The Funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh: Inventing traditions
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger wrote a book on the Invention of Tradition and the points it makes are continually relevant.
All traditions are invented at some point. Many are flexible and often re-invented.
The Christian Church has been especially good at this, taking over traditions of others and re-branding them to fit.
The death of the Duke of Edinburgh on 9th April and his funeral on 17th April will no doubt be lauded in some places as great examples of how Royal tradition deals with such moments.
There are many Royal traditions including revolution (1688) and abdication (1936) but those wont be on show in Windsor on Saturday (as far as we know).
The tradition kicked in when the BBC in a mark of official forelock tugging scrapped all programmes on any channel it has that it had heard of (iPlayer escaped) on Friday and replaced them with something about Prince Philip. The result was that many viewers switched off and there were over 100,000 complaints. Perhaps that is a new tradition in the making but the scrapping of programmes appears to have related mainly to the point that when the last significant Royal death took place- the Queen Mother in 2002- the BBC had been insufficiently obsequious
In the age of social media and the interwebs all kinds of people were to be found paying their respects to the Duke who in another age would not have been heard. This is a new democratic tradition of sorts.
The funeral itself will be described in the greatest of Royal traditions with the qualification that the pandemic has dictated some limitations. Yet reports suggest Prince Philip had planned a funeral with little ‘fuss’ and laid out the detail. According to various flunkeys that one can find on the BBC news website and in the right-wing press, its all in accordance with various long-time Royal traditions. It isn’t. Prince Philip, who had some claim to be a very modest moderniser, made it up.
That is perhaps best reflected by the point that while on such great occasions the Royals traditionally wear military uniform on Saturday they probably wont. Harry lost his various Royal military sinecures when he left the UK (although he did serve twice in Afghanistan)and Prince Andrew’s reported desire to dress up as an Admiral (which he is not) is apparently pushing matters too far. So a sombre civilian clothes tradition looks likely to have been invented and no doubt commentators will explain it in hushed tones to those that are interested.
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