Expect some of the most archaic ritual, such as that requiring assorted nobles to assert their right to render service to the monarch in a “court of claims”, to be reduced or quietly dropped. Peers will have less of a role, a nod to the fact that most – though, incredibly, not all – of the hereditary peers lost their seats in the House of Lords under the last Labour government. There will be more explicit recognition that this is a kingdom made up of several nations, reflecting the devolution settlements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that were still decades away in 1953. The same will be true of some of the other ceremonial tweaks. This pluralism clearly stems from a conviction of the king’s, but it is also – like the relatively pared-down pageantry – a recognition of reality.

The coronation of King Charles will be more inclusive than the last, with representatives of other creeds present – even if he will vow to be Defender of the Faith, namely Protestantism, rather than the more ecumenical “defender of faith” as he once suggested was his preference. Lots of people will watch an Anglican service on television this weekend, but fewer than 2% attend one regularly. Less than half of the population of England and Wales, a mere 46.2%, identify as Christian, according to the 2021 census – and 37.2% say they have no religion at all. Yet by 1992 a survey could find not a single respondent who was even aware, unbidden, that the monarchy had a religious dimension at all.Ĭharles inherits a realm in which not merely belief in the divine right of kings has faded, but belief itself. Pollsters found that 34% of 1950s Britons believed Elizabeth had been placed on the throne by the hand of God. The coronation would have been understood by the generation of 1953 as a religious event, and not only because it took place in Westminster Abbey. Photograph: APĪnother change is so profound, we barely notice it.

Queen Elizabeth II is crowned at Westminster Abbey, 2 June 1953. The idea that a king would one day be asked to account for, and apologise for, the crimes of empire, including the crown’s profiting from slavery, would have seemed as remote a prospect, and as unimaginable, as a tweet.

It will also be because, as the scholars at UCL put it, “the UK no longer has the capacity to mount anything like spectacle” that installed his mother.Īs for “the great imperial family”, in 1953 few were asking tough questions about what Britain had done in the name of empire instead, the concern of the hour was how Britain had begun to lose it. If this weekend’s ceremonies are more modest than those of 70 years ago, that will only be partly down to the new king’s reported preference for a more modern, slimmed-down monarchy. As the Constitution Unit at University College London put it in a recent paper, the UK “still has an international monarchy, with the king being head of state of 14 other countries” but “it is no longer a major international power”. Today the headcount of the UK armed forces has shrunk to fewer than 150,000. More than 40,000 troops took part in Elizabeth’s coronation – drawn from a military that numbered more than 850,000 – with 24 military bands, and a naval review at Spithead involving 190 ships. True, the country had been drained by the war against fascism but Britain remained a military power of serious heft. In 1953, India was only six years into its newly won independence and the British empire still reached across the globe. Not long before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, she famously dedicated herself to a life of service to the “ great imperial family to which we all belong”. The changes wrought in Britain are especially sharp.

2nd and charles survey