From the archive: the Observer view on the coronation, 1953 – and the monarchy’s revival

To regard the great festival with which the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II is celebrated merely as a pious and joyful tribute to history, tradition and continuity is to miss half its significance – and the most important half.

It is not a routine event in the annals of a set institution, as were the crowning of mediaeval monarchs. Nor is it, whatever facile cleverness may say, a mere romantic pantomime, appealing to easy sentiment with its remembrance of things past and to popular curiosity, with its play on personality. Perhaps there were royal occasions in the last two centuries of which this might have been said. Only wilful blindness could say it of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

Once more, as when King George VI died a year ago, we find that a royal event has the power to eclipse everything that normally occupies the public consciousness; to reduce all the most important transactions of international diplomacy and national politics to the second rank of interest; and to reach into a depth of collective emotion never touched by the business of governments. The fact that this is so is still quite insufficiently explained, but it is undeniable; and it is a new fact. It testifies to an unexampled rise in the prestige of British monarchy.

In the last few decades, the royal function of reigning has revealed itself as a great unifying factor for the nation

This rise is quite recent. A little over 40 years ago, when King George V came to the throne, the British monarchy was one among many in Europe and Asia. Monarchy was still, as it had almost always been, the normal form of state everywhere, but it had entered a phase of decline. In this country, it was a respected and popular institution, but it was hardly felt to be the emotional pivot of our national life. The contemptuous strictures which Bismarck had made in the 1860s on a monarchy of the British type – “a merely ornamental embellishment of the constitutional structure, a dead cog in the mechanism of a parliamentary regime” – might, in a more polite form, have been echoed by quite a number of British subjects in those days.

In the intervening half-century, nearly all the seemingly stronger thrones of Europe and Asia, from Spain to China, have fallen. The British monarchy is now one among very few. Its constitutional powers have not increased; rather, wise self-restraint has withdrawn the crown even farther from the day-to-day business of government and politics. Reign and rule are more clearly divided than ever. But the British monarchy has established a new hold on the public imagination which is perhaps unequalled in its 1,000-year-old history; it certainly is unequalled in modern times.

What has taken place is a rediscovery of the forgotten and mysterious function of reigning, in contrast with the prosaic governmental function of ruling. Slowly and imperceptibly in the last few decades, and more dramatically in the last few years, the royal function of reigning has revealed itself as a great unifying factor in our national life.

While governments and politicians of the Right and Left have more and more come to be regarded as “they”, our kings and now our young queen have come to be felt as the living embodiment of all that still makes us say “we”.