Royal ceremonies justify the unjustifiable: A medieval historian’s view on the Platinum Jubilee
Today commemorates the 70th year of the reign of Elizabeth II, and marks exactly 69 years since she was crowned and anointed queen in a ceremony in Westminster Abbey. The origins of the anointing ceremony go back over a thousand years, to King Pippin and Queen Bertrada in Francia in 751. Pippin was a usurper, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, and his reign represented a disruptive regime change. Pippin started out as a powerful magnate, so powerful he was able to supersede the previous Merovingian dynasty of kings. The religious ceremony in which he and his wife established their dynasty was designed to justify this new, tentative rule with an appeal to the divine. And it worked. The invention of the anointing ceremony was an innovative feat of monarchical ideology that was soon imitated by rulers across the channel and has lasted until this day as a central pillar of monarchy in Britain.
Though the most powerful man in the kingdom, Pippin was not a king until he was made one by his subjects. But this is true for all royalty in history. From the earliest developments in Christian monarchy, royal ceremonies and celebrations have performed one main function: to justify power that is otherwise unjustifiable. Monarchy is a political system that relies on a collective social belief that one person is more important, more special, more powerful than everyone else. That their offspring, by the random virtue of their birth into a certain family, will also be special. It takes a strong ideology to maintain this system. Monarchs perch on top of a pedestal built out of pomp, ceremony, symbols, traditions, and appeals to higher powers.
Granted, the constitutional monarchy of modern Britain is a very different political system to the absolute power of the Carolingians. And the royal influence of Queen Elizabeth II is paradoxically both more limited and more far-reaching than that of the kings and queens of early medieval Mercia and Wessex who adopted and developed the Carolingian anointing ceremony. While the modern British monarchy arguably has only nominal influence in British politics, it does retain religious, ideological and political global influence, especially though the so-called ‘commonwealth of Nations’ and in territories violently colonised by Britain. The modern royal family also retains access to vast wealth, property and a monopoly on ill-gotten material culture.
I am certain that if I proposed a new political system based on a randomly-selected family gaining disproportionate wealth and influence on a global scale, most people would object strongly to this idea. Even more so if the family had a centuries-old history of colonial violence, not to mention a prominent member recently implicated in sex-trafficking. And yet, this is the reality of British monarchy. And it is widely considered justifiable. Why? Because of royal ideology.
To celebrate 70 years of the unjustifiable, we have to believe that monarchy is an inescapable institution. This relies on creating an ideology that appeals to something higher and longer-lasting than one woman. Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony was the culmination of over a thousand years of divinely-sanctioned royal power, and even included some liturgy first written for the coronation of Queen Judith, the great-great-granddaughter of Pippin, upon her marriage to King Æthelwulf of Wessex in 856. Without a belief in divine will, or at least in the power of rituals and traditions, a coronation ceremony is just a fancy hat and the application of grease to the forehead.
Jubilees are a comparatively recent invention compared to coronations. The first royal Jubilee in British history celebrated the beginning of the 50th year of the reign of George III in 1809. That occasion was much more subdued than the all-encompassing national celebrations that now accompany jubilees. There was certainly no 1809 equivalent of the late-stage capitalist royal memorabilia nightmare of corgi cakes, supermarket royal gnomes and ‘Heinz salad queen’ — though there was a commemorative jug.
A divinely-appointed monarch at the head of a thousand-year-old institution should surely be able to convince people of her family’s legitimacy without the need for quite so much commemorative corgi merchandise. Constant appeals to the queen’s personal virtues, dignity and work ethic, whether justifiable compliments or not, surely undermine the idea of a hereditary monarchy in which the monarch is chosen purely through accident of birth. If someone can be ‘good at it’, that undermines monarchy as a hereditary system.
So what do I make of this weekend’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations as a historian? While many anti-monarchists may lament that they have to endure such a sycophantic celebration of royalty this weekend, I think another perspective is possible. Through my research on early medieval royal ceremonies, I have identified many occasions on which, like in the coronation of Pippin and Bertrada in 751, royal ceremonies have been enacted not to demonstrate power, but in a desperate attempt to shore it up. The particularly desperate flag-waving fanaticism of the Platinum Jubilee is a very shaky foundation for the continuation of something so unjustifiable.
Subscribe to my newsletter: https://florencehrs.substack.com/subscribe