Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

CORONATION

FROM THE 8TH

TO THE 21ST CENTURY

ROY STRONG

TO

THE DEAN AND CHAPTER

OF

WESTMINSTER

FROM

THEIR

HIGH BAILIFF

AND

SEARCHER OF THE SANCTUARY

2005

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

PREFACE

Prologue 1953

1 The Lord’s Anointed

2 King and Priest

3 Kingship and Consent

4 Sacred Monarchy

5 Crown Imperial

6 From Divinity to Destruction

7 From Reaction to Revolution

8 Insubstantial Pageants

9 Imperial Epiphanies

Epilogue 2005

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

CHRONOLOGY

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This book is a direct consequence of having the honour of holding the post of High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. It is a position lost in the mists of the medieval past when its orbit of activity was practical. Today the post, along with that of High Steward, is purely an honorary one – but not without purpose, for it enables the Dean and Chapter to draw into the Abbey’s service those who might bear witness to the faith it upholds and the ideals of the nation that it has come to epitomise. This book is my contribution.

It is a remarkable fact that the history of the English Coronation, particularly in the modern period, remains such a neglected field of study. The pioneer work remains Percy Schramm’s still magisterial study published in English in 1937. To that we must add the recent monumental and definitive catalogue of the Crown Jewels in two vast volumes in a limited edition and hence inaccessible to the general public. The present book sets out to remedy that lack by providing both for the general and more specialised reader the first overall documented history of the Coronation in a single volume.

The need for such a publication is an urgent one as another Coronation will sooner or later take place. In researching and writing this book I have been struck by the widespread ignorance as to the nature of this ancient rite, au fond a foundation stone of the British state and a bulwark against its total secularisation. It is no empty pageant but one that, like so many other historic customs and institutions under attack today which some wish cheerfully to sweep away, has proved itself amazingly flexible over the centuries. Any nation calls for rites of passage and the Coronation, with its central concept of setting a single human being apart by dint of anointing with holy oil as the embodiment of both crown and nation, is the greatest of them all.

I began my scholarly life almost half a century ago working under the late Dame Frances Yates on Elizabethan court pageantry. At the time I confess to finding Coronations dull and, I thought, merely repetitious. How wrong I was! Researching this book has been one long revelation as the ceremonial inaugurating a new reign gradually revealed its ability to respond to and reflect every theological, political, social and cultural nuance over the centuries.

I do not claim to have written the last word on this subject. Who could? But I have opened up a topic that in some areas has already attracted fine scholarly contributions. My debt to those scholars, particularly those working on the early and medieval periods, I acknowledge with gratitude. One of the problems of working on this subject is the sheer quantity of the manuscript and printed material, so much that inevitably at some point a line firmly had to be drawn or else the book would never have been finished and the result would have been unwieldly. What is new is the attempt throughout to draw the camera’s lens back and place what can all too easily become an antiquarian account of a series of isolated pageants into the wider perspective of what those involved at the time were setting out to achieve.

Coronation could not have been written without recourse to manuscript material. In the case of the early, medieval and Tudor periods that has been fairly fully explored. It is the material for the modern period which has largely gone without investigation and it is that which in the main has preoccupied me. I cannot express my gratitude enough for the graciousness extended to me at all the archives explored to write this book: the College of Arms, the British Library, Westminster Abbey Muniments, Lambeth Palace Library, St John’s College, Cambridge and the Public Record Office. In the case of the last I am grateful to R. W. O’Hara who, under my direction, worked through the material there. From the outset, thanks to the enthusiastic support of Garter King of Arms, I was given unfettered access to the huge collections in the College. Robert Yorke, their librarian, saw that, each time I went, everything I asked for was to hand. Equally Dr Richard Mortimer and Dr Tony Trowles saw that I was fed with the plethora which exists in the Abbey. At St John’s College, Cambridge, I was looked after by Jonathan Harrison, the Special Collections Librarian.

The advent of the information technology revolution truly also facilitates far speedier research. The ability to consult the British Library catalogue online and so much of its manuscript holdings remains a constant source of wonder to me. What has also speeded research is that splendid British Library resource, Articles Direct, from their supply centre at Boston Spa.

I cannot list nor remember now everyone who has helped me on my way but I record my gratitude to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Luce, who welcomed this project which meant that, with the gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen, I was given free access to all the material at the College of Arms, in particularly that connected with 1953. Amongst others who have assisted I record: Dr Andrew Hughes (University of Toronto), Dr Simon Thurley (English Heritage), John M. Burton (Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey), Professor David Sturdy (University of Ulster), Dr Pamela Tudor-Craig, Clare Browne (Victoria & Albert Museum), Dr Richard Barber, Daniel McDowell, The Hon. Lady Roberts (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle), and Anna Keay (English Heritage). Particular gratitude is owed to the Very Revd Dr Wesley Carr, Dean of Westminster, for reading the closing chapters and making several pertinent suggestions.

I am one of those authors who rather depends on an inspired and committed editor who is prepared, which is unusual, to read what I write as I go along. In Arabella Pike I had just that. Once finished a book passes into the hands of the publication team whom I would like also to thank, in particular the designer Vera Brice. She has had to cope with the decision, a welcome one, that this book should incorporate what in effect is the largest visual archive on the topic.

ROY STRONG

The Laskett

June 2005

PROLOGUE 1953

On my dressing table rests a small leather box with a lid embossed in gold with a stylised crown and below it the date 1953. The graphics are unmistakably of the period we associate with the Festival of Britain, which indeed opened only two years before. At the time I was coming up to being seventeen and in the sixth form of Edmonton County Grammar School sited on the fastnesses of the North Circular Road. The box was a gift to every boy in the school on the occasion of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In it we were to keep our shirt studs, a fact which immediately dates the object to a now vanished sartorial era. The object is as fresh as the day on which I received it and I keep it to hand to remind me of my earliest memory of real spectacle, as I was one of the two young people from my school selected to be bussed into central London on the great day to stand on the Victoria Embankment and watch the great procession make its way to Westminster Abbey. The date was 2 June 1953.

The fact that it was the forward and not the return procession that I saw turned out to be a stroke of luck, for it enabled me to return home in time to watch most of the coronation on television. The arrival of that in the sitting room of the north London terraced house in which I grew up was another major event. But to return to the morning. That I recall as being a grey one, but then at that age just about everything I could remember had been grey, for the coronation was just eight years on from the end of the war, one which had reduced the country to penury. The capital still visibly wore the monochrome robes of that conflict, enlivened on the day by the splashes of colour of the street decorations and by the tiny red, white and blue Union flags which we clutched and waved.

It was a long wait and, as I was not tall, my chances of seeing anything were not that great. Nonetheless, there was the thrill of anticipation as a military band was heard from afar and then the great procession unfolded. I do not think that I ever saw more than the top half of a horse and rider. No matter, for two images stick in mind, ones shared at the time by millions of others. The first was an open carriage over which the capacious figure of Queen Salote of Tonga presided, beaming and waving to everyone in a manner which won all hearts. The second, of course, was the encrusted golden coach in which the Queen rode with the Duke of Edinburgh. It must have been lit from within for the Queen’s smiling features and the glitter of her diamonds remain firmly fixed in my memory.

Subsequent to that there were the pictures on the tiny television screen, hypnotic, like some dream or apparition, certainly images enough to haunt a stage-struck and historically inclined youth for the rest of his life. But I add to that the subsequent film of the coronation, for there it was on the large screen in colour, never to be forgotten, glittering, glamorous, effulgent. This was the England I fell in love with, a country proud of its great traditions and springing to life again in a pageant that seemed to inaugurate a second Elizabethan age. This was a masque of hope, a vision to uplift the mind after years of drear deprivation.

In retrospect I had seen part of what is now recognised to have been the greatest public spectacle of the twentieth century. What I was not to know was that this impoverished child in his dreary navy-blue blazer, cheap grey flannel trousers and black and gold school tie was to stand, half a century on, resplendent in scarlet and black in my role as High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, along with the whole college, to welcome the Queen at the great service which commemorated her coronation.

It is now all so long ago that most readers may well ask what is a coronation? Where did such an extraordinary ceremonial come from? What formed and shaped it over the centuries? And how can such a pageant ever have any relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first century? When I last visited the crown jewels in the Tower of London, part of that display was a projection of the film of the coronation. Looking at it, I could not believe that such a thing had been staged in the second half of the twentieth century and, equally, I could not help wondering whether one would ever be staged again. But then that was a viewpoint which sprang from ignorance, unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual or its deep significance in terms of the committal of the monarch to the people. It was questions like these that prompted me to write this book, launching me on a voyage that proved to be one of constant surprise. Amongst many other things it was to reveal the coronation as the perfect microcosm of a country that has always opted for evolution and not revolution. But I must begin at the beginning, and that takes us back not just centuries but no less than a thousand years.

1 The Lord’s Anointed

THE EARLIEST ACCOUNT of an English Coronation comes in a life of St Oswald, Archbishop of York, by a monk of Ramsay, written about the year 1000.1 He describes how, in the year 973, Edgar (959–75) ‘convoked all the archbishops, bishops, all great abbots and religious abbesses, all dukes, prefects and judges, and all who had claim to rank and dignity from east to west and north to south over wide lands’ to assemble in Bath. They gathered, we are told, not to expel or plot against the king ‘as the wretched Jews had once treated the kind Jesus’, but rather ‘that the most reverent bishops might bless, anoint, consecrate him, by Christ’s leave, from whom and by whom the blessed unction of highest blessing and holy religion has proceeded’. The text refers to the King as imperator, emperor, for by that date he was not only ruler of Mercia but also of Northumbria and of the West Saxons. Edgar had assumed the imperial style by 964, by which time his several kingdoms also included parts of Scandinavia and Ireland. This was a king who had come to the throne at the age of sixteen and was to die at 32. His reign was Anglo-Saxon England at its zenith, an age of peace and an era when, under the aegis of great churchmen, headed by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, a radical reform of the Church was achieved. Bath, the Roman Aquae Sulis, the place chosen for the King’s Coronation, even in the tenth century and in spite of all the barbarian depredations, would still have been a city which retained overtones of its past imperial grandeur, a setting fit for its revival by a great Saxon King.

The day chosen for the event was Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. Edgar, crowned with a rich diadem and holding a sceptre, awaited the arrival of a huge ecclesiastical procession, all in white vestments: clergy, bishops, abbots, abbesses and nuns, along with those described as aged and reverend priests. The King was led by hand to the church by two bishops, probably ones representing the northern and southern extremities of his realm, the bishops of Chester-le-Street (later to become the mighty palatine see of Durham) and of Wells. In the church the great lay magnates were already assembled. As the splendid procession wound its way from exterior secular and into interior sacred space the anthem Firmetur manus tua was sung: ‘Let thy hand be strengthened, and thy right hand be exalted, Let justice and judgement be the preparation of thy seat, and mercy and truth go before thy face.’ Here in the open air had already begun that great series of incantations to the heavens to endue this man with the virtues necessary for the right exercise of kingship.

On entering the church Edgar doffed his crown and prostrated himself before the altar while the Archbishop of Canterbury, St Dunstan, perhaps the greatest figure in the history of the Anglo-Saxon church, intoned the Te Deum, that majestic hymn of praise to God in which ‘all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein’ and in which petition is made to ‘save thy people and bless thine heritage. Govern them and lift them up for ever.’ That prostration was an act of self-obliteration, for what was enacted before those assembled was the ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ of a man who was to leave the church fully sanctified and endowed with grace by Holy Church as a king fit to rule. St Dunstan was so moved by the king’s action that he wept tears of joy at his humility. But such a rebirth is not bestowed without conditions, and so the great ceremonial opened with an action which was to set the English Coronation apart from any other and also account for its extraordinary longevity.

The promissio regis, the Coronation oath, consisted of what were known as the tria praecepta, three pledges by the King to God. First, ‘that the Church of God and all Christian people preserve peace at all times’, secondly, ‘that he forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees’ and, finally, ‘that in all judgments he enjoin equity and mercy …’ These came in the form of a written document, whether in Latin or the vernacular is unknown, which was delivered to the King by Dunstan and then placed on the altar. The archbishop then administered the oath to the King seated. We do not know whether the oath was sworn aloud by the King to the assembled clergy and lay magnates. Logic would suggest that this happened. The placing of the tria praecepta at the opening of the Coronation service remained through the centuries one of the defining documents as to the nature of the monarchy. Monarchy in England never became, as it did in France, absolute. It always remained conditional upon being faithful to the three pledges given in the oath, to maintain peace, administer justice and exercise equity and mercy.2

That done, the action moved on to the bestowal of unction, the anointing of the King’s head by the bishops (whose identities are not given, but presumably were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) with holy oil, chrism, a fragrant mixture of oil and balsam, poured from an animal’s horn. In this ritual occurred the sacred moment of rebirth, one accompanied by a succession of prayers invoking the Kings of the Old Testament as exemplars of the virtues to be granted through this action, recalling also those kings, prophets and priests who had been similarly anointed and calling upon the Holy Spirit to descend and sanctify Edgar in the same way. Following this, the most solemn moment of the whole Coronation service, came the anthem Unxerunt Solomonem: ‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King; and they blew the trumpets, and piped the pipes, and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth rent with the sound of them; and they said, “God save King Solomon. Long live the King, may the King live for ever.”’ All of this, for over a thousand years, has been re-enacted at every Coronation, although ennobled since the eighteenth century by Handel’s radiant and triumphant music. It is extraordinary to grasp that its roots lie as far back as the last quarter of the tenth century. Nor has the ritual of investiture which followed changed that much. Upon Edgar were bestowed the following regalia: the ring, ‘the seal of holy faith’; the sword by which to vanquish his enemies, the foes of Holy Church, and protect the realm; the ‘crown of glory and righteousness’; the sceptre, ‘the sign of kingly power, the rod of the kingdom, the rod of virtue’; and the staff or baculus ‘of virtue and equity’. A Mass followed and, after the whole ceremony was over, those assembled moved again from sacred to secular space where a great feast was held. Edgar, wearing a crown of laurel entwined with roses, sat enthroned, flanked by the two archbishops, presiding over a banquet of the great magnates. Elsewhere his Queen held court over a parallel one for abbots and abbesses. This description in the life of St Oswald is detailed enough to establish that the text or ordo used was that known as the Second Recension, a consideration of which I will come to later in this chapter. That scholars have established this to be the case means that we can deduce that Edgar’s Queen must also have been crowned, although the Monk of Ramsay does not refer to the fact, for the ordo includes prayers for this which permit her to be anointed like her husband but only allow for investiture with two ornaments, a ring and a crown.

So much for what we do know about the 973 Coronation, but there is much that we do not. We do not know where the action was staged or anything about the gestures used, the vestments worn, the appearance of the regalia or the music sung. There is also the puzzling fact that, although Edgar had been a king since 957, he waited until 973 for his Coronation. Some scholars argue that he had undergone an earlier ceremony of blessing and unction and that this one was to mark his ascendancy to imperial status, while others maintain that his humility was such that he deliberately waited until he reached thirty, the canonical age a man could be made a bishop and also about the age when Christ was baptised and began his ministry (Luke 3: 23).

What is in no doubt, however, is that this spectacle was the apogee of his reign, designed to mark Edgar’s imperial status and blaze it abroad both in his own country and on the Continent. Shortly after that he received the homage of his subject kings, who symbolically rowed him from his palace to the church at Chester while he tended the prow. The Coronation was also an outward manifestation of Edgar’s commitment to the reform movement associated with Archbishop Dunstan, which introduced new rules to govern monastic life based on those used on the Continent at the great abbey of Cluny. So the Coronation ordo enshrined a vision of the English monarchy which reflected that role, one which owed its debt to continental exemplars, the king cast as rector et defensor ecclesiae. Time and again this ordo, the Second Recension, draws out, by means of symbolism and doxology, the parallel between kingship and episcopacy. This was emphasised in the choice of the day for the ceremony, one on which the Holy Spirit descended giving the Apostles the grace to carry out their task. What is astonishing to a modern reader is that here already at such a very early date are virtually all the elements of our present Coronation ceremony as it was last enacted in 1953 for Elizabeth II. The fact that these same elements could be used again and again through the centuries and continue to be responsive to the ideas and aspirations of far different eras is a gigantic index as to just how flexible the English Coronation ceremony continues to be. As a consequence, apart from the papacy, no other inauguration ritual can boast such longevity. Such rituals should not be lightly dismissed as so much insubstantial pageantry. They are powerful icons in which a society enshrines its identity and its continuity. The importance of them has been admirably summed up by Meyer Fortes:

The mysterious quality of continuity through time in its organisation and values, which is basic to the self-image of every society, modern, archaic, or primitive, is in some ways congealed in these installation ceremonies … Politics and law, rank and kinship, religious and philosophical concepts and values, the economics of display and hospitality, the aesthetics and symbolism of institutional representation, and last but not least the social psychology of popular participation, all are concentrated in them.3

When Edgar was crowned, such a rite of inauguration in some form had been in existence in Anglo-Saxon England for over a century. How did such a thing come about and whence did it come? To answer that I must widen our camera’s lens to take in the fate of Western Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise in its place of the barbarian kingdoms and the establishment as a consequence of the role of the Church as the bestower of legitimacy on dynasties by dint of the rite of unction.

THE IDEA OF UNCTION

What is unction and how did it come to occupy such a central position in king-making?4 The first question is a relatively simple one to answer, the second far more complex. Unction was the application to a modern ruler of a ritual recorded in the Old Testament, the anointing of a chosen leader with holy oil. In the First Book of Samuel the elders ask the prophet to choose a king for them who will act both as their judge and their leader in war. Samuel chose Saul. ‘Then Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and said, Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?’ (I Samuel 10:1).

Later in the same book Samuel is led to choose Saul’s successor and the ritual is re-enacted: ‘Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward’ (I Samuel 16:13).