Yesterday’s coronation showed Britain doing what Britain does best — putting on the most gloriously bonkers ceremony the world has seen for decades. From Penny Mordant with a giant sword to Charles and Camilla seemingly playing a very important game of musical chairs, along with some of the strangest costumes you’ll see outside of a ComicCon, it was enough to ensure that the eyes of the world were all on Westminster Abbey for a few hours.
Much of the strangeness of the pageantry stems, of course, from the fact that bits and pieces of the ceremony date back hundreds of years. But there’s one crucial piece of the ceremony that really should have been updated over 300 years ago because not making this change means that there’s a big lie at the very heart of the ceremony.
It’s a lie about where the monarch’s power comes from.
Through most of the centuries that we’ve been crowning our monarch in Westminster Abbey, Britain has been a Christian nation. The coronation service has, therefore, been a Christian service. And it has, at its heart, a belief that the power wielded by the monarch comes from God. And that remains at the heart of the ceremony to this day. In the most sacred part of the ceremony (the bit that takes place behind screens because it’s too important for us to see) the new monarch is anointed with oil while the Archbishop of…
