Monthly Archives: September 2021

Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning British monarch, will not resign to hand over the throne to her 70-year-old son or 39-year-old grandson, the author of a new biography said, due to of “binding promises in presence” undertaken at his coronation in June 1953 at Westminster Abbey.

As early as 1982, there have been periodic calls for Elizabeth to abdicate in favor of Charles, the Prince of Wales, or more recently William, the Duke of Cambridge. In an interview, historian and author Matthew Dennison said such speculation ignored the spiritual training young Princess Elizabeth received from her parents and guardians, as well as the deep impression that the 1953 anointing ritual during of the coronation did.

Mr. Dennison, biographer of Queen Victoria as well as of the former Roman Empress Livia, has just published “The Queen” in the United States with Apollo, an imprint of the British firm Head of Zeus. The book includes a detailed overview of the monarch’s education and his life on the throne.

“The British coronation service, alone among the coronation services in world monarchies, retains the anointing, and it is the last of the Christian coronation services to retain this kind of connection with the divine,” the author said. in a phone interview Friday with the Washington Times. .

“She will not abdicate because a life promise to God is a life promise to God,” he added.

The Queen “is a person of deep Christian faith,” Mr. Dennison continued, “but I think the monarchy affair, the affair of being an anointed ruler, has probably confirmed that. I think for her that [ceremony] remains a strengthening element because a coronation is the most important day of his royal life.

Mr. Dennison noted that a portion of his subjects believed there was providence involved in his rule.

“It is interesting that when this queen became queen in 1952 a poll was taken and 30% of the people believed that she had become queen by the will of God. I don’t imagine that would be a similar response nowadays, as we live in a much more cynical era, ”Mr. Dennison said.

Upon her coronation, Queen Elizabeth received the additional titles of “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”, each recalling the reign of King Henry VIII, who first held the title of “Defender of the Faith. the faith”. was given to him by Pope Leo X in 1521, as the Royal Family website notes. Thirteen years later, when Henry VIII broke with Rome, he assumed the title of “supreme head on earth” of what was then the Church of England.

During the “act of consecration,” which the BBC said was the only element of the coronation not televised or recorded for later broadcast, the new monarch, wearing “a robe of the purest white” but not his cape crimson nor the royal jewels, sat under a golden canopy and was anointed on his head and chest with oil of orange, roses, cinnamon, musk and ambergris by the Rt. The Reverend Geoffrey Fisher, then Archbishop of Canterbury.

Archbishop Fisher said to the new ruler, “Be your head anointed with holy oil, as kings, priests, and prophets have been anointed. The prayer also referred to the coronation of former Hebrew King Solomon, imploring Elizabeth to be “anointed, blessed and consecrated queen.”

While researching this part of the ceremony, Mr. Dennison “found firsthand accounts of people saying they were almost embarrassed to watch the service at that point because it feels so intense,” he recalls.

He said the reaction was “partly because of what was going on, but [also] because of the extraordinary gravity they felt they detected in the queen.

Mr Dennison said: “There are other people in the department who at that point said of the service she had just beamed, happy with what had been said.”

Archbishop Fisher, who officiated at Elizabeth’s marriage in 1947 to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh who died in June 2021, had prepared the monarch for the ceremony, explaining “to the Queen that after that time, it would never be the same again, ”added Mr. Dennison.

How that would translate under the reign of a future King Charles or a future King William – if these royals kept their current names when they joined – is uncertain. The Prince of Wales, in a 1994 BBC interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, said he wanted to be an “Advocate of the Faith”, rather than the full official title, which specifically refers to the Defender of ” the “faith – the Church of England.

The statement sparked a wave at the time, but Mr Dennison points out that nearly 30 years later Charles is associated with charities related to preserving Church of England traditions, such as the book of 1662 and the last Book of Common Prayer. Prince William, the author said, “didn’t say much about the faith, but neither did he really have a chance to say a lot about the faith.”

Since 2000, the Queen’s annual Christmas message, seen by millions in Britain and abroad, has taken a drastic turn towards the spiritual. What one observer called “a travelogue from the past year” during the first years of his reign has evolved into a discourse on the meaning of service in the community, as well as the importance of community service. faith for the people she serves and for the Queen. himself.

The more recent messages, Mr. Dennison noted, “are much more about his own Christian faith and the teachings of Christ as a kind of guide to life accessible to all. She says in one of the shows that [this] guide is something that is available to everyone at no cost. And this is the example of the life of Christ.

After years of personal and public tragedy, the Queen, Mr Dennison, said: “Today she mentions her own personal relationship with Christ. And I think for other believing Christians in Britain it must be incredibly inspiring because it’s not something we hear in this country unless we go looking for it in a church context.

Abraham Riesman is a reporter for such media as New York Magazine and the bird-themed pop culture website Vulture and an author who wrote a biography of comic book legend Stan Lee titled “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee “. He recently worked hard on a follow-up autobiography of another legend in his field: WWE President Vince McMahon. Ringmaster is described as “a biography of Vince McMahon, who went from a dyslexic boy growing up in a trailer park to the iconoclastic president and CEO of the multi-billion dollar WWE empire, with new reporting and exclusive interviews from those who witnessed, helped, and suffered from his ascension. “

On Twitter, Riesman claims to have uncovered documents he calls “one of the holy grails” as part of his research for the biography. And while Riesman doesn’t provide any clue as to what the documents reveal, he did provide us with enough material to obtain our own holy grail: a clickbait article crafted from tweets.

Riesman tweets:

Unfortunately, Riesman refuses to release any information on the documentation, forcing curious people to wait until the book’s release if they want to find out what’s inside. Riesman seems to be better at long term bookings than Vince McMahon himself is these days.

So what did Riesman find out? Our best guess is that Riesman obtained the documents that were hidden in the safe that Shane McMahon had used to blackmail his father into granting him a match with The Undertaker at WrestleMania 32, with WWE in control in game. Shane ultimately failed to defeat the Undertaker and the contents of the vault. have never been revealed. But will Abraham Riesman succeed where Shane-O-Mac failed? We can find out when Ringmaster hits stores. The book doesn’t have a release date, but Riesman has already guessed that it could be finished by 2022.

Royal Rota reporter Omid Scobie has revealed new details about his relationship with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in an interview, following the release of the pocket version of Find freedom.

Talk to Tatler, Scobie, 38, spoke about his career and experience reporting on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as well as the book’s impact on his relationship with them.

The new edition of Find freedom, written by Scobie and Carolyn Durand, included a new epilogue that reflected how the couple had spent the past year.

Scobie, who is Anglo-Persian, told the magazine he was one of three journalists invited to Meghan’s last engagement as an active royal and shared a ‘big farewell hug’ with the Duchess .

According to the reporter, Meghan told her: ‘It couldn’t be like this’ as they kissed, before she left England to live in California with Harry and their son Archie in January 2020.

Scobie believed that his work for American publications US Weekly and Harper’s Bazaar led the Sussexes to trust him enough to share their final moments as senior royals.

“I think she wanted to share that last moment because it’s a moment in history,” he told the magazine. “But also to do it in an environment where she felt safe.”

Scobie said the narrative around Meghan ‘got out of shape’ drastically after Archie was born, when it looked like ‘nothing that Meghan could do was ever right’ and it’s up to that time that the Sussexes “realized there was no progress from there.”

When asked how he was able to get direct quotes from Meghan in the book, although the couple’s legal team insisted there had been no collaboration with them, Scobie said that it was the Duchess’s friends who reached out to “share a glimpse of how she felt”. .

“The people who said no at first, when they saw it getting worse, suddenly responded to an email we sent six or seven months to a year earlier – people who were increasingly frustrated. by the things they had seen and at what distance [different] that’s what’s really happening, ”he said.

However, Scobie is not sure about his relationship with the Sussexes now, after the book was published. He said he “didn’t even know if the Sussexes liked me, to be honest”, adding that “the press is the press”.

He also said the couple’s relationship with the tabloids was “completely dead” and that he didn’t think it would ever work.

On Harry’s break-up with Prince William, Scobie said things had not “progressed”, contrary to reports the brothers were ready to put their feud behind them after unveiling a statue of their mother , Diana, in July.