It may have been the grey of the London sky and the tender green of new leaves on plane trees along the Mall that lent to the coronation spectacle a sense of melancholy recessional rather than the parade of pomp and power it sought to project.

When British people say ‘we do pageantry like nobody else’, they are indirectly admitting that we depend disproportionately upon the past to give meaning to the present. When the re-enactment of ancient custom takes on such importance, this implies some absence or uncertainty in contemporary life.  

When cultures are in the ascendant, dominant and expanding, they are impressive and intimidating, particularly since they find it impossible not to express their supremacy over others by conquest or colonisation; but when they are in retreat and have lost their hold over the imagination of the people, they become poignant and show a vulnerability that had never appeared at the height of their power. It was this that inflected the extravaganza of the coronation; created a spectacle in full consciousness that the display of splendour does not belong to any conceivable future.

This is something the British ought to know well since we spent the long imperial moment destroying or tearing down the cultures of others, their sacred rites, practices and traditions. With missionary fervour and unequalled military power, we scythed our way through ‘lesser’ civilisations, scorned their heathenish beliefs, extirpated their superstitious rituals and put an end to their barbaric customs, bringing, in their stead, what we saw as civilisation, truth and freedom.

The time has, perhaps, come for us to undergo a similar experience, although no one has invaded our sacred groves and forests, trampled our tabernacles or desecrated our gods. The beliefs at the heart of our culture have become corroded by the rust of disuse, the holy texts eaten away by the insects of indifference, the vestments invaded by the moth of doubt, even though the outer forms remain, resplendent, apparently unimpaired. If our culture has also been colonised, overtaken by more powerful entities, the chief of these is Time itself, which has caused us to forfeit our dominant place in the world and to withdraw from the territories we occupied, so that on great State occasions we re-enact with magnificent vanity an illusion of continuity with vanished glories. 

What we saw at the coronation was the beautiful monstrosity of a past embalmed in ceremonial, nostalgia materialised. The splendour of the colours – red, gold, black and white – and the precision of the choreography, the memory of military pre-eminence and the chants echoing in the soaring Gothic vaults and narrow aisles represent a reality that cannot be ‘modernised’, because it no longer exists except as performance. This is an imperial Lenin’s tomb, preserved intact, but liable to disintegration should air and daylight be admitted.

Although the coronation is of great antiquity, its present form was devised for Edward VII in 1902, paradoxically, at a moment when the apogee of imperialism had already passed. There has, therefore been a long time for it to ossify and take on the aura of ageless imperishability that the event projects to the world.

The underlying sadness beneath the faultlessly glittering execution of the ceremony was, perhaps, emphasized by the individuals who were the representatives of the majesty that elevated them. Both Charles and Camilla looked more than solemn, as well they might, oppressed by the paraphernalia and ritual demanded by their formal passage into sovereignty. They were being subjected to ancient rituals which their subjects would never have to undergo.

It is impossible not to wonder how many ghosts of fallen divinities and broken idols in Africa and Asia and the Americas are evoked by this spectacle, in which faith has been forfeited by a majority of those over whom the king now reigns: who, among his people, now believes in the sanctity of the chrism oil consecrated by the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem and by the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, with which Charles is anointed behind screens; olives harvested from two groves on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus is said to have prayed before the Crucifixion, the oil of which is perfumed with balsam, jasmine and orange blossom? Why did the king have to retreat behind screens for the anointing? Was it that none should see him wearing a simple shift, was it that none should behold the indignity of liquid applied to the royal forehead, breast and hands? Or was it because this might have exposed the procedure to ridicule? 

What mocked and vilified pagan entities hover over the ceremony of the king being divested of all worldly vanity before God by wearing the Colobium Sindonis, the ‘shroud tunic’, before being adorned with a coat of gold? The outlandish exoticism of the desecrated altars and broken beliefs of vanquished cultures pales before these gaudy solemnities which command a faltering faith in the changing sensibility of Britain. The waning of popular belief is not sudden, as it was when invaders overturned the shrines and trampled the sacred objects of peoples mistakenly thought to be more ‘primitive’ than ourselves. The forfeit of faith is a slow and sullen retreat compared with that violent overthrow; but it is as inexorable.

Those who wonder why so many people in Britain are still willing to suspend disbelief in the archaic splendour of this celestial bal masque have their answer in the events of the following day at the grandiosely named Coronation Concert, which was supposed, unlike the crowning itself, to represent both present and future. No more unimaginative and barren concoction could have been imagined in these ephemera which contrasted so starkly with the enduring splendour of the scenes in Westminster Abbey. This was intended to be a celebration of diversity (and the performers did indeed represent a wide range of people, not reflected in the overwhelming pallor of the 20,000 audience), a call to ecological consciousness and to charitable endeavour. It was well-meaning and mediocre; as a source of inspiration and hope in the future sadly deficient; a pallid contrast with the pageant that preceded it. Perhaps it is significant that major British talent stayed away – either refusing to be associated with the event or perhaps feeling it was not worth their while to appear for a meagre three-minute slot or because they didn’t want to be associated with an institution which is held in no great esteem by a majority of the young,

The two events had one thing in common: they bore little relation to the lived experience of contemporary Britain. At least the events in the Abbey had a coherent story, as another episode in a familiar historic pageant, even if also contained much mumbo-jumbo, mystifying social precedences of rank and status, regalia the purpose of which has become incomprehensible to the modern world. The concert had no such binding theme. The meaninglessness of pop songs projected into the night air around Windsor Castle did not relieve their emptiness: religious orthodoxy was replaced by secular piety; the failing conviction of the former was matched by an unconvincing commitment to the latter.

The coronation is a time to reflect – not to re-affirm a longing for vanished glories, but to assess what can still be achieved with diminished status and reduced wealth. Elites, obsessed with irrecoverable power, have unsurprisingly ceased to observe the needs of their own people – a people growing old, an increase in physical and mental sickness, a youth with little hope in its own future, when the empire mutated into a commonwealth, when racism as a high principle of imperial governance was – quite abruptly – shamed and outlawed, when the projection of Britain’s ‘soft power’ – its language, culture and democratic example – overtook its threats of military action against recalcitrant entities, gunboats and expeditionary forces, this inevitably caused great confusion and perturbation of spirit in ruling castes and people alike – an anxiety not easily dispelled. This is bound to be reflected in the most precious rituals and ceremonials of the culture, nowhere more so than in the solemn exaltations and yearning melancholy for that which is irretrievable. The coronational festival was a parade of finery which had not been brought out for seventy years: if it exuded a scent of lavender and mothballs, this could not quite overcome the faint whiff of a shroud.

Jeremy Seabrook is a British writer and columnist. He is the author of over 40 books. His most recent book is his memoir Private Worlds.

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