Coronation Chicken?
Feast or Phobia
Hello and welcome once again to the Word Emporium! Whether I will or not, my home nation will have yet another historical, epoch making event tomorrow. Charles will be Crowned King and officially Reign as Charles III. This may not appeal to me personally: yet I know already it will be watched worldwide. I will be actually watching the Ballet Cinderella live in Bahrain with the music of Prokofiev instead.
Now the Anglo speaking audience will of course have realised that today’s title is a duplatantente. It has two meanings. Let me explain both.
Firstly Coronation Chicken is indeed a Chicken dish that is a curious mix of Indian curry spices, mayonnaise or creme fraiche (if your a Champagne Socialist living in Islington living as far away from working class oiks as possible) and cooked Chicken whole or in pieces. This idea seemingly bubbling up in Britain for Queen Elizabeth's II Coronation in 1953 but with possible antecedents for her father and perhaps even as far back as Queen Victoria.
Remarkable dish in one way as many of my overseas readers will not know or realise that Britain did not end wartime rationing where the Government controlled their subjects food purchases and intake directly ( introduced in late December 1939 due to WW2) and for meat was still in effect in Britain until after the Queens Coronation sometime in 1954.
Coronation chicken has that austerity feel about it to me: trying to be slightly spicy and exotic but created as cheaply, as mildly, as possible. A truly British attitude to food even without austerity some cynics might still today argue!
It is ok. I like it on occasion in a sandwich or a baguette. Even rarely as a chicken breast with salad dressed accompaniment. Will not be eating this weekend or anytime soon.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230430-coronation-chicken-the-story-behind-the-royal-dish
Yet my readers and friends will have seen through my feint. They know I am really talking about my desire to avoid what is going to be tomorrows (May 6th 2023) Coronation of Charles III as the King of England, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The chicken part is colloquial: a chicken is someone scared of facing up to a reality. Be that a schoolyard bully, an idea, a sporting challenge or as in this case a stupid tradition well past its sell by date. In my opinion!
But wait!
I am going to play Devils advocate against myself here! Can I justify the Monarchy? Just for a change can I see the good it might be or represent in today’s Britain? Instead of thinking about why and how it could be replaced ( notice both those words. I cannot countenance the why without the consequential and substantive replacement being posited. I am not, nor will I advocate tearing down without the new construction planned and ready to be put to work).
I am not a revolutionary unless it cannot be avoided. In this case in Britain today I would argue no revolutionary necessity exists.
I think that the continuity, the simple fact that England and then Britain has had such an Institution for well over a thousand years, for good and bad, is something worth pausing over. It is not as if this Monarchy has been set in aspic or cast in adamantine. It has changed. It has adapted. It was even replaced for awhile and then reinstated. It has in fact evolved.
Sometimes willingly and as a result of practical considerations such as in the epoch of William and Mary’s Settlement in the late 17th Century or the Parliament Act of 1911 making explicit the Supremacy of the House of Commons as legislature in our bizarrely still unwritten Constitution.
Sometimes by external coercive force as King John’s hand forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 or Charles 1st losing his head on a Westminster Scaffold in 1649. Throughout the centuries however as Voltaire remarked about the English who seem to have found a way to have liberty and a Parliament whilst simultaneously bending their knee to God in a national Church and to a Monarch in his Court.
The English are the only people upon earth who have been able to prescribe limits to the power of kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrained from committing evil……
‘Letters concerning the English Nation’ No 8 circa 1733
The British Monarchy has a timeless quality as an Institution (in terms of our human experience). It is not the particular person who holds the office that matters rather it is the fact it continues to exists at all. Perhaps Edmund Burke is apt to ponder in this regard. The Constitution is not this generations to dissolve or repeal. It is not the rationalist contract theory that is important in Britain’s Constitution. Rather, in oppositional relief to the French Rousseau, the British Constitution Burke argues is an amalgam of inherited traditions handed on from generation to generation. This is the strength. This is the heart of Monarchy perhaps still today in the 21st century: tradition. It links the past, the present and the future. I do see the value in that really! I betray a certain conservative, traditionalist heartbeat of my own in doing so. (Reflections on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke)
Above party political affiliation. The Monarchy in todays Britain plays no explicit role in politics or the formation of policy and laws. It is retained as a symbol of power that is beyond the grubby realm of political parties. They use that power, if they have a majority consent of the people, as a matter of temporal polity. The Monarchy and the particular Monarch sit above that greasy beam like a bouquet adorning the tip of a Maypole. Over seeing the merry dance without being a part of it. Elizabeth II did this, I admit, admirably.
For me it boils down to keeping such an institution just posited in a different way. I am a intellectual child of the American Revolution. Of the Constitutional Republic with a diffusion of powers and a Constitution that is not simply a human contractual theory posited on a parchment document: but based on a higher God/Deity that powers derive from.
A clever device I knew but have never appreciated before. Yet now see that philosophical idea has great merit. Indeed, you might argue that the Monarchy plays an analogous role in the British Constitution: hence its continuing value to its many intelligent advocates.
It is why I cannot fathom the modern day American Democrat Party refusing to acknowledge the religious principle inherent in their Constitution. Not as a force to coerce belief: but as a guarantor above party affiliation. Allowing space for practical freedom of conscience for all citizens governed by that Constitution.
The King’s own Royal Standard that guards both the creation of the laws and their application states ‘Dieu et mon droit’. Both the American Republican ideas and the British pragmatic adherence to Monarchial traditions, spring from this Isle. I prefer the former. Yet even I see the worth of the latter and would not suffer its replacement by anything but a peaceful, consensual transfer of Institutional power.
I will not be found amongst the groups holding banners saying “Not my King”. I am not interested in a British Revolution similar to the American one. It is simply not required. We have been bequeathed all the tools required to affect such a change if we so desired. My fellow countryman and women at the moment do not want to. The Monarchy still meets our national characteristic; apathy about institutions that if not broken, need no fixing.
Indeed the greatest danger to the monarchy is not my kind of folk I would argue now. It is and will be the ill defined woke zeitgeist with its elitist views on the morality that must be adhered too and necessarily enforced upon us for our greater good if needs be.
If the new Monarch were to go against this elite that runs the other institutions of Britain (BBC, Civil service, economic leaders and most powerful of all: Gary “ Captain Blood” Lineker!) Then, who knows?
Will Charles speak against such a cult? I kind of hope he does! It is fundamentally illiberal and autocratic. A clash between them could give my republicanism a severe test: as I trade off far left hokery pokery wokery with my natural antipathy towards Monarchy? How would I choose?
However, I will not be watching the stuff tomorrow. I have better things to do with my time. Like reading a book. Listening to music. Going to the Souq and seeing if I can get lost amongst the spices, incense, colourful clothes and interminable rows of plastic toys from China and then going to the Ballet to see a dance based on a land of make believe: Fairy God Mothers and Princes and pomp………
Blessings to all. Feel free to comment below and let us know your thoughts from wherever you are from or whatever perspectives. All are welcome and will be read with interest!
Yours,
Syre Byrd