The Head that Wears the Crown
Ben Crocker, CSS research fellow in music studies, on why we still celebrate the coronation ritual.
An oft-misquoted line in Henry IV Part 2 has made its way into common parlance: “heavy is the head that bears the crown.” We attribute it to Shakespeare, but the play’s actual line reads “uneasy is the head that wears the crown.” We modern literary mortals are arrogant enough to believe that Shakespeare needs refining, and we’ve enlivened his metaphor by linking the crown’s physical weight to leadership’s mental burden. I remember hearing the line frequently when working at a Sydney boarding school—one founded by King William IV in 1832. “Heavy is the head” was a common refrain used to remind each other not to trouble too much about the headmaster’s odd missteps. The burden of leadership, we needed reminding, is an awful one to take up. We ought to give due grace to the sovereign who is willing to shed his human fallibility and deploy Godly powers in public service.
In the third Carolean era, we stare up at the throne and see a man in Charles III publicly known and obviously mortal. The King’s long antecedent trail of human failures gives us pause: why do we in Britain and the Commonwealth still celebrate the coronation ritual’s divine mysticism?
When Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8th of last year, many of the faculty and staff of Common Sense Society were gathered at Bowood House in Wiltshire for our Britannia Fellowship. At that evening’s formal dinner, Marion Smith led a motion of condolence to our British friends, and John O’Sullivan gave a toast in remembrance of Elizabeth’s long life of service. Anthony Daniels and I agreed on feeling a deep sadness at her passing. I remember that afternoon well. Before dinner, CSS—UK director Emma Webb offered some insightful remarks on monarchy’s virtues. As much as monarchy has the outward appearance of privilege and inevitability, she reminded us, the experience for the monarch himself is one of vulnerability and isolation. Monarchy is still a voluntary occupation. Notwithstanding the overwhelming social and moral obligation the Prince of Wales faces to succeed, he must choose to do so. To be monarch is to step willingly into unending servitude. The 4 1/2 pound weight of St. Edward’s Crown can only ever be a shallow metaphor for the burden of a soul sacrificed by its irreversible fusion to the state itself.
This points us to the monarchy’s paradoxical brilliance: it is the ultimate expression of custom beneficially constraining free will. How many thousands of times did Charles wish he had been born outside of dynastic obligation? We know he was desperately hurt by an early familial estrangement. His mother, as a young queen, never gave him the attention he needed. He hated the manly obligations his boarding school, Gordonstoun, placed on him. His eccentricity and love of the arts made him too peculiar a character to progress conventionally through royal life. And we know of the awful anguish and terrible personal decisions that flowed from his family’s interference in his love life. What should, for any normal person, have been a simple case of marrying the right woman at the right time, turned into a decades-long saga, settled only in the King’s twilight years.
Despite all the incentives in the world to act selfishly and step away from his predestined life, the force of royal obligation has kept Charles in check. Whatever we think of him and his predilections, his coronation after seventy-four years in waiting has reinforced for us monarchic life’s highest virtue: voluntary service.
Royal obligation is memetic. In it, visibility combines with inherent historical force to transmit a mode of living that prioritizes obligation to others, while remaining—at the first and the last—dependent on the exercise of the individual’s free will. We see how powerful this memetic force is when we remember the disgust the British public felt upon the 1936 abdication of Charles’s great uncle, Edward VIII. Their outrage had less to do with his reasons for abdicating (the scandal of marrying an American divorcee), and more to do with his fundamental failure to accept the monarchical burden. Edward, in the end, was too weak to bear both the crown and his own personal afflictions.
In contrast, George VI, Edward’s brother, was willing to accept the burden of service despite his severe limitations. Crowned at the dawn of the broadcast era, it was only with the help of Australian therapist Lionel Logue that he overcame a crippling speech impediment. George reigned during the Second World War and his willingness to place his country’s interest before his own earned him a heroic élan amongst the public. He overcame his difficulty in speaking and famously remained in London throughout the War, refusing to abandon his people even when Buckingham Palace itself was bombed. Elizabeth, his daughter, joined in the celebrations at War’s end, sneaking out of the palace to dance with the public, alongside her sister Margaret.
King George’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, believed that the crown’s heavy burden had sent her husband to an early grave. She never forgave Edward for abdicating his duties. Perhaps there was something to this: Edward lived twenty years longer than his brother George. But then again, Elizabeth II, George’s daughter, outlived them both by a further twenty years yet.
Elizabeth seemed born for the task of carrying monarchic leadership. Her seeming ease in the role and her rule’s uncommon longevity fused her person to the crown with unusual force. Yet her burial ritual reminded us that even after a seventy-year reign, the Queen bore her burden as a mere mortal. The Lord Chamberlain, her most senior servant, snapped his wand of office before her coffin was lowered into the crypt at St. George’s Chapel. This “breaking” of the objects of office, symbolizes the Sovereign’s release from his or her own sovereignty. It is not until after death that the soul is released from the burden of duty.
Most Western societies have a similar external function that displays through reverence and ritual the outward manifestation of sovereignty, but there is a world of difference between that exercise in a constitutional monarchy and in a constitutional republic. Monarchy begets inescapable duty and this is difficult to recapture in republicanism. Perhaps only in America has it succeeded. America however, will have to exist for a thousand years longer in its current constitutional arrangements to see if the sovereignty republicanism exercises can withstand the pressures monarchy has—albeit under greatly varying circumstances—for the past millennium in England.
Thomas Hobbes argued that society could only gain the requisite peace and order required to endure when a single individual embodied the state’s sovereignty. The famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan shows the monarch as a leviathan and the literal “Head of State.” The people may make up the state’s body, but the head that bears the crown must be necessarily—and absolutely—above his subjects.
Charles bears his crown at a time when the currents of popular sentiment seek to sweep away the last vestiges of monarchy’s ancient wisdom. Today’s world is one of radical liberalism, where man is master of his own destiny, seemingly hostage to nothing but his own whim and fancy. The high, solemn duty derived from aristocratic virtue and perpetuated by the monarchic paradigm seems to be headed for extinction. In the 21st century, Western men have used their apparent superior powers of reason to decide, as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted, that “their whole destiny is in [their own] hands.”
There is plentiful talk in Britain and all her realms that the mere sight of the crown should inspire revolt against the idea of monarchy—its debauched excesses, its antiquated exclusivity, and its unenlightened remnants of popular mysticism. But at its very heart, in the embodiment of the sovereign King himself, monarchy speaks to us with a more solemn truth than we often care to admit. Monarchy tells us that we cannot escape who we are. Its act of prescription, today largely benign in social execution, communicates the inescapability of our own lives, and the obligation one has to meet with this challenge in service, where we might rather wish selfishly to run away.
Since our dawn, mankind has struggled with this idea. The Egyptians believed unseen forces controlled men from the time of their birth. The Greeks personified fate and destiny as the Moirai: the three godly sisters Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos ensured every human being would live out his destiny as assigned by the laws of the universe. In the Christian tradition, even Christ himself, the greatest of men and the son of God, was unable to escape his crucifixion.
Lest I be accused of overreach in placing Charles next to Christ, let me qualify by saying that no such personal comparison is deserved. But insofar as Britain is a Christian nation, and insofar as Christianity has had more to offer politics than all the great philosophers from Plato to the present combined, there is a distinctly Christian element to the ideal towards which monarchy strives.
This Christian ideal, that of servant-hearted leadership, was crystalised in the collect the Archbishop of Canterbury prayed during the coronation service at Westminster:
Look with favour upon thy servant Charles our King, and bestow upon him such gifts of wisdom and love that we and all thy people may live in peace and prosperity and in loving service one to another.
The British monarchy will forever have its share of critics. They will decry its inordinate wealth while condemning the sins and indulgences of its sons and daughters. They will point out its long train of abuses and usurpations. But critics will never be able to erase the monarchic virtue of service itself. That in our democratic age, men may still carry this ancient burden is a good thing. We wish King Charles III the best of health, as he struggles in self-sacrifice to bear the weight of the crown, and the lifelong service for which it stands.
God Save the King rings out as King Charles III exits Westminster Abbey with orb, scepter, and crown. The King carries approximately twelve pounds of regalia, in addition to his heavy robes and train.