Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

4 Sacred Monarchy

IN SHAKESPEARE’S Richard II the Earl of Salisbury encounters a captain at a camp in Wales. The fate of the king is already sealed and the captain repeats a rumour that he is in fact dead. He then says:

The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven; The pale-fac’d moon looks bloody on the earth And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change; Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap, The one in fear to lose what they enjoy, The other to enjoy by rage and war; These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

(II, iv, 11. 8–15)

Such a passage is a window into the minds of those who lived in the pre-Newtonian age. Belief in the occult and what, to a post-Enlightenment mind, would seem to be the irrational was the norm. The monarch in his kingdom was a mirror of the divine order reflecting God’s rule over the hierarchies of heaven. Thus the fate of kings signalled cosmic consequences as the God-ordained natural order of things had been violated.

MYSTICAL MONARCHY

The three centuries which take us to the collapse of the monarchy in 1649 are those of sacred monarchy, an apotheosis which spirals ever upwards until James I actually enunciates the Divine Right of Kings, informing his eldest son ‘you are a little GOD to sit on his Throne, and rule over other men’.1 This escalation in the mystique of monarchy was to have profound repercussions on the Coronation, first in the phase which runs down to the Reformation, the subject of this chapter, and second in that which was to end with a royal head being severed on a scaffold.

Although the notion of the priest-king had long gone, that did not destroy the fervent belief that he who had received unction was different from ordinary mortals. That was reinforced by the emergence of the theory known as the king’s two bodies, his mortal one which made up the transitory aspect of monarchy, and the immortal one which was his fictive entity, the undying legal ‘body’ of the crown, of which the sovereign was but the temporary representative. On the theory that the king never dies the state depended for continuity in the administration of government. In this way we begin to witness what might be described as a new secular mysticism surrounding the monarchy, one which was based not so much on holy unction but on the precepts of law.2

All of this was to happen during the century preceding the triumph of the Tudors, in fact precisely in a period when it would be thought that exactly the opposite would occur. For most of the fifteenth century the monarchy was in crisis. Richard II was deposed. Henry IV, his successor, was little more than a usurper. His son, Henry V, was to revive successfully for a short period the war with France, but disastrously left a baby as heir to the new dual monarchy of France and England. Built up as the descendant of two royal saints, St Edward and St Louis, it was unfortunate that Henry VI grew up to be a pious simpleton, precipitating a major crisis as to what should be done with a man unfit to be king. The sanctity of kingship was such, however, that it was to take two decades before he was finally removed and replaced by Edward IV, a descendant of the second and fourth sons of Edward III. Unfortunately, Edward IV’s premature death left the country for a second time with a child king, Edward V. The mysterious disappearance of both him and his brother in the Tower opened the way for the brief usurpation of their uncle, Richard III, who, in his turn, was defeated by what was in effect yet another usurper, albeit a successful one, Henry VII, the first of the Tudors.

The turbulence of the period we know as the Wars of the Roses, indeed, was from time to time challenged as the contending parties tried to discredit each other. Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the King’s Bench and a partisan of the Lancastrian Henry VI, for example, denied the Yorkist Edward IV any of the wonder-working powers which, he argued, could only be exercised by the deposed king: ‘Those who witness these deeds [royal healing of scrofula by touch] are strengthened in their loyalty to the king, and this monarch’s undoubted title to the throne is thus confirmed by divine approval.’3

For whoever wore the crown, it was of supreme importance that he was seen to possess the healing attribute, so much so that in the case of touching for scrofula the coin bestowed by the monarch on the sufferer was increased in value as an added attraction. At some date it ceased to be the lowly silver penny and became the gold angel. This was first coined under Edward IV, but whether it was Edward or Henry VII who made the change is unknown. What it reveals is the desire that the mysterious powers bestowed by unction at Coronation were seen to be effective.4

Royal healing powers were, in fact, extended during the fourteenth century when rings made from coins presented by the king and laid at the foot of the cross during the Good Friday liturgy in the Chapel Royal were considered to be capable of relieving muscular pains or spasms, and more especially epilepsy. It was for that reason they were known as cramp rings.5 The practice is first certainly identifiable in the reign of Edward II, and every monarch up until the death of Mary Tudor in 1558 took part in what became a ritual. As in the case of royal healing for scrofula, which would never have taken off but for Henry II’s battle with the Church, so in the case of cramp rings there is a connexion between the development of this new healing power and the fate of the monarchy. It is, therefore, no surprise that it first emerges during the reign of a king under siege or that it enters its most significant phase during the reign of another beleaguered monarch, Henry VI. During precisely the period when the child monarch was being built up as the dual ruler of both France and England the ritual in the Chapel Royal was changed. Instead of coins being offered, taken away and made into rings, on Good Friday a bowl of rings was presented which the king fingered. This new ritual is described as follows: ‘the king’s highness rubbeth the rings between his hands, saying: “Sanctify, O Lord, these rings … and consecrate them by the rubbing of our hands, which thou hast been pleased according to our ministry to sanctify by an external effusion of holy oil upon them”’.6

Fortescue argues that the king’s hands have this magical power through the unction bestowed at Coronation. So what had begun as a simple offering of coins at the foot of the cross on Good Friday was transformed into a rite for a miracle-working king. By the beginning of the sixteenth century attempts were made to link this new royal miracle with the legendary ring bestowed by St John on Edward the Confessor and preserved in Westminster Abbey. If the Reformation had not intervened it is interesting to speculate as to where that association would have led.

Unction for kings from Henry IV onwards was further sanctified by the use for the first time of what was proclaimed to be the Holy Oil of St Thomas.7 As in the case of the cramp rings the saga has its turning point in the reign of Edward II, but it was built on the fulfilment of a much earlier legend. In any consideration of the Holy Oil of St Thomas it is essential to grasp the primacy attached to prophecy during the Middle Ages. In the case of the Oil this had its origins in a legend circulating at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In it the Virgin appeared to St Thomas in a vision while he was praying in the church of St Columba in Sens during his exile. She presented him with a gold eagle which contained a stone flask filled with the Oil, and informed him that this was to be used at the Coronation of unspecified kings of England at some future date. As the story was elaborated, her prophecy was that the first king to be anointed with it would recover Normandy and Aquitaine and go on to build many churches in the Holy Land, drive the pagans from Babylon and build churches there, too.

In its full-blown fifteenth-century version the Holy Oil was entrusted by St Thomas to a monk of the monastery of St Cyprian of Poitiers, with the message that it would be revealed at an opportune moment and that that signal would come from the King of the Pagans. Now when the latter discovered the existence of the Oil through his demons, realising the threat which it posed to him he sent a pagan knight and a Christian and his son to find the ampulla. The pagan knight died on the journey, but the Christian and his son discovered the Holy Oil, taking it first to the German king and then to Jean II, Duke of Brabant. He brought it to England and presented it to his brother-in-law, Edward II, with the idea that it should be used at his Coronation. The Council, however, declined to do so. Nine years later the king began to have second thoughts about the Oil and sent an emissary to Pope John XXII at Avignon seeking permission to be anointed. The pope wisely prevaricated, saying that the king could be anointed but only in secret. Edward did not pursue the matter and the ampulla seems to have been placed in the Royal Treasury in the Tower.

There it remained until 1399, when Richard II alighted upon it while rummaging through the royal jewels. The ampulla was a small stone phial containing the Oil set, by that date, into a gold eagle. In form it would have resembled a late medieval brooch which could be worn, as many relics were, suspended from a chain around the neck. He asked the then Archbishop of Canterbury to anoint him, but he refused on the grounds that the unction received at Coronation was unique and unrepeatable. The king’s faith in the ampulla was such that he took it with him to Ireland, suspending it around his neck. On his return Archbishop Arundel, now his sworn enemy, gained possession of it: ‘it was not the divine will that he [Richard II] should be anointed with it, so noble a sacrament was another’s due’. So Arundel kept it ‘until the Coronation of this new king [Henry IV], who was the first of English kings to be anointed with so precious a liquid’.

There is no doubt that the Lancastrian adoption of the Holy Oil was in emulation of the French Sainte Ampoulle, oil delivered from heaven during the baptism of Clovis, the first Christian king of France. Hence the French king’s style of Rex Christianissimus. Buried amidst the legend of the Holy Oil of St Thomas there is a substructure of truth. We know that it existed in the reign of Edward II and that it resurfaced in 1399. We also know that it was certainly used at the Coronations of Henry IV and Henry VI and quite possibly that of Henry V. It is to be recalled that part of the prophecy predicted the reconquest of Normandy and Aquitaine, and this must connect with the appearance during the fifteenth century for the first time of two squires clothed to represent Normandy and Guyenne (Aquitaine) in the Coronation procession. Moreover, by the middle of the century the Holy Oil of St Thomas had acquired a solemn ceremony of delivery from the palace to the Abbey for the Coronation. It was borne in procession by a bishop in pontificals attended by a cross and candles to the high altar. As it passed the waiting king he rose from his chair. All of this is recorded in the Liber Regie Capelle compiled about 1445–8 and recording what happened in the Chapel Royal. By then it was certainly housed in a gold eagle, the ampulla, and in 1483 Richard III made it over to the Abbot of Westminster with the stipulation that after his death it should become part of the Coronation regalia ‘for evermore’. And by re-creation it has.

In the context of the Lancastrian pursuit of the santification of their dynasty, we might add Henry VII’s campaign for the canonisation of Henry VI.8 As early as 1473 an effigy of the king had appeared on the choir screen of York Minster and the cult could not be suppressed. In the context of the new Tudor dynasty a royal saint to add to the Confessor was a desideratum, and negotiations were begun with Rome. They came to nothing, but Henry VII’s intention, when work began on what we know as his chapel in Westminster Abbey, was that its focal point was to be the shrine of ‘St’ Henry VI, his body being translated from Windsor. The fact that Henry VIII never pursued the project any further should not detract from what was initially to be a second dynastic valhalla, this time of the Tudors gathered around the shrine of a second royal saint in the same way that the Plantagenets encircled St Edward in what was the Coronation church.

All through this century when the crown was beleaguered there was an augmentation and elaboration of anything which would exalt its mystery. Crown-wearings, for example, increased in number. Originally confined to Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, there were now added Epiphany, All Saints and the two feasts of Edward the Confessor. In addition, there was the innovation of the queen wearing her crown on the anniversary of her Coronation.9

To all of this we can add the increasing mystique attached to the regalia in Westminster Abbey and to other artefacts which were deployed at the Coronation. About 1450 a monk called Richard Sporley compiled an inventory of the Abbey’s relics in which the regalia figure. It is worth quoting in full, if only because in the ensuing century these relics alone survived the purge of the Reformation:

Relics of Holy Confessors

Saint Edward, king and confessor, for the memory of posterity and for the dignity of the royal Coronation, caused to be preserved in this church all the royal ornaments with which he was crowned; namely his tunicle, supertunica, armil, girdle, and embroidered pall; a pair of buskins, a pair of gloves, a golden sceptre, one wooden rod gilt, another of iron.

Also an excellent golden crown, a golden comb, and a spoon.

Also for the Coronation of the queen, a crown and two rods.

Also for the communion of the lord king, on the day of his Coronation, one chalice of onyx stone with a foot, rivets, and a paten of the best gold; all of which are to be considered precious relics.10

About 1387–9 Richard II had asked a monk at the Abbey, Walter of Sudbury, ‘whether the regalia of [his] reign are the regalia of King Alfred and take their origin from him’. In the resulting treatise, De Primis Regalibus Ornamentis Regni Angliae, Walter describes the Abbey as a royal seat, sedes regia, one deliberately chosen by Edward the Confessor as the repository for the regalia. The latter he defines as insignia, ‘signs’ of the sacrament of Coronation and the means whereby the king takes on ‘the royal dignity, which among and above all the riches, pleasures, and honours of this world takes first place, supereminently at the very highest point’. In Walter’s mind the royal prerogative and the privileges of the Abbey are indissolubly intertwined thanks to its role as the custodian of the regalia and of the shrine of St Edward.”11

Richard II, like Henry III, had a mystical cult of the crown jewels. Indeed, so much so that in 1390, much to the consternation of the populace, he began to carry them around with him and in 1399 even took them to Ireland, suspending, as we have seen, the Holy Oil of St Thomas around his neck. All of this runs side by side during the 1390s with changes in forms of address to him, the period when ‘highness’ and ‘majesty’ entered, terms of the kind which, up until then, were reserved for the Deity. The word ‘prince’ was also rarely used until the same period, implying recognition of Richard’s role as the supreme lawgiver in a sovereign realm, while ‘your majesty’ paid tribute to his sacral character. More than any other monarch he created a new mystique of monarchy which was to be taken up and developed, one which used language, ceremony and symbolic artefacts.12

Like Henry III, too, he had a cult of St Edward and through that of the Abbey, to the extent that in 1397 he adopted new arms, those of England being impaled with those of the Confessor. In times of crisis throughout the reign his first recourse was to the shrine.13 Perhaps that cult went back to his Coronation in 1377 when the following incident occurred:

It is generally accepted that immediately after his Coronation the king should go into the vestry, where he should take off the regalia and put on other garments laid out ready for him by his chamberlains before returning by the shortest route to his palace, but at the Coronation of the present king the contrary was done, with deplorable results; for when the coronation was over, a certain knight, Sir Simon Burley, took the king up in his arms, attired as he was, in his regalia, and went into the palace by the royal gate with crowds milling all round him and pressing upon him, so that on the way he lost one of the consecrated shoes through his thoughtlessness.14

That loss was made good thirteen years later on 10 March 1390 when he sent to the Abbey a pair of red velvet shoes embroidered with fleur-de-lys in pearls, which had been blessed by Pope Urban VI, with the instruction that they were to be deposited with the rest of the regalia.15

That desire to elevate the monarchy finds reflection, too, during the fifteenth century in the adoption of a form of crown which was imperial, that is, it had a high narrow diadem arising above the circlet in the shape of a mitre. Up until that date such a form of crown was the prerogative of the Holy Roman Emperors. It has been reasonably postulated that we may owe this innovation to Richard II whose wife, Anne of Bohemia, was a daughter of Emperor Charles IV. Froissart’s description of the crowning of Henry IV in 1399 refers to an arched or closed crown, and one was certainly worn by Henry V. One of the earliest representations of an English crown incorporating what are called ‘imperial arches’ is to be found in his chantry in Westminster Abbey, constructed about 1438–52, where the king is depicted twice, once being crowned with what is meant to be St Edward’s crown, and once enthroned wearing an imperial crown with high arches. Under Henry VI the closed imperial crown becomes general and its most spectacular migration occurred in 1471 when Edward IV used it on his second Great Seal. That was not to be followed by Henry VII who used an open crown, although he was to introduce an imperial crown on to the coinage and make use of it elsewhere, typified by his bequest to Westminster Abbey of 29 copes of cloth of gold and crimson silk richly emblazoned with the crown imperial over the Beaufort portcullis. In the series of drawings known as The Pageant of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, made c.1485–90, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI and their queens are all depicted with closed crowns. Although the fifteenth-century English preoccupation with an imperial crown was probably directed towards English claims to France, it was to be repeated throughout Europe by rulers in response to the late medieval legal notion that rex in regno suo est imperator, every king within his own kingdom is an emperor. In 1517 Cuthbert Tunstall, then Master of the Rolls, wrote to Henry VIII: ‘But the Crown of England is an Empire of hitselff, mych bettyr then now the Empire of Rome: for which cause your Grace werith a close crown …’ All of this, however, was to take a very different direction after 1529 and the break with Rome.16

The orb as we know it today also makes its first appearance in this century. Initially orbs, too, were imperial attributes, one being used first at the Coronation of Emperor Henry II in 1014. This orb was a sphere with a horizontal band of precious stones and a cross on its summit, a form which surfaces in an English context on the first seal of Edward the Confessor in use from 1053 to 1065. Under the Normans and later it was combined with the Anglo-Saxon long rod or verge, resulting in a curious form of attribute, a ball from which arose a foliated stem topped by a cross. This is what we see on the Great Seals. Modern scholarship concludes that it was Richard II who was responsible for the emergence of the orb to prominence. At his Coronation in 1377 he is described as being invested not with St Edward’s sceptre (likely to have been in need of repair) but an orb with a long stem and a cross at the top, which must have formed part of his personal regalia. It, or an approximation to it, appears in the portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey. His successors, the Lancastrian kings, took up the orb, changing it to the imperial form of a ball with a cross on its summit. The earliest appearance of it in this guise is in an illumination of Edward IV, and it first appears carried in the Coronation procession of Richard III where it is referred to as the ‘ball with the cross’ and as signifying ‘monarchie’. The king was not, however, invested with it. Although orbs now became part of a king’s personal regalia there is no mention of one for the Coronations of either Henry VII or Henry VIII, although, as we shall see, it resurfaces in response to particular circumstances in 1547 for Edward VI.17

Side by side with the arrival of an imperial crown and an orb, the swords, which already by 1400 played such a significant role in the various processions as well as in the investiture in the Abbey, assume their final form. The association of ceremonial swords with royal authority goes back to the eighth century. An official royal sword is first recorded in England in the ninth century, while courtiers holding what must be the royal sword appear in the Bayeux Tapestry. The sword first surfaces as an item in the investiture in the Second Recension, and there is the record that three swords were carried in the Coronation procession of Richard I in 1189. The investiture sword, which eventually became known as ‘The Sword of Offering’, was at an early date symbolised by the use of a second sword which was called ‘The Sword of Estate’ (later reduced to State). The earliest reference to this ceremonial duplicate being used comes in 1380, significantly in connexion with a king obsessed by status and regal dignity, Richard II: ‘one sword for Parliament, set with gold, with diamonds, balasses, “balesets”, small sapphires, and pearls’. Thenceforth the sword of state, the visible symbol of the royal presence, recurs.18

References to the various ceremonial swords increase during the fifteenth century and the texts begin to provide a symbolic gloss as to their meaning. From the Coronation of Henry IV in 1399 onwards they were multiplied to four in number, the fourth, symbolising Lancaster (of which he was duke), being the one which the king had worn at his landing at Ravenspur.19 Swords were new made for each Coronation, but in 1399 the chronicler Adam of Usk gives for the first time meaning to them: ‘one was sheathed as a token of the augmentation of military honour, two were wreathed in red and bound round with golden bands to represent two-fold mercy, and the fourth naked and without a point, the emblem of justice without rancour’.20

The next text which invests the swords with meaning comes in a poem on the Coronation of Henry VI. The verses list three swords, although four were actually carried:

Thre swerdis there were borne, oon poyntlees, and two poyntid; The toon was a swerde of mercy, the oothir of astate, The thrid was of the empier the which ert our gate. 21

In this scenario they represented mercy (the sword Curtana), estate (state) and empire (perhaps the dual monarchy of France and England). Four were borne at Richard II’s Coronation and again they were given a gloss: a naked pointless one for mercy, two swords representing justice to the temporality and to the clergy, and the fourth, the sword of state.22 The meanings may shift, but what they reflect is an increasing desire to see these ceremonial objects as the embodiments of abstract concepts.

During the fifteenth century the Abbey and its abbots strengthen their hold on the Coronation and any artefacts connected with it. The abbot now goes to the incoming monarch to instruct him in the mysteries of the rite. It is he, too, who is the custodian of the regalia around which ever more legend accrues. He and his monks bear these sacred relics to Westminster Hall on the Coronation day, and to them they must be returned. Throughout the whole ceremony the abbot is to be there guiding the king in the action and it is he, too, who now invests the king with the buskins, sandals, spurs, colobium sindonis and supertunica.