Have you heard the one about the man who would be King?
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Monarchy
At some time in the very early morning, perhaps as early as 5am, a 74 year old man will slowly creak out of bed, in the manner that a 74 year old man is likely to do. He will fumble around for his slippers in the dark, possibly putting his left foot into the right slipper. He will then stumble stiffly across the room toward the lavatory where he will feel around for the light switch, his hand movements becoming more erratic with the increasing frustration that he can never quite remember where it is. After a few seconds mauling the wall and leaving grease stains on the wallpaper, he will finally find the damned switch. “Click!” the searing toilet light will come on, temporarily blinding him as his old age pensioner eyes are still accustomed to the dark and adjust slowly to any change in luminosity.
Squinting he will make his way to the toilet, lift up the seat and relieve himself. The relief however will be cut short by the anxiety induced from the loo seat, which he just remembered has a habit of not staying up, and as his elderly eyes adjust to the light he can discern a slight declining of the seat as it ebbs toward the golden stream like an intruder tripping a laser alarm beam.
In a panic he terminates mid flow, swiftly pulling up his briefs. However his relief in avoiding a potential urinous disaster is undermined by the realization that after-pee residue has now saturated a 50p size spot of his underwear. But he thinks it is small enough that he will just about get away with it and is amused to remember that 50p coins now have his face on them. He pauses for a moment to ponder if he needs to wash his hands just yet, but then his mind is distracted by thoughts of the day’s upcoming events where he will be crowned as His Royal Highness King Charles the III of the United Kingdom (and 14 other commonwealth nations) in a sacred ceremony ordained by God himself.
This seems like an absurd vignette, and that’s because it is. It is also true (in nature if not precise detail). The coronation will indeed be an absurd event. The notion of the monarchy itself is absurd in 2023. Given that the national debt is 100% of GDP, there is a cost of living crisis, inflation is in double digits, nothing works, the NHS is collapsing, everyone is on strike, and thousands more people than average are dying every week, the fact we would willfully give up a day of economic activity to celebrate the crowning of an unelected 74 year old divorcee as our divine leader is patently Pythonesque. And thank God it is, because it is just what we need. Nothing reflects the collective British soul better than the absurd, the illogical, the non-sequitur.
Grim faced commentators will relish the opportunity to point out that the concept of a monarchy is incompatible with modern society. These are the same people who squeal with delight at any chance to inform us that Saint George didn’t kill a dragon because dragons aren’t even real, fish and chips was actually invented by the Chinese, and Jesus wouldn’t have got a work visa as a carpenter in Tory Britain. Thank God for this lot as well, because they too are playing their almost Taoist harmonious part in our national story.
The working classes in contrast, will be the most sincere and jubilant in celebrating the King’s ascension. The grim faced commentators won’t understand these prolls’ revelry given they have the least in common with royalty. They suspect the working classes are either stupid or just doing it to annoy them. Meanwhile the working classes don’t care what the intelligentsia think, and will have a good ol’knees up at the street party, with Sharon forgiving Gary across the road for breaking the lawnmower he borrowed last summer. Thank God for them for their sincere lack of irony, and for annoying the roundheads.
The fidgety middle classes caught in a perennial in-betweenness and unsure of their position will delight in a semi-ironic take on the affair, getting off on their intellectualization of the monarchy (this author included) as an excuse to peacock their cerebral feathers. Thank God for them and their sardonic, urbane tweets.
Then there are the too-cool-for-school crowd, who will go to great pains to let you know that they don’t care about the coronation. They will ring you up at 2am just to confirm that you understood how the whole thing is of little interest to them, and they are so uninterested that they don’t even know how they feel about it, the same way they don’t have an opinion on the decision of the World Indoor Bowls Council to become an affiliate member of World Bowls Limited (I’m against it by the way). Thank God for them.
Though ostensibly Britain is internationally renowned for cliches such as Big Ben, tea, Paddington Bear, fish and chips, James Bond, and coming 7th in the world for most things, if you actually talk to an expat living here, you will not hear them waxing lyrical about Goldfinger, or that great battered haddock they had after the footy last night. What you will actually hear is a litany of complaints about how many things here are completely illogical.
Why do you drive on the wrong side of the road?
Why do you have separate hot and cold taps, when the rest of the world uses mixer taps?
And whilst we’re discussing mixing, why do you mix metric and imperial measurements? I.e. A litre of water, but a pint of milk? I ate a kilo of chocolate and put on a stone in weight? I had to drive 5 miles to buy a 3m high bookcase, but now need a ladder as I’m only 5ft6.
Why do you use insults as a term of endearment?
Why do you tut when people don’t queue up outside, but then never queue in the pub?
Why are your eggs brown and covered in bird poop and feathers as if you need confirmation they came from chickens?
Why do you never say what you actually mean?
Why do you have small houses, but waste space by having large front gardens that you never use?
Why are you always so polite but then also swear all the time?
Why are you so affronted when people don’t play fair, but then retain a hereditary monarchy which is built on the concept of unfairness?
There was a very good historical reason for separate hot and cold taps, to avoid the mixing of potentially contaminated hot water from the water tank with the drinkable water from the cold mains supply. But with modern plumbing that reason is no longer valid.
However, the British love nothing better than a contradiction. The Romans came and built straight roads. As soon as they left we replaced them with a warren of bendy lanes and cul-de-sacs. Why make life simple and logical?
We had the chance to witness the end point of logical straight-line rationality over the channel. The frogs got rid of their monarchy, instituted an age of reason, and bloody chaos ensued.
Of course now the fact that the French got rid of their royals is all the reason we’ll ever need to never do it ourselves. They cut off their monarchs’ heads, like the crass, overwrought brutes they are. Us English undertook the more refined form of sedition that is mockery and satire. Sarcasm may well be the lowest form of wit, but it is the highest form of violence. Which is why our otherwise pacifist pastoral land of cricket greens and flower shows is suffused with lashings of irony.
To be fair, before the French made it uncool, we did chop off the heads of our monarch, just to see what it was like. Turns out it meant we lost Christmas, which robbed us of the opportunity to bond over a collective moan about post-medieval festive decorations been sold too early before midsummer is barely even over. As a result social anarchy ensued.
So we decided that restoration is the new revolution, and brought the King back. However we still liked to pride ourselves on our sense of merit, liberty, and fairness, and so having a crazy dude who looked like the trans love child of Frank Zappa and Captain Hook bossing us about, well, it just didn’t seem like cricket. So we decided that invasions have worked well for us in the past when we were stuck in a rut, and invited one to occur, but called it a revolution instead, when it fact it was a reformation.
The glorious revolution granted parliament supreme power over the monarch, whose authority was now merely symbolic rather than absolute. As compensation for this loss of divinity, our Kings and Queens were no longer expected to wash poor peoples’ feet on maundy Tuesday, fight in battles, or shag their cousin.
So you see, we arrived at the convoluted system of constitutional monarchy via the most convoluted bendy lane possible. To this day we maintain our proud heritage of contradiction. Outside of the Houses of Parliament stands a statue of Oliver Cromwell. Directly opposite on the wall of St Margarets church is a bust of Charles I. To this day, when the monarch opens parliament, the death warrant for Charles I is displayed in the robing room, lest the sovereign get any ideas. But the monarch also does their own due diligence. The cellars of Westminster are searched for gunpowder, and an MP is taken hostage in Buckingham palace for the duration of the ceremony as a form of collateral. There is often much disappointment when the chosen MP returns unscathed.
“Preposterous!”, “Ridiculous!”, could you imagine the sober, rationalists in Brussels doing that? Maybe they could have a ceremonial handing of the brief case to a fake sheik.
Our culture is a proverbial Yin Yang, with any element being bolstered by the presence of its opposite (it’s why we ran Hong Kong so well). Contradiction is encoded in our vernacular. If a Brit is doing well, they will say they are “not too bad”. If they have just been diagnosed with aggressive, terminal bone cancer on the same day that they declared bankruptcy and their wife left them, they will inform you that they “have been better”.
As it is with language so it is with the nation’s culture and institutions. There is a method to the madness. A utilitarian aspect. It helped us fend off fascism, as the notion of a humorless tyrant taking himself too seriously could never germinate in the mirth filled soil of Britain. Humour is the antidote to ideology and tyranny, and what is humour but the alloy created from the synthesis of immiscible contradictions?
There is much lamentation about the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. She is regarded as a singular figure, who cannot be equaled or imitated. And indeed, her monarchial birth was an immaculate conception. Little was known of her before her ascension to the throne, and she was born of an era where singular narratives ruled like conceptual monarchs over the public consciousness. We were British, we knew what that meant, and we knew what we believed in. QEII came with no baggage except her father’s steadfast shepherding of the nation through the deadliest war in history. The grand fabric of tradition draped behind her like the regal cape she wore. She was never really human, and so graduated to the role of a sovereign being without incredulity. She was of another era, and so uniquely suited to be a reference point to the ending of that era. A still point in a turning world. But the world has turned.
And now the roulette wheel of fate has landed on King Charles III. As a general rule, history has not been kind to the third installment of a franchise (let’s hope Charlie is more Lord of the Rings than Godfather). However, I would argue that he is inherently the most suited to the role in the current time. His mother was singular in the sense that she was monotone. Stoic, reserved, obdurate, stable. Charles on the other hand is positively kaleidoscopic.
He is a creature of the turning world. He cut his teeth during the collapse of the grand narrative, the advent of pop culture, mass immigration, reality TV, celebrity culture, the internet. Whereas his mother was a sphinx, archetypically recognizable but inherently unknowable, Charles is arguably the most human royal we’ve ever had. A sensitive soul with whom we have shared first love, marital breakdown, divorce, tragedy, he is both a lost boy searching for a hug and the crazy uncle at Christmas talking to the plants and shouting at architecture. All the more ironic it is that the royal we share the most empathy (if not sympathy) with, we must now revere as an entity that is unhuman, a King, a Sovereign. Likewise, Charles is regarded as a progressive, a modernizer, defender of all faiths including wokeness, yet is also a staunch traditionalist, railing against the banal vulgarity of modern architecture, popular culture, and left wing progressive materialism.
The notion that this man, with his soiled laundry flying like flags at full mast, and his erratic emotional, spiritual, and political views seared into public consciousness, will become an embodiment of an national ideal is absurd. But the notion that a sacred ideal can be embodied in the lapsarian flesh of a mortal is absurd anyway, so what better conduit than Charles the contradictory?
What better figure to see us through our current schizophrenic era, than a paradoxical figure representing a paradoxical institution?
Perhaps the best example of the dual recognition of the monarchy as both a revered and risible institution is when the legendary (and one fears almost forgotten) comedian Spike Milligan received a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards in 1994. Upon being read a fawning fan letter written by the then Prince Charles extolling Milligan’s virtues, the comedian interrupted to call the royal a “groveling little bastard”. The audience erupted with the sort of laughter that is only unleashed when an archaeologically deep social tripwire is triggered. A laughter shared by the Prince himself who wrote to Milligan that a little more groveling would be required for a knighthood (which was duly awarded in 2000).
On reflecting upon the paradoxical importance of the monarchy, I am reminded off the scenes which unfolded in America where the inhabitants of New Jersey and New York were given only a few hours’ notice to evacuate their homes before the category 3 hurricane sandy made contact, bringing with it a calamitous storm surge.
With little time to prepare, and even less capacity to carry things, people in large did not try and cram the $2,000 4k TV, or the brand new NespressoTM machine into their cars. The things that held the most monetary value and that were used the most often were left to perish. What was saved was that corny painting of a boat inherited from grandad that you can’t stand but was his favourite. The cracked fine bone China tea set handed down from grandma. The kid’s old saliva infused soft toy which has been in the attic for years. All of little or no monetary value, the stuff that is never used but just takes up space in the house. Yet when confronted with the doom of an impending flood, it is the very stuff that moors one’s identity to something more than itself.
So yes the coronation will be a disappointment. It will also be awe inspiring. The weather will probably contrive to be the least suitable form for the occasion. We will feel a queasiness at how much this is all costing, whilst also wishing they had spent a little more. We will scoff at the slebs who though looking so radiant on the One Show, cut a tawdry figure when in contrast with real regality. Then after it is over, having gone on for too long, yet we also wishing we could see more of the archbishop looking awkward, we will go to relieve ourselves, hawkishly watching the errant toilet seat and then both burning and freezing our hands between the hot and cold taps.
Perhaps the most English of poets Philip Larkin, captured our bi-polar relationship with our royalty in two poems he wrote for the Queen’s silver jubilee:
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
She did not change.
The sky split apart in malice
Stars rattled like pans on a shelf
Crow shat on Buckingham Palace
God pissed himself.
The Monarchy is both everything and nothing, our most famous institution, but has no real power. We are in awe with it, yet we think it is silly. It exists in a quantum state, both a wave of national mood and singular particle of unjustifiable decadence, depending on how we observe it. It is Schrodinger’s monarchy, both dead and alive.
The monarchy is dead, long live the monarchy!