Allan Barton shows how the Coronation regalia evoke their medieval – and Catholic – predecessors
The United Kingdom is unique in Europe in still preserving a coronation to mark the beginning of a new reign. Extraordinarily, given the religious revolution of the Protestant Reformation, the English coronation rite (for it is an English ritual) is a medieval ceremony. It has been unchanged (except for the bowdlerisation of some of the texts and with some of the blessings of objects removed) since the reign of Richard II, when it was codified in a volume called the Liber Regalis, which is kept at Westminster Abbey.
The basic shape of the coronation dates to the late Anglo-Saxon period and may be the work of St Dunstan (c.AD 909-988). The high point of the rite is not in fact the crowning of the sovereign, but his or her anointing – as Gavin Ashenden has observed elsewhere. The Holy Spirit is called down upon the sovereign and the outpouring of grace is sealed with the use of holy oil. The investiture that follows, which includes the donning of sacerdotal robes, the presentation of regalia and finally the crowning, are all to acknowledge that the sovereign has been transformed through the anointing. The use of holy oil is a remarkable piece of Anglican sacramental exceptionalism – as all other forms of anointing were purged from the Church of England during the Reformation.
Medieval English kings received a double anointing: first on the hands, head and breast with oil blessed for that purpose, and then secondly with the oil of chrism, which was poured onto the head of the king in the sign of the cross, in much the same way as a bishop is consecrated. Such anointing, which has Old Testament precedent, was copied by St Dunstan from contemporary Frankish practice. The English medieval kings looked longingly at the French rite, as from the coronation of Louis VII in 1131 they were anointed with holy oil that they believed had been delivered by angels for the baptism of Clovis in 496.
In 1318 Edward II managed to acquire his very own supply of holy oil, which he claimed had belonged to St Thomas of Canterbury, who had received it from the Virgin Mary who had drawn it from her own heart in an eagle-shaped ampulla of gold. When Edward obtained this oil in 1318 he had already been on the throne for 10 years, but his rule was shaky and he petitioned the pope – unsuccessfully – for a second anointing with the oil, in the hope that it might improve his situation.
His great-grandson, the boy king Richard II, was also keen to be anointed with this oil at his coronation in 1377 – but he was also denied the privilege, and the oil was used for the first time at the coronation of the man who usurped the throne from him: Henry IV. St Thomas of Canterbury’s oil, in conjunction with chrism, was used right up until the reign of the Catholic Mary I. New oil was procured as she felt that the earlier supply had been compromised by her Protestant brother.
One of the primary objects in the present English regalia is the ampulla, a golden eagle in which the anointing oil is placed. The present object dates from 1660 and was made for the coronation of Charles II – but it is probably a remaking of the eagle ampulla that once contained the oil of St Thomas. That medieval ampulla with the rest of the medieval regalia was destroyed in 1649, during the Commonwealth.
Before 1649, there were two sets of royal regalia in use. One set was kept at Westminster Abbey and was used for the coronation only: at its centre was St Edward’s Crown. The second set was used more frequently and kept by the Master of the Jewel House. Its centrepiece was the “great” or state crown, of which the Imperial State Crown is the successor.
Before destroying the regalia in 1649, the commissioners of Parliament who were given the task of making a valuation also produced an inventory of them. Although the state regalia was very splendid, when the commissioners were presented with the coronation regalia from Westminster Abbey, they found before them an underwhelming group of artefacts.
St Edward’s Crown (which at the Reformation had been rebranded as the slightly more palatable “King Alfred’s Crown” to divorce it from cultic or intercessory overtones) was made of solid gold wirework with very slight stones set in it and 2 little bells hanging from it. It was valued at only a quarter of the value of the king’s state crown. The queen’s crown – “Queen Edith’s Crown” – was even meaner. It was made of silver gilt and was set with a few garnets and was valued at £10, whereas her state crown was worth 20 times that sum. There were various sceptres used in the ceremony for the King and Queen and rather than being of solid gold as the commissioners had hoped, they were made of cheaper materials. The Sceptre With The Dove was made of wood covered in silver gilt. Another sceptre topped with a fleur-de-lys was found to be of iron covered in silver gilt. A third was made of horn and silver gilt and only one sceptre had any stones in it and any significant gold content, and even half of that was made of silver rather than gold. There was also a collection of garments worn by the king at the coronation, which are described as rich but “very old”.
It was usual before the 15th century for English kings to be buried with funerary regalia and rich garments. When the tomb of Edward I was opened in 1770 he was found to be “richly habited and adorned with ensigns of royalty”, with a gilt crown on his head and gilt sceptres in his hands. There is the tantalising possibility that some of the items in the medieval coronation regalia are underwhelming because they were originally made as grave goods rather than for use at the coronation, and were removed from the coffins of the Confessor and his wife Queen Edith when they were exhumed and translated by Henry III.
Henry III and his son Edward I had a strong devotion to Edward the Confessor and were keen to demonstrate the continuity of their rule with his.
In the coronation oath, they swore to preserve to the Church its rights and privileges that he had granted, and Edward I ensured that his successors were crowned in a chair called “St Edward’s Chair”, which had an image of the saintly king painted on its back.
It would make sense for them to have wished to be crowned and invested with regalia that not only belonged to the Confessor but had been buried with him and hallowed through contact with his saintly relics.
At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, rather than making a single set of regalia, to make the point visually that things were carrying on where they had left off when Charles I was executed, care was made to replicate as many of the items from the former sets of regalia as could be remembered, including two crowns.
At the Coronation of Charles III we see in another extraordinary example of continuity: a Protestant sovereign being hallowed in a ceremony that at least outwardly retains what are in essence Catholic rites and Catholic sacramental, being anointed with oil poured from a remaking of an object associated with St Thomas of Canterbury and being crowned with what are most probably reimagined and deeply symbolic medieval Catholic relics.
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