What struck me first was how religious the ceremony was – conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury and entirely framed in the language of the church. An Anglo-Saxon time traveller would have felt perfectly at home with the core of the service – though back then, of course, it was conducted in Latin, with the coupling of royal law with ‘the law of god’.
But I had a lingering sense of a cognitive dissonance (as the psychoanalysts call it). Britain is now, we are told, among the world’s least religious societies. In a time of crisis, can an archaic religious service still express the central constitutional fact of our body politic? The ceremony spoke to many of the continuity of our past, but it was also about nostalgia, class and deference, compounded by the ill-judged idea that we should swear allegiance in front of our TV sets.
This story is from the July 2023 edition of BBC History UK.
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This story is from the July 2023 edition of BBC History UK.
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