“When I am in serious humour,” wrote Thomas Addison in 1711, in one of his celebrated essays, “I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the gloominess of the place, and the Use to which it is applied, and the Solemnity of the Building, and the condition of the people who lye in it, are apt to fill the Mind with a kind of Melancholy, or rather Thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable.”
The King and Queen certainly looked in serious humour as they left for the Abbey on the day of the coronation, but I can’t believe they were that thoughtful – certainly not in the fugit inreparibile tempus spirit urged by Addison. Rather, with their pinched, powdered and emphatically elderly faces framed by the rain-speckled windscreen of the state coach, they looked either to be costive – always a problem for the ageing luminary when he or she has an early call for a long ceremony – or to’ve recently had a marital spat.
If her spin doctors are to be believed, the Queen will have been rampaging around the state apartments inveighing against the King thus: “You know I’ve never wanted to be queen, all I really enjoy is a fag and a natter, this is all about you – it’s always all about you! And now I’m going to have to go through the whole thing without having had a shit… you shit!”
Anyway, off the poor old things went for a long morning of elder abuse – or at least that’s what it looked like to me. I don’t think I’ve watched a single one of these grand monarchical affairs since the then Prince of Wales’s investiture in 1969, but my French wife finds the entire moth-eaten tapestry of British royalty “quaint”, so I made her de-crusted cucumber and smoked salmon sandwiches, and we cracked open a bottle of Carpentier Champagne (only 14 quid from Lidl, a truly regal bargain), so as to toast… ourselves.
I take the actor Adjoa Andoh’s point about the “terribly white balcony” scene, after the – relatively speaking – diverse congregation assembled in the Abbey, but I think she may be confusing fiction with fact: colourblind casting has become, quite rightly, de rigueur in British drama, but it’s going to be a long time yet before the protagonists of the never-ending reality show that’s our so-called “constitutional” monarchy are selected without any attention to their race, ethnicity or heritage. Genealogy is, at root, the ideology of aristocracy.
And that’s why the King has been waiting his entire adult life to play this particular part; which brings me to perhaps the most troubling aspect of the coronation – one I don’t think I’ve seen commented on anywhere. And no, it’s not the praise heaped on an erstwhile Tory minister for holding a metal bar vertically for an hour (there must be hundreds of thousands of fifty-something British women who could do the same), but rather the cue cards.
Yes, having waited his entire life for this coronation service, and having apparently played a central role in devising it, the King was nonetheless unable to memorise his own lines, which can’t have amounted to more than ten or so exchanges. Instead, an adipose prelate had to hold a cheat within his eye line for every single one of them. It was the same for the Queen. Granted, the King may have been anxious – and who wouldn’t be, knowing that a man in an ornate gold dress was about to take you behind a curtain and rub holy lube on your moobs – but even so, it gave the distinct impression that this supposedly transcendent occasion was as ephemeral as the newscasts which covered it.
As for the costive Queen, she’s been bigging herself up as first and foremost a regal reader for years now. If you thought the coronation concert featured a line-up of passé acts (I hadn’t heard the words “Lionel” and “Richie” spoken so many times since the early 1980s), then check out the bill for the Queen’s own literary festival to be held at Hampton Court in June.
With events including a comedic Jane Austen show, Robert “Back Passage of Power” Harris on espionage writing, a tribute to the late Dame Hilary “Plastic Princess” Mantel, and the late Gyles Brandreth in conversation with the late Judi Dench about the late William Shakespeare, this hardly seems in line with the stated objectives of the Queen’s charity, the Royal Reading Room, which aims at: “closing the gap between writers and readers through accessible, educational and free literary content.” So-called “Platinum” seats are available at £120 – and when I say “available”, I mean the house is still three-quarters unsold with less than a month to go before showtime. Really, the Queen should take a leaf out of Oprah Winfrey’s book – since it’s the US talk show host that she’s clearly emulating.
Or rather not, since Winfrey seems to get by fine without cue cards.
