Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

Whoever compiled the Fourth Recension (one scholar suggests Walter of Wenlock, Abbot of Westminster) must have been acutely aware of all these irreconcilabilities. Only when the monarch was enthroned aloft on a raised stage, kissed by the officiating clergy and rendered fealty to by the supporting magnates was he seen as having sovereignty over both. The peers stretched forth their hands to touch the crown, offering it both loyalty and support. In that dramatic moment both lay and ecclesiastical representatives came together in what was a rebuttal of Pope Boniface VIII’s bull, Unam Sanctam (1302), which relegated the secular power of princes to a lower order subject to the universal pontiff.

In what way does the Fourth Recension differ from its predecessors? In the first place, items which had been part of the First and Second Recensions but which had been dropped in the Third reappear. Fifteen texts in all have been added, hugely increasing its length. The longest addition was the special order of the Mass, for which were provided the introit, two collects, the epistle, gradual, tract, gospel, gospel offertory verse, two special orations, two secrets, a preface, a special benediction and two post-communion prayers. This is the first time, also, when an ordo has substantial rubrics with precise directions. These can vary quite considerably from one manuscript to another. Indeed, an indication as to just how complicated the ceremony had become is reflected in a description of the action at the Coronation of Edward III in 1327, the Corounement du Nouel Rei, which only includes the incipits for the prayers. This account enabled an onlooker to follow the action at which they were present.18

There are a considerable number of manuscript copies of this ordo and, as in the case of its predecessors, they vary. Some, in addition, provide notation for the chants, enabling us for the first time to recreate the music. The manuscripts fall into three groups. One pre-dates 1308, of which one, written in a large clear script, may have been used at the Coronation of Edward II, possibly carried by the king’s monk. A second group, it has been suggested, pre-dates Edward Ill’s Coronation and yet a third, and by far the largest group, has a text which may precede or follow the Coronation of Richard II in 1377.

Two of the key manuscripts are fortunately virtually identical and both are in the muniment room of Westminster Abbey. One is the Lytlington or Westminster Missal, compiled by Abbot Lytlington (1362–86), which can be dated to 1383–4, and the other is the Liber Regalis, which recent art historical research dates to the 1390s. As the Liber Regalis was to be the text which those putting together the Coronation of James I in 1603 turned to, I give a synopsis of the action as it appears in that manuscript.19

1 A stage is to be erected at the crossing in Westminster Abbey with a flight of steps from the west side for the king to ascend and a further flight on the eastern side for him to descend and approach the high altar.

2 On the stage a ‘lofty throne’ is to be sited so that the king may ‘be clearly seen by all the people’.

3 If the Archbishop of Canterbury be incapacitated he shall choose one of his suffragans to perform the ceremony.

4 On the day before his coronation the king is to ride bare-headed to the Palace of Westminster ‘to be seen by the people’.

5 The Coronation is to be on a Sunday or a holy day.

6 The king is to spend the night before in prayer and contemplation, seeking the virtues needful for a ruler.

7 The Abbot of Westminster is to instruct the king about the Coronation. If he for some reason is unavailable, the prior and convent shall choose another.

8 On the day of the Coronation the prelates and nobles of the realm should assemble at the palace ‘to consider about the consecration and election of the new king, and also about confirming and surely establishing the laws and customs of the realm’.

9 The king is bathed ‘as is the custom’ and attired in ‘spotless apparel’, not wearing shoes but socks only. The effect must be that his body ‘glistens by the actual washing and the beauty of the vestments’. In the great hall he is lifted ‘with all gentleness and reverence’ on to a throne covered with cloth of gold.

10 From the Abbey a clerical procession consisting of members of the episcopacy and of the convent shall make its way to the great hall. They return in procession with the king to the Abbey chanting and singing anthems.

11 The royal almoner supervises a path laid with ray (striped) cloth from the palace to the Abbey. After the event the cloth within the Abbey is the perquisite of the sacrist and that outside is distributed by the almoner to the poor.

12 The stage and steps within the Abbey are to be covered with carpets by the royal ushers and cloth of gold is to be hung around the top of the stage.

13 Royal chamberlains must see that the throne is adorned ‘with silken and most precious coverings’.

14 There then follow details of the procession. The king is to be preceded by the prelates and monks and himself led by the hand by the bishops of Durham and Bath ‘in accordance with ancient custom’. Immediately before the king the chancellor, if he be a bishop, with the chalice of St Edward. Before him also the treasurer, again if he be a bishop or abbot, bearing the paten. Both are to be in pontificalibus. After the chalice and paten follow dukes or earls, ‘especially who by kinship are nearly related to the king’, who bear the sceptre with the cross and the golden rod with the dove. All of these items of regalia should be delivered from the Abbey to the palace by the abbot. After the regalia come three earls bearing swords, Curtana carried by the Earl of Chester and the two others by the earls of Huntingdon and Warwick. Then follows a noble appointed by the king carrying the spurs. The king and the queen (if there be one) are each under canopies of purple silk carried on four silver lances topped with silver-gilt bells. Each canopy is carried by sixteen Barons of the Cinque Ports, four to a lance supporting it in rota. The fabric afterwards is a perquisite of the barons, the lances and bells of the Abbey, as, in addition, are all the carpets, silken cloths and cushions placed in the church. This was ‘in accordance with ancient custom’.

15 When the king is seated on the stage the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is to consecrate him, addresses the assembled people at each of the four sides, ‘inquiring their will and consent’. As he does this the king stands and turns to face each side in turn. The people give their assent shouting ‘So be it’ and ‘Long live the king’ and ‘uttering with great joy’ his name.

16 The choir sings the anthem Firmetur manus tua.

17 The archbishop who is to celebrate Mass revests himself at the altar ‘on account of the crowd that is come together, lest he should be hindered by it’.

18 The bishops of Durham and Bath shall support the king on either side and together with the other bishops shall lead him down the steps to the high altar. The abbot is always to be in attendance acting as a prompt to the king ‘so that everything may be done right’.

19 The king makes an offering of a pound of gold and then prostrates himself upon the carpets and cushions which have been laid by the ushers. The archbishop says a prayer over him.

20 One of the bishops makes a short sermon to the people while the archbishop sits in a chair before the altar, the king sitting opposite him.

21 Then the archbishop administers the Coronation oath followed by an admonition on behalf of the bishops, to which the king also responds. He then confirms all that he has agreed to by swearing at the altar.

22 The king prostrates himself again before the altar while the archbishop kneels and intones the Veni creator Spiritus. A prayer follows and then two bishops or singers intone the litany. While this is sung the archbishop and all the other bishops prostrate themselves alongside the king and privately recite the seven penitential psalms.

23 More prayers and responses follow, after which the king sits again in his chair and then goes to the altar and divests himself of his robes, except his tunic and shirt ‘which are open at the breast, and between the shoulders, and on the shoulders, and also at the elbow …’ The silver loops sealing the openings are undone by the archbishop, the king kneeling beneath a canopy. The archbishop anoints the king with holy oil on his hands, breast, between the shoulders, on the shoulders, on both elbows and on the head in the form of a cross. Then his head is anointed a second time with chrism. The holy oil is to be in a silver phial and the chrism in one of gilt. After this the silver loops are fastened. During this action the anthem Unxerunt Salomonem is sung.

24 The first phase of vesting then follows, opening with a linen coif for the head, then the colobium sindonis cut like a dalmatic. The coif the king is to wear for seven days and on the eighth a bishop is to say a Mass of the Trinity in the Chapel Royal, after which he is to wash the king’s hair in hot water, dry it and ‘reverently arrange’ it and put on it a golden circlet which the king shall wear the whole day.

25 The archbishop blesses the royal ornaments and the king is vested in them by the abbot; first a long tunic reaching to his feet ‘wrought with golden figures before and behind’, then buskins, sandals and spurs. The sword is blessed and delivered by the bishops. The king is girded with it and then vested with the armils which ‘shall hang like a stole round his neck, from both shoulders to the elbows, and shall be bound to the elbows by silken knots…’ Then comes the mantle, ‘which is square and worked all over with golden eagles’. The crown is blessed and placed on the king’s head, after which follows a blessing and the delivery of the ring. The king takes off the sword and offers it at the altar, from which it is redeemed by the earl ‘who is the greatest of those present’. Gloves are put on the king’s hands and then the sceptre with the cross put into his right hand and the gold rod with the dove in his left. All of these actions are accompanied by prayers. The regalia, it stipulates, must be laid ready on the altar by the sacrist from the outset, ‘that everything may be done without hindrance from the very great concourse of people’.

26 The king then kisses the bishops and, together with ‘the nobles of the realm’, he is led back up the steps to the throne on the stage while the Te Deum is sung. When ended, the archbishop says the prayer Sta et retine and the king is enthroned, and ‘the peers of the realm shall stand around the king and stretch forth their hands as a sign of fealty, and offer themselves to support the king and the crown’.

27 The Mass then follows. The gospel is carried to the king to kiss and he then descends to present to the archbishop the bread and wine and also an offering of a mark of gold. When the archbishop has given the kiss of peace to the bishop who took the gospel to the king, the same bishop takes the pax to him. When the peace has been given the king descends and receives communion in both kinds.

28 The Mass ended, the king descends to the high altar and a procession of clergy and nobles forms to the shrine of St Edward. The Great Chamberlain divests the king of his regalia and vestments, which are laid on the altar by the abbot. The Great Chamberlain then revests the king in robes of state and the archbishop puts on him another crown but returns to him the regalia sceptres. Then follows a procession back through the church ‘with great glory’.

29 The Abbey of Westminster is to receive on the day a hundred bushels of corn and a ‘modius’ of wine and of fish.

30 The sceptres are to be returned to the Abbey immediately after the feast to join the rest of the regalia there, ‘the repository of the royal ensigns for ever, by papal bulls, kings’ charters, and old custom always observed’. A list then follows of the principal officers at the feast.

The text also contains provision for the Coronation of a queen either with a king or on her own. It stipulates that she is to be attired in crimson devoid of embroidery and that her hair should be worn loose and held by a jewelled circlet. When she is crowned on her own she is anointed only on the head and given a sceptre in addition to a ring and a crown. When she is crowned with her husband she is anointed also on the breast and receives in addition a rod. All these indicate that the crowning on her own of a queen is an earlier rite elaborated in the joint Coronation ordo, which elevates queenship on to a level comparable to that of the king.20

Even the full text, of which I have given only a synopsis, does not provide for every contingency as any attempt to restage even in the mind’s eye a Coronation quickly reveals. Full though the rubrics are, they are still not full enough and the ordo remains a play text awaiting its director and designer. Anyone who has been involved with elaborate royal ceremonial knows (I speak from experience) that much can be improvised for a particular event and not even written down, so that the gap between the text of the Fourth Recension and what actually happened on the day could well have been substantial. Between 1216 and 1327 there are only six Coronations: Henry III (1216 and 1220), Eleanor of Provence (1236), Edward I (1274), Edward II (1308) and Edward III (1327).21 Our knowledge of these is fuller for some than for others, but it is a fragmentary story rather like a jigsaw puzzle from which some of the most important pieces are missing and, moreover, are likely to remain so. Collectively, however, they take the story forward. In particular, they mirror the power struggles at the heart of this century and a half of Plantagenet rule.

KINGSHIP UNDER SIEGE

In order to understand the change in focus in the Coronation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we need to reconnoitre back in time to the disastrous reign of Henry III’s father, John, when relationships between the king and his magnates totally collapsed. John had not only broken rules of conduct which feudal society had regarded as sacrosanct, but lost England’s continental empire to France and been locked into a seven-year struggle with the pope over the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, leading to the country being laid under an interdict. Peace was made with the pope, by which the kingdom was received as a papal fief, only to be followed by a disastrous war with France. In May 1215 the king was forced to put his seal to the Great Charter or Magna Carta.

This document set the agenda for the centuries to follow, a foundation stone which saw the king as someone no longer answerable to God alone but also to the law. No fewer than sixty clauses put into writing an agreed body of laws covering every aspect of government and of the relationship of the king to his subjects. The importance of Magna Carta only grew with time, but in a single document we see embodied a change of focus which was to radically affect the Coronation.

The fifty-six-year rule of Henry III was about the maintenance of some constraints on a king who still sought a continental empire, who was arrogant, extravagant and obstinate and whose aim was to be absolute. Both the new Abbey and the transformation of Westminster Palace were visual manifestations of his mania for majesty on the grand scale. His reign was punctuated by conflicts with the barons. For almost a decade, between 1257 and 1265, king and barons were locked in a power struggle over the control of central government. The magnates attempted to force the king to rule according to a Council of Fifteen of their own choosing. Civil war resulted, the king winning when the barons were defeated at the battle of Evesham and their leader, Simon de Montfort, was slain. During this strife the vehicle for reconciliation became the Great Council to which, as the reign progressed, came not only the magnates but knights of the shires and burgesses representing the towns. These began to be called ‘parliaments’, parleys between the king and his subjects about affairs of state. Parliament was an emergent institution which was destined to play a major role in the Coronation’s history. By the fourteenth century Parliament invariably followed every Coronation.

Although there were periodic clashes between the king and the barons, for the majority of the time they worked together in harmony governing the state. That depended, however, on the king observing the rules, the key one of which was to keep a check on patronage, his distribution of rewards and benefits. Neither Henry III nor his warrior son, Edward I, the conqueror of Wales, could be faulted on that score, but in 1307 there came to the throne a king who ushered on to the scene a new phenomenon, the royal favourite. The wayward Edward II’s passion for Piers Gaveston upset the balance dramatically, so much so that it was to precipitate a major change in the Coronation oath.

As in so much about the early history of the Coronation we are hampered in the case of the oath by uneven evidence.22 It is generally accepted that Richard I’s oath was different from the standard tria praecepta. What had been the second promise was replaced by the third one and a new third promise was introduced, in which the monarch guaranteed the observation of good laws and customs and the abolition of evil. The old clause two, which prohibited rapacities and iniquities, was dropped. According to the chronicler Matthew Paris, John swore a different oath again and the young Henry III made that taken by Richard I. Nothing is known about the oath taken at the Coronation of Edward I, although we do know that he swore an additional fourth clause prohibiting the alienation of the rights of the Crown. This we discover through papal letters, and it certainly went back to Henry III, although whether it was tacked on to the king’s Coronation oath or to an oath of fealty whereby he recognised papal overlordship is unknown. What this embodied was the development of the notion of the crown in connexion with the idea of the inalienability of royal rights and possessions by whoever temporarily might be wearing it. The concept of the crown as an abstract entity was common in England since the twelfth century, but in the course of the thirteenth century the impersonal crown also gained constitutional importance.

None of all this could ever have anticipated the revolutionary oath which the wayward Edward II was forced to accept in 1308. This time the whole format was recast. The third promise was turned into an introduction, the two promises which followed it remained the same, but the fourth was dramatically new. In it the king bound himself to observe the future laws made by the community of the realm. The fact that so many copies of this oath exist is an index as to just how significant it was regarded in retrospect. Both the Latin and the Anglo-Norman text (which was the one the king used) therefore survive. In the former, Edward swore to keep the just laws quas vulgus elegerit. In the latter, ‘les quels la communaute de vostre roialme aura eslu’. The word vulgus is not exactly the same as la communaute de vostre roialme, though at the time they must have regarded it as equivalent. By 1308 the magnates were increasingly calling upon the populus, vulgus or the ‘people’ in support of their opposition to the king. What the oath brought centre stage at the Coronation was the king’s relationship with his own people and the rules which should circumscribe it.

What precipitated this? When the king met the magnates to discuss the Coronation the subject of Piers Gaveston came up. He had just been created Earl of Cornwall. In the Coronation he eclipsed everyone by wearing purple velvet embroidered with pearls; he was assigned the place of greatest honour in the procession, carrying the crown. In the service itself it was Gaveston who redeemed the sword and carried it before the king. Worse, he flaunted himself at the feast afterwards as marshal. No fewer than nine chroniclers record the quarrel between Edward and the magnates on this occasion. The Annales Paulini record that he was forced to promise ‘that he would do whatever they demanded in the next parliament, so long as the Coronation was not put off. It was, in fact, delayed from 18 to 25 February, and in the ‘parliamentum’ which immediately followed Gaveston was sent into exile.

What began its life as a mechanism to get rid of a royal favourite was to become the ideological linchpin from which flowed the events of the reign. It forced Edward to accept the Ordinances of 1311, submitting himself to the dictates of the magnates. His attempt to reverse this eleven years later and destroy clause four ended in failure. The Statute of York moved from the premise that a king could not alienate part of his sovereignty to the barons. The governance of the realm was the joint task of the king and the communitas regni, redefining parliament as not merely consisting of the barons acting on behalf of the communitas but actually including them in their own right. In the end, in 1327, Edward was deposed and subsequently murdered. Every king since has sworn that oath.

The catastrophic reign of Edward neatly demonstrates that the ideological bargains struck at Coronations belong to the heart of medieval history. They also explain what happened at the Coronation of the young Edward III, which, as a consequence of his father’s behaviour, was to represent a high tide of radicalism. Two manuscripts record that at this Coronation the Anglo-Saxon election was revived. In one version four earls ex parte populi report the election of the king to those assembled in the Abbey.23 They ask that the prince, thus elected ab omni populo, be received and consecrated by the clergy. The Archbishop of Canterbury then selects four bishops and four abbots to inquire ad populum in the church if the latter will testify to the truth of the earls’ report. If the answer from those assembled is positive, both envoys and clergy give thanks to God and the elected king is led into the Abbey. What all this means is that Edward III was not presented as king by hereditary right, but because he was elected by the magnates and the ‘people’. The Fourth Recension in its final form is not so extreme as here, but it does preserve the presentation to the people at the opening of the action, ‘inquiring their will and consent’.

Although all of this would seem to lead to some diminution in regal status, everything, in fact, was pushed very much in the opposite direction. Thirty years after his Coronation Henry III asked the great theologian, Robert Grosseteste, in what way was he different as a consequence of unction.24 The bishop replied circumspectly, making a clear distinction between the sacerdotal and royal offices. He stated that the king receives through this act the spiritual benefits and graces necessary for the virtues he requires to meet his royal obligations. The reply cannot have pleased the king. Other thirteenth-century theologians, however, are far less cautious and speak of the effect of anointing with chrism as meaning the reception by the king of the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is not known at which Coronation chrism was reintroduced. The chroniclers refer to it being used in 1170 for Henry the Younger and it is also noted as having been used for Edward I, who had a golden eagle made for the event, the earliest reference to an object that could be the ampulla for the holy oil which became part of the regalia. One thing is certain: the Fourth Recension is absolutely specific that the king is anointed in all in eight places with holy oil and on the head with chrism.25

The question which Henry III addressed to Grosseteste, and its answer, had their effect, for the king decided not to be buried in the apparel he wore when he was anointed but in his robes of majesty. For his burial in 1272 there was delivered: ‘one royal rod, one dalmatic of red samite with orphreys and stones, one mantle of red samite most splendidly adorned with orphreys and precious stones, a gold brooch, a pair of stockings of red samite with orphreys, one pair of shoes of red samite …’ When the tomb of Edward I was opened in 1774 he was found to be similarly clothed in ‘a dalmatic … of red silk damask’ over which there was ‘the royal mantle, or pall, of rich crimson satin, fastened on the left shoulder [i.e. his right] with a magnificent fibula of metal gilt with gold’. In his left hand he held a rod topped with a white enamelled dove and in his left a sceptre. Only Edward II was buried wearing the tunic, shirt, cap, coif and gloves ‘in which the king was anointed on the day of his Coronation’, although for the funeral the body was further dressed in royal robes including a mantle, a dalmatic, hose, shoes and spurs, all items which had been worn at his Coronation, but which were returned after the event to the Royal Wardrobe.26