WHY do we’d like a King? Why does he need so many castles? Why do we now have all these ostentatious ceremonial events? That is the twenty first century, in any case, and most of the rituals date again a whole lot of years. Isn’t it time to maneuver on?
My reply to that query begins with my grandfather, who was 19 when Queen Victoria died. At the moment there have been horse-drawn trams in just a few streets of his city. He was 30 earlier than his store had a phone. At 32 he noticed mates go to combat the Nice Warfare, and lots of didn’t return.
My father gave him his first experience in a automotive in 1932. He by no means had one himself. He would have been round 44 when he heard his first radio broadcast from the BBC. At 54 he lived by the 12 months of the three kings: George V, Edward VIII and George VI (1936).
As a 57-year-old half of his workers went off to combat within the Second World Warfare. Some had been killed, two on the Arctic convoys.
It wasn’t till he was 67 that he was capable of watch his first TV programme when it arrived within the Midlands in 1949. He lived simply lengthy sufficient to see the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953.
They had been the main occasions of his life: a gradual crawl from nineteenth century drudgery and fundamental dwelling in direction of a extra civilised life with electrical fireplace, radio, single-channel TV, and a tiny fridge.
Since then the tempo of life has elevated exponentially. I’ve a selection of 500 TV channels and a whole lot of radio broadcasts. My cellphone has lengthy since misplaced its wires and dial, and I can summon up the world on its miniature display screen. My laptop computer pc can perform advanced duties in fractions of a second.
(Two private examples of the best way our lives are each extra advanced and extra irritating: my pc software program directions, after they had been nonetheless in printed kind, ran to greater than 1,000 pages. My gadget-laden automotive, new in 2015, got here with a 500-page handbook which on its first web page says you need to learn all of it earlier than driving.)
Fridges at the moment are ‘clever’. New fashions of every part come out each week. We’re urged to replace, improve, pre-order. Cheques are vanishing, bank cards going the identical means. Our telephones are taking on working our lives, monitoring our well being, checking our financial institution steadiness, counting our steps, and holding extra knowledge about us than our mind.
For this reason we’d like a King. For this reason we hold, for instance, the Royal Firm of Archers, the sovereign’s bodyguard in Scotland, shaped in 1676, and the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London, put in by Henry VIII. For this reason we’d like an Earl Marshal, a title that has been in use since 1386, and a Lord Nice Chamberlain, courting from William the Conqueror’s time. The Garter King of Arms proclaimed our new King in a ceremony going again to 1415. (He’s paid £49.07 a 12 months for his hassle.)
For this reason we faithfully protect our historical buildings equivalent to Holyrood Abbey (1128), St Giles’ Cathedral (1124), Westminster Corridor (1097), and Westminster Abbey (1065).
Our nation, whether it is to outlive, should be anachronistic. The world is altering too shortly. We should keep true to a core that’s immutable, unalterable, safely anchored in a thousand years of historical past.
We’d like the ceremonies, the castles, the processions, the Foot Guards of the Family Division of their scarlet tunics and bearskins, the Gold State Coach, and (subsequent 12 months) the coronation of King Charles III.
Lengthy reside the King.
