With the stars apparently agreeing with the Not My King mob, will the Carolean Age be nasty brutish and short, or nice, British and long?
I was unsurprised to see that among the many boo-boos that the British monarchy are deemed to have made, the date of the coronation was a big one. According to astrologer Rose Smith, (whose website’s bevy of psychics can, for a tidy fee, advise us non-royal plebs on our modest futures) the choice of May 6 alone meant that the reign of Charles III was going to be rocky. It seems that a dodgy Pluto is the problem. Sitting out there on the very outskirts of the Solar system, that icy little lump of methane is doing something rude to Mercury. Busted down to dwarf-planetness, Pluto’s jealous resentment is going to cause more problems for the monarchy than a disgruntled in-law. Forget politics, wars, climate – just shut your eyes and trust the astrologers who tell us that the things we can actually see and verify are all caused by things we can’t.
It didn’t bother me, then, to watch the coronation. I was always going to, not least because I remember the other one. I knew nothing of republics or politics that day in 1953. My father had bought a television, the only one in the family, and he and Mum hosted over 50 people in our house. I was four, and couldn’t quite understand the lilac-grey flickering screen. I think it was a huge one of fourteen inches, a Pye model that was kept decorously in its own freestanding oaken cupboard with two doors that opened with dangling brass thingies. Dad could be lavish, especially with hospitality.
His relationship with monarchy was complex, to say the least. In his youth in 1936, when Edward VIII abdicated, he said, according to my mother, who would occasionally throw him under a bus in an argument, ‘Well if the king can quit his job, then I can too.’ He then took the train to London, doubtless to see if anything was happening that the radio and newspapers weren’t reporting.
I think he was conflicted on every level because as Captain Catholic, he couldn’t approve of the king marrying a divorced woman. But as a loyal Englishman, he didn’t want to see the king forced out by a bunch of Bolsheviks, who were worse than Protestants, though of course everyone knew that the Anglican church began when Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and …
But then, when nothing happened and the quietly heroic and dutiful George VI took over and saw us through the war, some real loyalty was won. Even though a long line of Hanoverian and Tudor predecessors did terrible things to Catholics. Dad was a forgiver, never a canceller.
'I arranged for grandchildren and great-niece to come and watch some history and hear some pretty decent music. I told them, "You’ll thank me one day when I am long dead, and you can tell your own grandchildren that you watched the coronation of a long-dead king as you celebrate the Grand Ascendance of the Great Whatever of your own time."’
That grey June afternoon in 1953 I heard, from the kitchen, where several aunts were icing cakes and making sandwiches, the whole house resound with shouts of ‘Vivat! Vivat!’ We had acquired a beautiful lady whose face was like my statuette of Our Lady and who was going to be Queen of everything I knew, and that was OK with me.
Food was as important then as it was during the first weekend of May, 2023. Feed the troops, keep ‘em happy. Accordingly, I arranged for grandchildren and great-niece to come and watch some history and hear some pretty decent music. I told them, ‘You’ll thank me one day when I am long dead, and you can tell your own grandchildren that you watched the coronation of a long-dead king as you celebrate the Grand Ascendance of the Great Whatever of your own time.’
My elder granddaughter of 11, she whose first or most persistent words were ‘WHY?’ and who hasn’t changed much, said ‘Well Grandma, I want you to mention in your article that there is a Huge Slug in your bathtub’. Whereupon I told them not to kill it, but pick it up and put it on a weed in the garden, whereupon they all did say ‘EEEWW! Gross’ and went forth to make Harajuku pancakes with lots of edible bling and too much cream.
But there was some excellent music, especially Bryn Terfel singing Paul Mealor’s spine-tingling Kyrie in Welsh, ending on a pianissimo that Montserrat Caballé would have been proud of. The Jupiter section from Holst’s Planet Suite had my little republicans dancing as though it were an Ariana Grande. The Westminster Abbey music was mostly lovely, with a welcome addition of women and girls to the choirs, making the sound fuller and warmer. The Ascension Choir, a black gospel group, did a wonderful Alleluia that had us all emotional.
And my little girls flitted in and out of the room, eating enough chocolate to tackle Everest in a blizzard – and I thought of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay doing just that in 1953 and how it was announced at the time as part of the whole hopeful thing that started back then and is trying, against many odds, to keep going now with a figurehead who wants to heal and to help.
And who can forget Pretty Yende, the lovely South African coloratura soprano, who was wearing a large exploding daffodil and enough diamonds to rival the Queen? She sang warmly, cleanly and passionately. Some wanted her to refuse to sing as a protest against colonialism. Her reply: ‘I see each and every opportunity I get as a possibility for my gift to reconcile, to heal, to love, to give joy, to give hope for the future. We cannot change the past but each generation … with a small action can give hope for tomorrow.’
There were many people there, from every creed and ethnicity on our little planet, who agreed with her. Except maybe some republican astrologers. Bugger Pluto, anyway.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.
Main image: Members of the public walk up The Mall following the procession after the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on May 6, 2023 in London, England. (Adam Gerrard - WPA Pool/Getty Images)