Charles, Karl and all these things Carolean
In the run-up to the coronation of His
Majesty King Charles III, a couple of the news items occupying the attention of the mass media caught my attention.
There was the idea of replacing the historic, ‘Homage of the Peers’ with a ‘Homage of the People’.
This drew cries of foul from various quarters, and seems to have ended in a last-minute change of wording of the Order of Service for the Coronation.
Am I strange, or do some people go to extraordinary lengths to find things about which to feel outraged?
How dare we extend an invitation to people – if they wish, and only if they wish – to become more active participants in the service, by saying a few words in the comfort of their homes, or wherever they happened to be watching the event?
What is the world coming to?
I can’t help feeling that, with a slightly different marketing strategy, things might have been very differently received.
Had the initiative been instead branded as the, ‘Nobility of the People’, many of the same mouthpieces which voiced such indignation might have been ardent suppor ters.
Others voiced concerns, before the coronation, about the fact that it is – at its heart – a religious service; indeed, specifically a Church of England service, notwithstanding innovations introduced this time round specifically to involve people of many different religions during the service.
As far as I could see, there was no great consternation expressed by those commentators a few days before the coronation when it was reported, from across the Atlantic, that this year’s Met Ball had paid homage to a dead man.
This man’s contribution to global wellbeing was to design some obscenelyexpensive clothes – if ‘clothes’ is the correct word to use for some of them.
Nobody seems to mind at all about the homage paid to someone with so little going on in his head that he thought it a good idea to leave a reported one hundred and fifty million (dollars, I presume) to a cat.
Nor did I hear of anyone lamenting about the Met Ball’s being a throw-back to Ancient Egypt’s worship of cats.
A Coronation Reflection
Can you really expect us to endorse
A man only trained for seventy-four years?
Rather elect a tyrant for years of remorse -
Or a business-backed politician who stokes up fears?
Like his mother and grandfather, King Charles makes a vow:
Each day of his life, his task is to serve;
And put seven decades into what he does now -
Nor may he fail in sinew or nerve.
A system not perfect, but better than most:
Generation after generation, silent rulers we boast -
Each trained in our history; schooled coast to coast.
JAY FLYNN Moneyrow Green
Holypor t