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.
Bu hikaye BBC History UK dergisinin July 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye BBC History UK dergisinin July 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
The King They Couldn't Kill -Want to know why Henry VII is remembered as an intensely suspicious king, wracked by paranoia? The answer, writes Nathen Amin, lies in his death-defying rise to power
Henry’s wary nature is typically attributed to his shaky claim to the throne. The first Tudor monarch was unable to escape the taunt that he was a usurper with no right to call himself king. In fact, his renowned paranoia was the inevitable consequence of a traumatic youth – a trait ingrained long before he harboured ambitions to wear a crown. If we delve deeper into Henry’s background, we can draw a fuller picture of one of our most circumspect of monarchs – one that might elicit sympathy for a long misunderstood king.
The Spy Who Hoodwinked Hitler - Dummy tanks at El Alamein. Bogus generals in Algiers. Sham armies on D-Day. All were ruses masterminded by Dudley Clarke. Robert Hutton tells the story of the British soldier who made an art form of duping the Nazis
Examining the reconnaissance photos, Behrendt was convinced that the Allies weren’t in any hurry. They were constructing some kind of pipeline towards the southern end of their line, probably to carry water, which was barely halfway completed. There were supply dumps appearing in the south as well – always a telltale clue about where an attack would come. True, a large number of trucks were parked at the northern end of the line, about 25 miles back from the front, but they hadn’t moved for weeks.
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It’s election night 1997, and Jeremy Paxman is grilling Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson.
