Ecce Homo, Ecce Rex

When we get to behold the human without the paraphernalia of office

There was one part of the coronation ceremony last week – other than the poor minister carrying that sword for such a long time – which I found striking.

It was when, as part of the religious element of the the service, the king was stripped to his shirt.

And the reason this struck me was not its religious significance, but because it reminded me of a nineteenth century sketch that my blog has featured before.

This engraving by William Makepeace Thackeray:

The point of the caricature, of course, is that there is a distinction with any ruler between the natural person and their paraphernalia of office.

The comic series Sandman also deals with this point, where the entity Dream realises that he has wrongly infused (or perhaps confused) his three symbols of power (helm, powder, ruby) with own immense power.

This is not a new thought: as long as we have, as a species, have had notions of (what we would now call) lordship (rather than face-to-face dominance) then there has been the issue of the extent to which artefacts confer power – or whether the artefacts instead recognise and convey power.

Of course, the more confident the ruler, the less they need to resort to any visual rhetoric and symbolism.

Genuinely powerful rulers need few props, for they have power instead.

And a confident ruler in a culture where there are props of office will be unafraid to not be seen with those props.

The paraphernalia is an extra, not the essence.

And this is true whether the garb is a crown, or a judge’s wig and gown, or a police officer’s helmet and warrant card.

This is why this step of the coronation was so interesting (and it is, it seems, an ancient component of the service and not some novelty).

Not only did we see a king with his crown and his orb and his sceptre: we got to see him before he put any of them on.

We got to behold the man, before we got to behold the king.

And the point that Thackeray was slyly making with his cartoon is that some with power would very much not want you to behold any such thing.

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Note: the title may be better as Ecce Homo, Ecce Regum – and so I apologise for my prioritisation here of style over substance:

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This is cross-posted on my law and policy blog, where you and others can comment.