Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

The age of gold returns The world’s reform draws nigh The rich man new cast down The pauper raised on high. 26

The chronicle account catches to the full the magnificence of a Coronation by that date, its sense of unfolding spectacle, its choreography, its richness in terms of robes and artefacts, its use of contrasting passages of speech with chant. Much is already familiar but there is also so much that is new. The ecclesiastical procession now fetches the king-elect, or duke as he is resolutely referred to, from his royal chamber. In the procession various dignitaries are assigned roles bearing everything from items of regalia to candlesticks (these never reappear). The royal robes are carried on the board used in the exchequer and the king now proceeds beneath a canopy. Later, after his crowning, he doffs his regalian robes and ornaments, putting on lighter ones along with a lighter crown. As another chronicler so rightly put it, all was done ‘cum pompa magnifica’. Everything was firmly in place for the major transformation which was to occur under the aegis of Henry III.

But there is a wider context to which this Coronation belongs, for it was the prelude to the king’s departure on the Third Crusade. It was staged in the midst of all the fervour leading up to such an event, when the chivalry of Christendom rallied to rescue and preserve the Holy Land and the Holy Places from the Infidel. When Richard at last set sail a few months later in December he took with him King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, which he was later to present to Tancred, King of Sicily.27 But the fact that he took it at all indicates some notion of self-identification with the king of legend whose court was the pattern of chivalry. Can it at least be suggested that the Coronation of Richard was in a sense that of Arthur revived? The suggestion, although unprovable, is at least worth the making and a number of factors suggest that this could well have been in the mind of whoever put together the secular ceremonial in 1189.

I have already referred earlier to the account of the Coronation of King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s seminal Historia Regum Britanniae, compiled during the first half of the twelfth century. The two chapters on Arthur’s Coronation festivities would have been incentive enough to escalate regal spectacle.28 Arthur is conducted to the church by two archbishops with four knights bearing golden swords before him. We are told that there was wonderful music during the procession and at the actual church service, which is not recounted. As they leave for the banquet both Arthur and his queen take off their heavy crowns and put on ‘lighter ornaments’, just as Richard did before the feast. There were, in fact, two banquets, one for the men and the other for the ladies. The English Coronation banquet was also a male preserve like the Arthurian. ‘For the Britons,’ writes Geoffrey, ‘still observed the ancient custom of Troy by which men and women used to celebrate their festivals apart.’ There followed three days of festival with tournaments, archery and other competitive sports and, after this, on the fourth day, ‘all who, upon account of their titles, bore any kind of office at this solemnity, were called upon to receive honours and preferments …’ The scenario for 1189 was exactly the same. Was this an attempt to emulate King Arthur? This was a Coronation staged at precisely the period when the Arthurian romances of chivalry under the aegis of that great innovator of the genre, Chrétien de Troyes, took off as a new ideal of courtly life. Indeed Chrétien’s greatest patron was Richard I’s brother-in-law, Henry of Champagne.29 Was the Coronation of 1189 an attempt to revive the world of Arthur, ‘For at that time Britain had arrived at such a pitch of grandeur, luxury of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other kingdoms’? It is an hypothesis that is worth the making. What is clear is that we have travelled already a vast distance from the feudal testimony of 1066 and entered the new world of Camelot.

3 Kingship and Consent

IN THE SAME YEAR ‘the lord king, inspired by his devotion to St Edward, ordered the church of St Peter at Westminster to be enlarged.’ With these words the chronicler, Matthew Paris, records Henry III’s decision not so much to ‘enlarge’ as to demolish and rebuild the Coronation church.’1 This was a building project on a scale unparalleled anywhere else in Western Europe at the time. It was not only, however, driven on by the king’s commitment to the cult of his saintly forebear, but equally by a desire to outshine the French king, Louis IX, the builder of the Sainte-Chapelle. In St Edward the Confessor Henry III saw an ideal pattern for his own kingship, one which he set out to imitate and emulate.2 The very fact that he was to eclipse the saint by rebuilding his church on an even grander scale is evidence enough of that. Although its role as a royal valhalla and as a meeting place for both the King’s Council and the nascent House of Commons has long since gone, it still retains its place at the heart of the nation as a royal church, what is called a royal peculiar, one which is exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, and as the setting for a proliferation of royal events, of which over seven centuries later the Coronation still remains the greatest.

The contribution of Henry III to the history of the Coronation, therefore, cannot be overestimated. He was to provide it with its mise-en-scène, a supremely graceful, soaring, many-pinnacled glasshouse, rivalling, if not surpassing, the greatest of the French Gothic cathedrals, which indeed inspired it. In Henry III’s mind Westminster Abbey had above all to eclipse in splendour the French Coronation church of Reims. To achieve that the king employed for the task a man well versed about all that was happening in France, Henry de Reyns. The Gothic style was still relatively new to England when the Abbey arose with a speed which must have astonished contemporaries. Twenty-five years before, the monks had also, it seems likely, taken the decision to rebuild. They began with a Lady chapel sited beyond the existing east end, a project to which Henry III contributed the golden spurs with which he was invested at his Coronation there in 1220. Lack of funds meant that the scheme stagnated until the king suddenly embarked on his own massive project, lavishing on it the equivalent of the crown’s total revenues for two years. In just twenty-four years the east end, transepts, choir and part of the nave were already up, enough for the church to be formally dedicated on 13 October 1269. This was a church built by a man who had a highly elevated concept of the office of kingship. By 1245 the Abbey had established itself as the immutable setting for the crowning of the kings of England. It was, therefore, custom-built from the outset with that ceremony in mind. Henry III had been crowned in haste as a child of nine in Gloucester cathedral with a gold circlet because London was in the hands of the French. But the central role of the Abbey in his eyes is reflected in the fact that he obtained a papal dispensation to be not only crowned but also anointed a second time in the Abbey in 1220. Both Coronations would have been according to the Third Recension.3 But the new dynastic church by its very scale and concept would seem to call for a ceremony to match (although it has been equally argued that it prompted no such development). And, indeed, that is precisely what happened, for sometime towards the end of the thirteenth century a new ordo was compiled, the Fourth Recension. This, we know, was certainly used for the Coronation of Edward II in 1308, but there is no way of proving one way or the other that it was used for his father, Edward I, in 1274. As a document (to which I will come shortly), it is difficult not to believe that Henry III had some hand in it. Why else the grand ceremonial north entrance through which the great processions passed, the pushing back of the choir westwards to leave a large clear space at the crossing on which to erect a stage, or the deeply symbolic cosmic pavement in the sacrarium? And that is to name but a few of the features which must have been conceived with the action of the Coronation in mind.

Henry III left an indelible legacy in this church. He lies buried on the site of the former tomb of the Confessor, hard by the new shrine which he built, on which he lavished gold and precious stones and around which he accumulated relics of the Holy Blood, a nail from the Cross, the Virgin’s girdle and the stone on which Christ had stood at his Ascension.4 To these his son, Edward I, was to add more, and one in particular to which we must turn our attention and which was to play a major role in the history of the Coronation, the Stone of Scone. Although Edward was overlord of both the Welsh princes and the kings of Scotland, his ambition was to totally subjugate them and bring the entire island under his rule. In the case of Wales and the erection of a network of castles he would be successful. In that of Scotland he would fail.

The Stone of Scone upon which Alexander III, King of Scotland, had sat in 1249 when he was crowned, was taken by Edward I in 1296 during his Scottish campaign and presented, along with the Scottish crown and sceptre, to the shrine of the Confessor. It remained in the Abbey ever since until a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, at the very close of the twentieth century returned it by diktat to Scotland on the back of devolution. By this act a unique medieval artefact was vandalised.

What in fact is the Coronation chair and when did it enter the Coronation story? Modern scholarship has shed a mass of new light on this intriguing object.5 We know that the Stone was acquired in the summer of 1296 and that Edward I had decreed that a chair cast in bronze was to be made to receive it and that it was to be placed next to the altar at the west end of the shrine of St Edward. To make that bronze chair a wooden mould or pattern had to be made. That is likely to have been designed by the king’s master-mason, Michael of Canterbury, who was used to designing thrones, and carried out by the king’s painter, Walter of Durham. In the summer of 1297 all of that was abandoned due to the expense of the war in Flanders. Instead, a wooden chair was made and installed on a low painted step or dais next to the shrine’s altar. This had a canopy or cover over it, which Richard II was later to restore or repair. The existing chair is, therefore, not earlier than the summer of 1297 and not later than March 1300. Its initial decoration was not very complex, with only gilding over a lead white base.

There is no connexion with the Coronation, explicable in the sense that for the next thirty years any reference to the Stone is always to it as a sign of victory. It is significant that the Coronations of both Edward II and Edward III pass by with no reference to its use, nor, which is more to the point, is there any reference in the two sets of negotiations for the Stone’s return to Scotland in 1324 and 1328. If it had been used for the Coronation of an English king it would certainly have been pointed out on one or both of those occasions, but then the kings of England never officially styled themselves as kings of Scotland. It is from 1300 onwards, after the Stone had come to England, that the earliest legendary histories of the Stone surface, different in both countries. According to Scottish myth the Stone was brought to Scotland by Pharaoh’s daughter Scota and it arrived via Ireland. In the English version it was the stone on which the patriarch Jacob had laid his head at Bethel and dreamt of a ladder of angels stretching from earth to heaven (Genesis 28: 10–22). In both sets of negotiations it figured as an artefact attached to the shrine of St Edward and as a sign to the English of a great victory. Nothing came of the 1324 request for its return, but in 1328 Edward III actually ordered the Abbey to send it north. The abbot, in fact, refused. It is precisely around this time that the Jacob legend appears, and it would seem likely that a far more elaborate programme of gilded and pounced decoration was applied to the chair in its newly enhanced status. Although in an inventory of 1300 it is referred to ‘in order that the Kings of England and Scotland might sit on it on the day of their Coronation’ the line is, in fact, crossed. Its earliest certain use was to be in 1399 for Henry IV, but little is known about it for most of the fourteenth century, although its use at Coronations during this period cannot be ruled out. Thomas of Walsingham, when describing the form and manner of an English Coronation, writes that details are to be found in books in the Abbey and with the Archbishop of Canterbury, including the enthronement of the king upon the royal seat above the Stone.6

Westminster Palace also underwent a building programme under the aegis of Henry III, particularly in terms of interior decoration and elaborate wallpainting.7 It, too, both internally and externally, was the setting for much of the Coronation, providing the secular space through which the processions moved and where the feast was staged. With the loss of the continental empire under John the monarchy ceased even more to be migratory, and Westminster became the administrative centre of Plantagenet government. To the exchequer and treasury, which had arrived in the twelfth century, were to be added the Court of Common Pleas in the thirteenth and the Court of the King’s Bench in the fourteenth. But it was the palace as a royal residence which was to expand and develop in regal splendour, reflecting accurately all the aspirations of Henry III. Of these developments the most significant was the Painted Chamber.

In all probability this existed in the twelfth century before Henry III’s radical transformation of it into one of the most splendid rooms in the palace.8 The Painted Chamber, which was the king’s own principal apartment and bed chamber, was 26 feet wide, over 80 feet long and 30 feet high. It was in this room that the kings of England, according to the Fourth Recension, passed their Coronation vigil. During the second half of the thirteenth century it was redecorated with a series of wallpaintings of Old Testament scenes, representations of Triumphant Virtues and, above the royal bed, the Coronation of St Edward with attendant scenes telling the story of the Confessor, St John and the ring. This story first appears in the life written by St Ailred of Rievaulx in 1163. It tells how the king was approached by St John the Evangelist in disguise as a beggar, and the Confessor, his purse empty, gave him as alms a ring. Several years later two English pilgrims encountered St John in the Holy Land, this time disguised as a handsome old man. He gave them the ring with the instruction that they should deliver it back to the king and tell him that he, too, would shortly join the company of saints.

What we are witnessing here is the king’s identification of himself with the Confessor, manifested in a programme of decoration in the inner sanctum of royal secular power. Palace and Abbey were linked by the same imagery, but it is striking that the main scene chosen to be depicted in the wallpainting was not the moment of unction, when the Holy Spirit descended, but instead the king enthroned, holding in his right hand the rod with the dove and with his crown supported by the archbishops of Canterbury and York. I shall return to the significance of that, along with other early representations of Coronations, at the close of this chapter.

Henry III’s obsession with St Edward gradually permeates outwards to sanctify virtually anything of any age connected with the rite of Coronation. The king inherited his crown from his father and we have no notion as to its age or appearance, but Henry III saw it as the crown of St Edward. In 1267, when there was a great sale of royal jewels, it was exempted on the grounds of it being the ‘diadem of the most sainted King Edward’. So it attained the status of a hallowed relic and was left as such by Henry III to be used at the Coronations of successive kings of England. The ancient chalice or regal together with its paten are referred to at the Coronation of Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, in 1236, as those of St Edward and, in the words of Matthew Paris, as being ‘from the regalia of the kings of old’. He, on that occasion, equally describes the sword Curtana as being the saint’s, and six years later St Edward’s sceptre makes its appearance. To all of these we can add a ring which had been taken from the tomb when the saint’s body was translated.9

Sometime about 1245 the queen was presented with La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, a highly mythologising account of the Confessor’s life and miracles which has as its subtext a parallel between Edward and her husband. In it the Saxon king has a vision of a royal Coronation church:

And then let the king be consecrated Enthroned and crowned, And there be the regalia preserved In sure and certain protection. 10

This life epitomised what was to be the courtly cult of the royal saint, for it never took off in terms of popular appeal. And what happens during the thirteenth century is a wish fulfilment of precisely these verses. The Fourth Recension works from the premise of the existence of sacred saintly relics in the safe keeping of the Abbey, the ‘royal ornaments of St Edward’, relics so precious that the king must be divested of most of them before he leaves the church after his Coronation. If he retains some of the items at his feast then they must be returned immediately after to the abbot who holds them ‘as of right’. The result of this was that by the middle of the fourteenth century a motley and confusing collection of crowns, sceptres, rods and assorted royal vestments was assigned to St Edward. These were to be deliberately destroyed by the Parliamentarians in the middle of the seventeenth century. All later antiquarians have been able to do since is to try to make sense out of what the various inventories list, and match the descriptions to any surviving pictorial evidence. The results of this exercise so far cannot be described as anything other than unsatisfactory.

What adds to the confused history of the old regalia is that there would always have been two sets, one the royal ornaments of St Edward and the other personal to the king. Out of the former the only item to survive today is a late twelfth-century spoon, silver gilt with four pearls, later additions, inset into the broadest part of its handle, its bowl engraved with elegant arabesques. This is listed among the secular regalia in 1349 as ‘Item i coclear antique forme’ (Item, one spoon of ancient form). It has the unique feature of a double-lobed bowl and is probably the work of a major late Romanesque goldsmith working in London. Such a spoon was made for a specific ceremonial purpose, the double bowl sustaining the notion that it was used for the holy oil during unction, the archbishop dipping two of his fingers into it. Medieval depictions of regal unction, however, cannot support its use in this way, for spoons only appear either in connexion with incense boats or as chalice spoons for mixing a little water with the communion wine. If it was used for either of these purposes, that had been forgotten by the middle of the fourteenth century when it was listed with the secular plate as not for liturgical use. Nonetheless what has survived is an object made for Henry II, Richard I or even John and the only piece of goldsmith’s work executed for an English royal patron to come down to us from the twelfth century.”11

The personal regalia of both the king and the queen were kept in the Tower and only add to the complications. Edward II, for example, had no fewer than ten crowns, and we might well puzzle over the origin and exact status of another crown which appears in the wardrobe accounts of his father, Edward I, in 1279: ‘a great crown of gold with square balas-rubies (or spinels), emeralds, eastern sapphires, rubies and great eastern pearls … which is appointed to be carried over the head of the Kings of England when they go from the church to the banquet on the day of their Coronation’.12

All of this is deeply reflective of a new richness, an expansiveness of a kind we have already seen anticipated in the description of Richard I’s Coronation. The symbolic overtones implicit in that were to develop and flourish in the two centuries that followed. But in order to do so it demanded a new ordo in tune with what were in effect new concepts of kingship and new notions as to the relationship of a ruler to his people. To accommodate the changed nuances called for a vastly expanded ceremonial, one which simultaneously elevated the wearer of the crown and, at the same time, spelt out his new obligations. The success of the Fourth Recension in meeting these demands can be measured by the fact that it has provided a framework for every Coronation since.

THE FOURTH RECENSION

What is extraordinary about the Fourth Recension is that no one seems able exactly to pinpoint the date of its compilation.13 In that respect it shares an attribute of its predecessors over whose dating and first use generations of scholars have argued and still argue. What everyone does accept is that it was used in 1308 for Edward II and that, although it was certainly modified for the event, the ordo was already in existence. So it pre-dates 1308, but by how much? The discovery of a mid-thirteenth-century fragmentary rubric for a Coronation related to the Fourth Recension texts in a manuscript by one William de Hasele (d. 1283) is a strong pointer that the fourth ordo may go back quite a way.14 What the rubric spells out is not a particular Coronation but one in abstract, describing but not naming the various officers present and their role at some future event. This memorandum is likely to have been inserted into this manuscript shortly after 1266, which should mean that some version of the Fourth Recension was in existence by that date.

It is difficult surely to accept that Henry III could have rebuilt Westminster Abbey without having something in his mind concerning the Coronation, particularly when one is aware of his keen interest in the activities of the French monarchy, and that so much of the fourth ordo echoes what was done at the French Coronation. The king was now to be anointed in five places like his French counterpart, and two anthems and three benedictions of the sword and ring were inserted, these last lifted virtually verbatim from the French Coronation ordo. In both we see the ruler cast as hero undergoing a rite of passage in which there is a careful balance struck between the actions of the monarch and those of the clergy, of royal as against ecclesiastical power.15 There is moreover in the English ordo a carefully observed balance between the parts played by the monarch and the magnates as embodiments of royal power and of its limitations. In that there is a parting of the ways, for the focus of the French Coronation was always to be on the sacre, the basis of absolutist rule and one which was to end in disaster in 1789. In sharp contrast, in England, where checks and limitations on the power of the crown were emerging fast during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the focus was on the oath which spelt out the boundaries of royal power. In this way the Coronation was already by the mid-fourteenth century flexible enough to be accommodated within the terms of a constitutional monarchy. In the Fourth Recension there is this enhancement of the monarchy in terms of its splendour and magnificence simultaneously with the ruler swearing an oath in which his power is limited. That curtailment is also vividly reflected in the pre-Coronation meeting of the king-to-be with the magnates in order to discuss the Coronation, and also in the reintroduction of the formal acclamation of the ruler from the earlier ordines.

Although the age of the theocratic priest-kings had long gone, unction was still seen to bestow the quasi-magical power on the king of being able to touch for the King’s Evil, the healing of scrofula.16 That Henry I was the first king of England to exercise this power is hardly surprising, locked as he was into a battle with the Church. He based his powers to heal on the cure of a scrofulous woman recorded in ancient lives of St Edward. The Plantagenets enjoyed huge prestige for their healing powers. Edward I, for example, touched 1,736 individuals during the eighteenth year of his reign. A chaplain of Edward III and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, writes of the ‘miracles’ performed by the king which could be testified to ‘by sick persons who had been cured, by those present when the cures took place, or who had seen the results of them, by the people of many nations, and by their universal renown’.17 In its very early days, when the Gregorian reform was at its height, the royal claim to heal was denounced as a falsehood, but thereafter a silence fell upon ecclesiastical writers, who were content not to refer to something of which they disapproved but not to openly attack it. But this did not erode in any way its popular appeal.