12th May 2023
There was one part of the coronation ceremony last week – other than the poor minister carrying that sword for such a long time – which I found striking.
It was when, as part of the religious element of the the service, the king was stripped to his shirt.
And the reason this struck me was not its religious significance, but because it reminded me of a nineteenth century sketch that this blog has featured before.
This engraving by William Makepeace Thackeray:
The point of the caricature, of course, is that there is a distinction with any ruler between the natural person and their paraphernalia of office.
The comic series Sandman also deals with this point, where the entity Dream realises that he has wrongly infused (or perhaps confused) his three symbols of power (helm, powder, ruby) with own immense power.
This is not a new thought: as long as we have, as a species, have had notions of (what we would now call) lordship (rather than face-to-face dominance) then there has been the issue of the extent to which artefacts confer power – or whether the artefacts instead recognise and convey power.
Of course, the more confident the ruler, the less they need to resort to any visual rhetoric and symbolism.
Genuinely powerful rulers need few props, for they have power instead.
And a confident ruler in a culture where there are props of office will be unafraid to not be seen with those props.
The paraphernalia is an extra, not the essence.
And this is true whether the garb is a crown, or a judge’s wig and gown, or a police officer’s helmet and warrant card.
This is why this step of the coronation was so interesting (and it is, it seems, an ancient component of the service and not some novelty).
Not only did we see a king with his crown and his orb and his sceptre: we got to see him before he put any of them on.
We got to behold the man, before we got to behold the king.
And the point that Thackeray was slyly making with his cartoon is that some with power would very much not want you to behold any such thing.
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Note: the title may be better as Ecce Homo, Ecce Regum – and so I apologise for my prioritisation here of style over substance:
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This bit:
“Of course, the more confident the ruler, the less they need to resort to any visual rhetoric and symbolism.
Genuinely powerful rulers need few props, for they have power instead.”
I believe this, and the emotional engineering feels intuitively right, but I wonder if it may be a bit ‘No True Scotsman”. Who would you cite as a ‘genuinely powerful ruler’, under these criteria?
I think it sounds like nonsense, to be honest. It’s almost a rule that the more confident the dictator, the more they curate their image, and the more they rely on visual rhetoric and symbolism.
Xi Jinping is supremely confident. But try posting images of a certain bear on Weibo and you’ll find out how much he relies on symbolism.
I assumed this is a vestigial part of the ritual that took place prior to being knighted – eg from Ramon Llull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry (13th century). So the squire was supposed to spend the previous night in prayer/vigil, without any of his armour or trappings, and then on the morning of his knighting approach the altar to “bind himself to the Order of Chivalry and submit to honouring and upholding it with all his might”. Then there would be a very long church service, and finally the knight would receive his sword etc, and there would be banquets, gifts and general partying. It was very important who knighted you, because if they weren’t a good knight themselves, then they couldn’t pass high quality knightliness on to you.
This ritual was of course lampooned by Cervantes in the 17th Century, showing it was comically outdated then. So it makes sense that Britain would still try to make it relevant in the 21st century.
Passing Spanish opinions are of no relevance to the British monarchy…
As a (not very learned) Christian theologian you are missing important features here. But then as an atheist that is (a) not something that concerns you, (b) probably a quite conscious part of your point. I’ll try to draw out some differences anyway.
Your observation starts from the baseline of natural persons and makes some claims about the artificiality of attempts to project power using objects. You argue that the
archetype of power is having it in something close to one’s natural self,
without artificial aids. Thackeray is clearly interested in removing artificial aids to get at the true natural person underneath.
Getting religious now, the point of the “ecce homo” is that Pilate is wrong. He thinks he has stripped Christ to reveal the underlying natural person. What instead happens is that Christ remains the King of kings, but is also being shown to be fully in solidarity with the rest of us (“What has not been assumed has not been saved”). And Pilate’s attempt to get at the core natural person is subsequently shown, paradoxically, to be a moment that is
incorporated into Christ’s kingly glory.
With this (very religious) reading of the coronation the stripping of the king is a the simplest level a facsimile of the stripping of Christ. The message being that Charles is a true Christian king like the King of kings from whom he takes is authority. But it is also a moment of solidarity between Charles and those of us who don’t have the objects of kingship to wear and hold. It’s a moment where we see ourselves in Charles and in that way participate in his kingship ourselves. All of which is to say that my religious reading is against Thackeray. The kingly moments, which are the majority of the coronation, where Charles has his aids are more true than his stripped back moment. The moment in his shirt is to enable those of us without the aids beside us to participate better in identit and imagination with his kingship.
So I don’t agree that the strongest rulers are without marks and aids of kingship. But Christian kings are not “other” to their people – over against them like
Roman emperors – but elevate their people with their own elevation.
All this is religious theory of course. It’s a factual question whether Thackeray’s observation is more pertinent to this king.
The Coronation seems to go to extremes in both directions. In the one hand there is a much higher degree of pomp, circumstance and bling than at (probably) the inauguration of any other head of state. However it also requires a higher level of abasement… which other head of state is required to get down on his knees in his undershirt to assume office? I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing.
Your comment is an interesting one that it makes references to comparable ceremonies. Fairly recently there were two similar ceremonies, the ones for the new kings of Spain and the Netherlands. Both of those seemed to have been done in a much simpler style. (It is interesting that there were no references to those ceremonies in any newspaper articles in the run-up or the aftermath of the coronation (if there were any, then I missed them).
For all the little changes compared to the 1953 coronation, it was a very backward-looking ceremony. It was a missed opportunity.
On the subject of the magnificence or otherwise of those who hold positions of high authority (which probably applies as much to the religious leaders in the ceremony as to the king), I recall being taken by my godparents to see the queen being driven through Southampton when I was very young.
Having no doubt seen impressive pictures in story books, I thought that queens and kings were special people, set apart from the rest of us, who were about 10 feet tall, enrobed in magnificent gowns and crowns and conveyed around in carriages.
Imagine my disappointment at seeing an ordinary little woman being driving along in a car.
She didn’t seem very different from anyone else and I couldn’t really understand what made her queen.
Not sure that my opinion has changed that much since, really…..
Good call on the Latin. It doesn’t say “Ecce hominem,” (which would be a perfectly fine thing to say), so why should you say “ecce regem”? So, having chosen to say “ecce homo”, (another perfectly fine thing to say), then “ecce rex” is the perfect completion.
“Ecce” is an interjection, like for example, “wow”. It is not the imperative of a transitive verb, which the usual translation “behold” suggests it might be. A more literal word for “behold”, like “videte”, which is a verb, would require you to say “videte hominem, etc.” No choice, in that case.