At midday on Saturday, Charles Windsor ceased to be a human being. As, hidden by a screen, anointing oil marked his breast, head and hands, he was invisibly and entirely transformed. Clad in the vestments of a cleric, crowned as a monarch, blessed as a living symbol of the Divine, he is the last of his kind. For 10,000 years priest-kings, the Rex Nemorensis, representing men to gods and gods to men, preserved in death and life the health of their people and the bounty of their land. And then, in three centuries, they all but disappeared. Where kingship endured modernity, it did so mutilated, humanised, profane. Only in the British Crown is the ancient inheritance preserved entire: a shard of Babylon or El-Ugarit on the banks of the Thames. When Charles emerged, anointed, from behind that screen, he was returning from somewhere in the deep past.
And yet it was the future once. The radical historian Christopher Hill, who died 20 years ago, once recalled that he discovered his great scholarly passion – the blood-soaked, turbulent 17th century – because he was told it was the best thing that ever happened to Britain. For the Whig historians he read growing up, the 1600s were almost luridly providential. First Oliver Cromwell defended parliament against royal absolutism; then, as the commonwealth aged to tyranny in turn, Charles II, the merry monarch, reconciled a free people to a chastened crown. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 completed a neat constitutional hat-trick: with the extirpation of the Catholic James II from the throne, an ideal political order was not so much built as revealed. Parliamentary government, reformed religion, and a monarchy absolute in principle while hamstrung in practice: the ensuing settlement, was, wrote Lord Acton, “the greatest thing done by the English nation”. The sense was, Hill recalled, that Britain was waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
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