A coronation miscellany
With the coronation of Charles III only a few days away, here are some quirky facts about the ancient ceremony
It’s less than a week till the coronation now, the first time in 70 years that we have crowned a new monarch, and details are emerging bit by bit: on Thursday, Buckingham Palace announced the ceremonial roles which individuals will play in the service, and yesterday the liturgy which will be used was released. Gradually we can put together a picture of what the event will be like, but no-one, save perhaps those who have been at the rehearsals, will really know how it will come together until the day itself.
There will be no shortage of commentary this coming week, and I dare say I will indulge myself, but as a light run-up, to prepare ourselves, I thought I’d offer some hors-d’œuvre to tease the palette, some interesting, salient or quirky facts about coronations and adjacent ceremony to get us all in the mood.
Realms and territories: what’s in a word?
The coronation oath is set out by statute, in the Coronation Oath Act 1688 which has been amended in small ways over the years since the so-called Glorious Revolution. In 1953, before Elizabeth II’s coronation, the government of Winston Churchill took the view that minor changes could be made to the wording with explicit legislative authority, and this approach has been adopted by the current government. In a written ministerial statement on 19 April, the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Oliver Dowden, announced that the Realms and Territories referred to in the oath will be described collectively rather than individually.
In 1953, the Queen enumerated her possessions, promising to govern according to law not only the United Kingdom but also “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining”. Clearly the constitutional status has changed considerably now. Charles III’s formal style is “of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories King”, mirroring that of his mother, but it will not be elaborated for the coronation oath. There are, however, 14 other Commonwealth realms: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, The Bahamas, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, and Tuvalu. These are all sovereign states, their relationship to each other (apart from membership of the Commonwealth) being only a voluntary union in the person of the sovereign.
The decision not to enumerate the realms may be a political one. Barbados renounced the monarchy and became a republic in 2021, and other Caribbean nations have substantial republican movements within them, so an emphatic reminder that they are notionally ruled by a septuagenarian Englishman who is based in London may be considered unhelpful. But the use of the truncated style brings up one point of interest.
The word “realm” did not appear in the monarch’s formal title until 1953. That year, just in time for the coronation, Parliament passed the Royal Titles Act 1953 which introduced the wording of “other Realms and Territories”. It was not, however, universally welcomed. In particular, Enoch Powell, then the relatively new Member for Wolverhampton South West, who combined a passionate attachment to the crown with a highly academic bent and the training of a philologist, found the new wording “evil”. He objected on two grounds: the first, which seems obvious after a moment’s thought, is that the phrase “others Realms and Territories” was “literally meaningless”. After all, a monarch is defined by the polity (or even the people) over which he or she rules—King of Spain, Emperor of Japan, King of the Belgians—so the new style effectively said that the Queen was queen of those places of which she was queen. This was a redundant absurdity he found repugnant.
But there was a more serious charge in Powell’s mind. The reference to “other Realms and Territories” meant, in effect and by definition, that the crown was divisible: that is, the Queen’s status as Queen of the United Kingdom was distinct from that as, say, Queen of Pakistan, and there was no reason for the two not to be treated separately. For Powell, this was a fundamental, almost existential change in the nature of the crown. He pointed out that, in 1927, the home secretary had made the meaning of “realm” very clear: “the word ‘Realm’ is constituted an alternative expression for the ‘Dominions of the Crown’.” It was a singular word, and it encompassed all of the monarch’s possessions. And this was, for Powell, a fundamental argument. Throughout history, the kingdom, with any overseas possessions, “was a unit because it had one Sovereign. There was one Sovereign; one realm.”
The almost casual change in the bill had profound meaning. It transformed, Powell said, this indivisible unit over which the crown held sway into a “fortuitous aggregation of a number of separate entities”. That opened the way to the possibility of the person of the crown being divisible, that is, separate monarchs; and for Powell, a baleful possibility tended, in his mind, by grim inevitability to become a certainty. And unity had, in a characteristically Powellite manner, a doggedly technical and legalistic side and a romantic, emotional, almost mystical side.
I assert that the essence of unity… is that all the parts recognise that in certain circumstances they would sacrifice themselves to the interests of the whole. It is this instinctive recognition of being parts of a whole, which means that in certain circumstances individual, local, partial interests would he sacrificed to the general interest, that constitutes unity. Unless there is some such instinctive, deliberate determination, there is no unity.
Powell’s half-hour address to the House of Commons, immediately before the home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, wound up the debate, of course made no difference. The bill passed its Second Reading easily and was sent to a committee of the whole House. But it was an illustration of the nexus of hyper-legalism and mystical theology which the crown can provoke in legislators. And it reminds up to approach the royal title and style carefully: you may think “realms” is a simple enough word, hardly distant from “realm”; but in these interstices empires can rise and fall.
Vegan anointing?
The most sacred part of the coronation service is the point at which the monarch is anointed with holy oil by the archbishop of Canterbury. The King will be touched on the head, chest and hands, and is considered so holy an activity that it will not be filmed; like his mother Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a three-sided screen will be held over the King for the moment of anointing and it will be hidden from the view of the cameras. As is traditional, the choir will sing Händel’s Zadok the Priest prior to the King being anointed; it is one of the four anthems the German-born composer wrote for the coronation of George II in 1727 and has been sung at every ceremony since, but the text is taken from a traditional antiphon, Unxerunt Salomonem, drawn from 1 Kings 1:38-40, and has been sung at every coronation since that of Edgar at Bath Abbey in AD 973.
The anointing oil, or chrism, is contained in the Ampulla, a hollow gold vessel in the form of an eagle with outstretched wings, made in 1661. It is poured from the Ampulla into the Coronation Spoon, the oldest surviving piece of the Crown Jewels which dates from the late 12th century. The spoon is first known to have been used for its current purpose at the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603, but prior to that it may have been used to mix water and wine in a chalice; like many items in the regalia, its origins are somewhat uncertain.
The oil is highly significant. Its base is made from olives grown on the Mount of Olives at the Monastery of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem, where the King’s paternal grandmother, Princess Alice, herself a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, is buried. Born at Windsor Castle, Alice was a Hessian princess by lineage; in 1928 she converted to the Greek Orthodox Church but was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia two years later. Sigmund Freud attributed her illness to sexual frustration and recommended that her ovaries be X-rayed to kill off her libido. In 1949, she founded an order of Greek Orthodox nuns, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, and died in 1969. While she was initially interred at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 1988 her remains were transferred to Jerusalem according to her final wishes.
The olive oil has been mixed with essential oils, sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin and orange blossom. It was consecrated earlier this year by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and, in accordance with the King’s long-established views on animal welfare, it is, effectively vegan. It might be thought that oil would inevitably be vegan, but in the past anointing oil has also contained ambergris and civet musk. The former is a waxy substance which develops in the digestive tract of sperm whales, from a secretion of the bile duct, and is used by perfumers as a fixative to make scents last longer. The latter is an oil produced by the perineal glands of civets, a soft, almost liquid substance which, when fresh, has a putrid odour but becomes sweet-smelling when diluted.
It is reassuring to know, then, that when His Majesty is anointed by the Primate of All England, no animals will have been harmed in the preparation of the chrism.
Find me a bishop, any bishop
The coronation is traditionally carried out by the archbishop of Canterbury, who is Primate of All England and the senior ecclesiastic of the Church of England. When the archbishop has not been available, the duty has tended to fall to one of the other senior clerics, the archbishop of York or the bishop of one of the most prestigious sees. William I was crowned by the archbishop of York, Ealdred, because the archbishop of Canterbury’s appointment was not recognised by the pope, having been made by a rival antipope who had fled Rome. Edward II was crowned by Henry Woodlock, bishop of Winchester, in 1308 because the archbishop of Canterbury had been exiled by the king’s father, Edward I. Mary I refused to allow the Protestant archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to officiate at her coronation in 1553 and turned to the bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, instead. William III and Mary II, joint monarchs after the Glorious Revolution, were not recognised by the sitting archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and so drafted in the bishop of London, Henry Compton.
In one instance, however, the monarch had to go far down the episcopal pecking order to find a cleric who would fulfil the role. When Mary I died in 1558, she was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth. The exact details of England’s religious settlement remained unclear for a few months, but it was certain that the new queen would not adhere to the Catholic faith. Elizabeth, advised by her astrologer Dr John Dee, chose 15 January 1559 for her coronation, because it was propitious in terms of the position of the stars and planets, but who would preside was a vexed question. The archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald, Cardinal Pole, had died within 12 hours of Mary I the previous November; the archbishop of York, Nicholas Heath, was a committed Catholic, moderate enough to agree to attend the ceremony but unwilling to carry out the coronation itself. The bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, next in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, had been active in the prosecution of heretics under Mary and was therefore unacceptable to the new queen, while John White, bishop of Winchester, had been imprisoned for preaching an anti-Protestant sermon at Mary’s funeral. Several other prelates declined to carry out the task, while some were suffering from the same influenza which had killed Cardinal Pole.
Eventually the name of Owen Oglethorpe, bishop of Carlisle, was reached. A Yorkshireman who had spent much of his career at the University of Oxford, twice serving as president of Magdalen College as well as spending a year as vice-chancellor. Under Mary he had been appointed dean of Windsor before being sent north in 1557 to the ancient but bleak diocese of Carlisle. The bishop was already in bad odour with Queen Elizabeth. He had been chosen to celebrate mass on Christmas Day in the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, and he was instructed not to elevate the host at consecration, since that implied that the real presence of Christ. This Catholic doctrine was intolerable to Elizabeth, but Oglethorpe refused to alter the service in any way. As a result, the queen walked out of the mass after the gospel had been read, to avoid witnessing the elevation of the host.
It is unclear, given this inflexibility and doctrinal objection to the reformed faith, why Oglethorpe was instructed to preside at the coronation, but perhaps he was the least bad option. In any event, his participation was circumscribed: although he performed the coronation itself, the service was conducted by the new dean of the Chapel Royal, George Carew, a more reliable Protestant clergyman, who did not elevate the host, and read the epistle and the gospel in English.
It was, in a strange way, the reluctant zenith of Oglethorpe’s career. He refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy which the Church of England quickly required, and was deprived of his see in June 1559. Placed under a relaxed kind of house arrest in London, he died on 31 December. Had it not been for that one act of unwilling ceremonial, he would hardly be remembered today outside the precincts of Magdalen College; but we can never choose the cause of our commemoration.