'The Coronation is utterly and absolutely explicitly Christian' | Dr David Starkey

[Music] thank you GB News website alleges that the order of service for King Charles's coronation has been delayed because of disagreements between him and the church about faith elements of the service as a self-proclaimed atheist David would you describe the coronation as an explicitly Christian service the coronation is utterly and absolutely explicitly Christian in the sense of the body of the service the uh the Notions of anointing well the Notions of anointing which is the heart of all of this not even specifically Christian the the Old Testament they go back to the anointing by the prophet Samuel of the first king of the Israelites um that uh the first king of the Jews Saul again you know the great Anthem that will be sung after the king's anointing uh with the with the music by Handel zadop the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King and and this element unit is absolutely embedded at the heart of the coronation service it's then of course adapted with the reformation and more particularly with the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to a specifically Protestant service but so as we really begin Calvin correctly at looking at the coronation in context the correlation is really two things it's a service of consecration of a monarch who at least technically is divinely ordained the DG by the grace of God the defender of the faith vidi defense law but the coronation begins with something else it's not just consecration it's contract it begins with the swearing of Oaths which are about the government of the country and particularly the government of the country according to the laws have passed in Parliament so it's these two elements okay and if we're now living in a Multicultural multi-faith Society what's wrong with faithful leaders of other faiths saying prayers as part of this service to make it more inclusive in fact if you go back to the the last coronation a very long time ago into a very different world uh the world of 1953 and the late her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II there was indeed a role for the moderator of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland who presents a Bible um obviously an intensely biblical form of Christianity in in Scotland with presbyterianism being the official religion of Scotland and by the way of course what we do forget here um in the anglo-centric world of England that in Scotland the King has got a different religion or a different variety of Christianity he is a presbyterian and however the Protestant establishment in England is there the Church of England but what I think you will find Calvin is that people of other faiths particularly I think Islam and the Roman Catholic Church a very happy for the establishment of religion in England because unlike virtually every other country it gives religion an official status within politics and now you began by saying I'm an atheist you are of course right but um when I'm teasing people of Faith like you I explain very clearly I am a very high Church atheist I believe in the importance of ceremony I believe in the importance of if you like what the wonderful Edmond book calls the decent Draper is the decent draperies of ceremony that hang and and Allegiance and passion and love that hang over the brutal realities of power now it's very easy to mock them but I think they matter and they matter profoundly the fact that the king properly understood is the national symbol is one of the central reasons that England Britain the British Empire avoided the horrors of political division between extreme right and extreme left of the early 20th century it's why contrary to what everybody says English nationalism is such a gentle thing in contrast you know with the furthest of Scottish nationalists or Irish nationalists I mean we've seen uh you know the the the the the the nature of nationalism in Scotland we all know about the horrors of the very lightly disguised by the by The Good Friday agreement England is different because in traditionally the passions of the state have not been identified with nationhood with Flags uh with with marching up and down of soldiers in modern dress it's this faintly ruritanian thing of monarchy and it's gentle and it's civilized and it historically rooted and it's of course this is where I think the king is getting it terribly wrong whereas advisors are getting it terribly wrong it's self-consciously not modern this constant chapter of modernization the words modern and monarchy do you really require much intelligence to realize that modern and monarchy don't go together that the monarchy itself is a statement of burkian historical continuity I mean I really do not understand what the the it's not as though the king is short of advice you may actually have too much advice he's the only King to have had joint private secretaries you have sir Clive alderton and Sir Edward young and are they talking against each other are they a kind of Gilbert and Sullivan chorus are they a duet who is seriously advising him it's a good point you can either have modernization or monarchy not necessarily both but I'm interested in the point you raised about the king changing denomination as he crosses over from England to Scotland to reflect the people but it because it also works the other way around doesn't it in that the faith of the king reflects the people but the faith of the people reflects the king no no no no because the king or queen of England has been Christian since the 7th Century a mission that began in the sixth Century with King alphabet of Kent when he converted he brought the country with him now King Henry VII made political decisions which resulted in Elizabeth the first being excommunicated by Rome but she when she was excommunicated she took the country with her thus England became Protestant as a result so our faith as a nation has always reflected that of our sovereign you are so ignorant on the contrary what happens what happens in 1689 is that the English you know the English of a very slow Wicked people it's one of the reasons why we've been politically so successful we're not febrile and intelligent like the French there's a kind of subterranean quality about the British mind and you are right that from the Reformation onwards because of the thing called The Royal Supremacy with every new Reign you had a different variety of Christianity you went into kind of middle way with Elizabeth you continue the only King who actually kept things as they were bizarrely was James VI of Scotland when he came to England Charles the first takes things uh in a much more ritualized and ceremonialized Direction Cromwell who is really King rips things into a form of extreme congregationalism Charles II back in James II tries to take us back to Catholicism at which point in 1618 9 what happens Calvin is the complete reversal of what you said the English decide with the Glorious Revolution of 1689 that rather than the koyos Reggio EOS religio who is the rule there is the religion in other words as you said that the people have the religion of the king what we decided in 1689 was a novel principle the king would have the religion of the people that's what happens and this is why we've again escaped so many horrors of the early modern period that that religion in England as was brought firmly under the control of the state now and this is called erastianism and I think it's a jolly good thing and imagine if the Church of England were actually able to govern itself properly can you imagine the catastrophe of all you warring lot I mean priests have no sense of proportion about religion they get wildly excited about them as tiny things whereas if you leave it to an essentially not very caring not very believing assembly called Parliament to carry the final say do you know what you get a degree of Common Sense see in other words I am being really nautical I don't know about it I'm adopting the view of religion uh which which you know Edward given uh in in his description of ancient Rome does and what he says and I think it's something we need to bear in mind religion does matter but it's properly it's really important and particularly in this age of multiple faiths it's really important that we understand how and why and what Gibbon says is this in the Roman Empire the philosophers thought that all religions were equally false the people thought that all religions were equally true and the politicians thought that like me that all religions were equally useful and it is human life as I said needs ceremony the and there was this extraordinary realization by the very wise Souls who ran the monarchy a hundred years ago that monarchy is Central in that provision of ceremony it's why the heart of London is rebuilt it's why the coronations of the first Decades of the 20th century when there were two in very short succession um In 1902 and again uh in in 1911 because of the very short reign of of Edward VII those coronations set the model for the magnificence for the ceremony for the rehearsal for the Perfection for that ceremony that we British now do so well but didn't used to and you know what it coincides with the introduction of parliamentary democracy the the formlessness of government that you get with a large-scale democracy it Demands a focus on an individual and it demands a notion of ceremony and you see what happens when there isn't a proper individual for things to focus on in for example the terrible experience of the American presidency with the last two presidents um we've been immensely fortunate that until Charles the monarchy has been prepared to fulfill this role it seems to me with his tinkering with the uh with this false god of modernization with this playing around with mild touches of woke and more extreme touches of environmentalism the Monarch is losing its touch it needs desperately to refind it I think you're right to some degree in a lot of what you've just said because the monarchy is supposed to provide that stability where I disagree with you is that in when you say that well first of all we do get excited as clerics uh but I don't think Parliament is the answer to stability within religion because religion cannot be the faith cannot be Democratic but surely that's where the Monarch comes in because the monarchy is supposed to provide that Foundation above Parliament where Parliament tends to get excited about things too such as as you mentioned rightly woke issues that are pushing forward at the moment so liberalism and environmentalism and such so for those reasons I suspect we have to have a Christian a head of state as in we have to have a defender of the faith as our King yes and what I'm really trying to say is that the monarchy cannot exercise power independently the whole structure of what happened in England after 1689 and why the monarchy has survived is that the monarchy is increasingly a ritualistic figure what I'm saying is we need ritualistic things the truth is we've got two King in England and we've had two kings in England ever since Robert Walpole in the 1720s the real king of England is the prime minister and the Prime Minister exercises all the proper political powers of the monarchy but the thing I was very disturbed with what you said about Parliament and the way in which England has differentiated in its England has differentiated itself from all other countries is for history almost as long as the monarchy in other words going back to the to to the 13th century there has been a notion of one body and one body only Parliament representing everybody in England and in that wonderful legal formula that everybody in England is represented in Parliament either in person because he or she is a peer or is a bishop or by their representatives through the counties and the boroughs in the House of Commons now the thing that again that has profoundly worried me about the line that Charles has taken is his overt contempt for Parliament he has said I am going to reduce the number of peers and I'm going to reduce the number of MPS to whatever whatever number it began as 20 trials I think it's now gone up to 40 each house now this is an act of utter contempt the king is a creature of Parliament that is what the settlement of 1689 says and in the set in the coronation of 1689 the entire House of Commons was present in a body led by the speaker and they constructed a special gallery for them so they actually Overlook the coronation theater with the speaker keeping a very close eye on what William and Mary were doing below and the King has decided instead that he understands the country better than elected politicians he's going about filling the very reduced number of seats in the Abbey with Community Representatives you know boys who spent time in a tent the equivalence of nagosi Fulani this is a disaster this is this is where of course that the unique will career come environmentalism calm the notion of communities um is is destroying any sense of the unity of the nation Parliament is the proper forum and the the trouble is of course that we've we've lost confidence in Parliament we've lost confidence in our political process we no longer have that sense that it is the body that genuinely represents the nation but the kind of AD hocary of the odd the odd representative of Islam or whatever different people of different you know different colored skins and people representing different areas of the country you know and whatever happens to be a favorite charity of the king or The Prince and Princess of Wales this is this this is to see the nation not as a nation but as a kind of collection of you know if it were nice macintosh's quality streets are still worse licorice also um and it's providing it's profoundly disturbing and the thing that most worries me covered is that there's been no attempt at the explanation of the coronation that that every opinion poll shows now a massive level of indifference that people don't care about it you know the death of the queen was different because the death of a person is a human act we're we're all you're the ending of a human life it's something we are all familiar with and in the case of the queen it was invested with something bigger because she'd been there for that vast number of years that she sat upon the throne that that notion of an entire world passing with her as well as the drama of a royal death but a coronation doesn't explain itself and as as far back as the 1830s when uh William William IV succeeds to the throne he said why bother with the coronation and King already um and there's been this spectacular inability to explain why the coronation is that indeed why monarchy is there we again are an extraordinary country in that we are the only country that actually fully reversed a Revolution by itself we of course beat the French by 100 odd years to cutting the king's head off in public and trying him in public and but we then decided that trying to do without a king was a really bad idea so we brought back a modified monarchy and we had another go at a minor Revolution and we sorted the problem out was of course you see with the with the contortions France is going through at the moment it's never established political stability since the overthrow of the monarchy um in in 1791 and we really do I think need to take a profoundly breath we had a Constitution and the politics that worked it seems to me we're throwing it away and when the king himself is one of those who is doing a sort of Tony Blair on the monarchy and tutoring fiddling fiddling without thinking this is disastrous yeah I mean I I share your concerns because I also share the king's contempt for Parliament and I think it's because we have a lack of faith not just in Parliament as our Representatives but we have a lack of confidence in our nation and what it means to be English I think that's that's a wider conversation we definitely need to to keep going and we'll have it here on GB news David Starkey thank you very much a pleasure [Music] thank you

Channel: GBNews

Views: 156,442

Keywords: GB news, Coronation, King Charles, David Starkey, Calvin Robinson, Queen Elizabeth, Christianity, Tradition, Christian

Id: 2QeOki7swy0

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023