Anointing the monarch at a coronation takes us back to England’s Catholic past, explains former Royal Chaplain Dr Gavin Ashenden
Of the symbolic echoes of the Catholic vision of society in Europe, the coronation of a monarch remains one of the most powerful. The ceremony in which King Charles III is to be crowned has retained some of the external shells of the Catholic construction of Christendom, but with a certain hollowing out of its central essence.
The recent restive gestures towards morphing a ceremony profoundly rooted in Catholic sacramental theology into a multi-faith, multicultural occasion by the King is an example, among many, of this entropic Protestant gravity. But a better understanding of what lies at the heart of this Christian coronation might help explain what the issues are.
The Council of Trent confirmed that the number of sacraments was seven. But there were voices who suggested that coronation was, or ought to be, an eighth sacrament: for at the heart of the coronation lies the rite of anointing. When Elizabeth II was crowned, this part was deemed too sacred and intimate to be televised – it has been confirmed that her eldest son feels the same.
The anointing takes place before the investiture and crowning. The Archbishop of Canterbury pours holy oil from the eagle-shaped ampulla into a spoon and anoints the sovereign on the hands, breast and head. This anointing provides the metaphysical framework for the concept of Christian monarchy and balances and informs the way in which power is exercised by the state.
In the Old Testament, the rite of anointing of David by Samuel, and of Solomon by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, represented the fusion of spiritual and political responsibilities carried by the monarch. The balance between Church and state was always precarious from the time of Constantine onwards, but the New Testament vision of “in the world yet not of it” informed the European vision of monarchy.
The relationship between pope and emperor was always fraught, never more so than when the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV stood barefoot in the snow at Canossa, waiting for absolution from Pope Gregory VII in 1077. During the Middle Ages, the rite of anointing played a part in developing a concept that the monarch was somehow part-priest as well.
The theologian who is credited with providing the earliest template for the coronation of European monarchs was Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims from 845 to 882 AD. His are the oldest surviving coronation rites from Europe; they serve as the foundation of nearly all traditions of European coronations, including those of French kings, Holy Roman Emperors and English monarchs.
Hincmar provided the pattern that unction, the ostentatiously sacramental part of the rite wherein a human becomes a monarch in the sight of God, is followed by crowning, a purely juridical act whereby a man becomes a king in the eyes of his people.
In the case of the King’s coronation, the oil of chrism has been prepared in Jerusalem. It has been consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, alongside the Anglican archbishop there. Having been blessed by a hierarch in the apostolic succession, it is a Sacramental with certain blessings attached to it – it takes us back to England’s Catholic past.
It may seem surprising that unction survived the shift from Catholic to Protestant ritual with the coronation of Edward VI in 1547. There appeared to be no concern that the rite should be abandoned as incompatible with the Protestant project. Unction continued, albeit with protestations against it conferring any charism beyond that of baptism.
Thomas Cranmer’s sermon on that occasion underlined that “the oil is but a ceremony; if it be wanting, that the king is yet a perfect monarch notwithstanding, and God’s anointed, as well as if he was not inoiled”. This “ceremony”, however empty its agents regarded it, continued.
Shakespeare later reflected the Elizabethan ambiguity over the means of legitimising the monarchy beyond doubt. In some of his history plays, the product of the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign, he brought a penetrating spotlight to bear on the fragility of kingship:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord;
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.
Richard II, 3, ii, vv 54-62
Tragically, this turns out to be a delusion: Richard II is deposed and realises that he wears a “hollow crown”.
I know/’Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ’fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave.
Henry V, 4 I, vv 279-88
The current political circumstances do not appear to be as viscerally unstable as those faced by the Tudors, but nonetheless a coronation is always a means of strengthening, presenting and articulating concerns for the legitimacy of the monarchy. Anointing represents the imprimatur of God on the sovereign and a warning against rejection or resistance.
And yet the dynamics and sacraments of holiness are neither magical nor automatic. Even those anointed by God forfeited God’s protection when they broke his covenant. Despite David’s righteous anger at the conjuring of Saul’s death, his end was seen as a consequence of Saul’s breaking his covenant with God.
Much later, the execution of Charles I may from a historian’s view be primarily about his economic misjudgement and his toying with absolutism, but the Puritans who committed regicide justified laying violent hands on the Lord’s anointed because they believed that he had broken his covenant with both God and his people.
The coronation of Charles III will be steeped in ancient national history and even more ancient biblical history. But the elements that provide monarchical legitimacy, while conferring political and optical weight of the most profound kind, operate differently as a means of spiritual currency.
Sacramental and resonant of a Catholic past, they infer a degree of demanding spiritual reciprocity from the monarch and cannot but convey some degree of spiritual conditionality. God may be invoked by monarch, state and people, but He is not to be taken for granted.
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