and Princess Anne is ahead of her brother at 64 percent. The real danger for Charles, which can be sensed in the streets of London this week, is that unless he shows more of a sense of the nation’s mood he will be viewed with indifference, as not having anything to contribute to people’s lives, or the country as a whole.

The other message from the streets is that any royal pageant remains huge draw for tourists from abroad who get all the entertainment value without having to bear the costs. And the full-on security in the capital, both visible and invisible, is falling into place by the hour—nobody was rattled by the guy who decided to toss a few shotgun cartridges in the direction of Buckingham Palace but it did serve to remind us that there can be no weak points in the ring of surveillance.

Of course, the king’s merits have yet to be fully tested. The missteps of the coronation could be just a bump in the learning curve. But calling for blind allegiance not simply to him but to the Windsor “heirs and successors” is a cringe-making demand that reaches back to the vanities of George III.

In 1776, among the things that most animated the American revolution among the Founding Fathers, was the absurdity of hereditary succession as the producer of kings.

After a visit to Europe in 1810, with one royal house after another reeling during the Napoleonic wars, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter, checked off a list of monarchs who had, he said, been fools—of France, Spain, Naples, Sardinia, Denmark, Prussia, Sweden and Austria, and of course King George III—“These animals,” he wrote, “had become without mind and powerless; and so will every hereditary monarch after a few generations.”