Long Live the Ancien Régime!
None of the pleasures afforded to historians fortunate enough to live in the only extant ancien régime can match that of witnessing the coronation of the monarch, as we were all able to do on 6 May. The ceremony provided a case study in how the Middle Ages continue to inform contemporary British public life – in this exceptional instance, the early, pre-Conquest Middle Ages.
The basic liturgical template of the rite used, the ordo, was devised at the very end of the ninth century. Even some of the prayers remain (in English translation, as they have been since James I in 1603) identical. This ordo was probably first used for Edward the Elder in 900, or perhaps Athelstan in 925.
Unfortunately, those who devised its adaptation for Charles III were not very thorough in their research. The official commentary, published alongside the ordo, identified Edgar as the first king to undergo it, at Pentecost 973, in Bath – an error understandably parroted in the media coverage. This dating was disproved long ago. But as Michael Gove once reminded us, the spirit of the age is to ignore experts.
It was no accident that this ordo was roughly coaeval with the English kingdom. Though heavily laced with Frankish material, one of its themes was that the king was being anointed as ruler of several peoples, conjoined in one Albion. It was at this point that the West Saxon kings began to be termed kings of the Angles and Saxons, or of the English.
Anointing had by that time already long been the most important aspect of the rite. It remained so 1,100 years later for Charles III, who, stripped to a mere shift, was screened from everything except the high altar in Westminster Abbey as his hands, breast and head were consecrated with oil made from olives grown on the Mount of Olives, whence Christ is said to have ascended into heaven. The antiphon which accompanied the anointing, stirringly set to music by Handel in 1727, and invoking Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointing Solomon as king of Israel, goes back to a still earlier English ordo. The anointing is the most sacred part of the rite because it reinterprets that Old Testament ceremony as a Christian sacrament, originally inspired by post-baptismal, or confirmation, anointing in the early Church. Confirmation anointing was modelled on the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ after His baptism, deemed to have given Him an allegorical royal dignity. Its purpose was to confer divine grace to fortify the new Christian to fight in Christ’s cause in the world, to become a victorious ‘athlete of Christ’. Victorious athletes in antiquity were crowned with laurel wreaths. Penny Mordaunt’s splendid attire, itself novel, perhaps unconsciously echoed this theme; it was not, as claimed by one wag, inspired by Poundland’s logo. An allegory implicit in late antique liturgy was actualised to transform an Old Testament royal inauguration into a Christian one.
The oil used for Charles III was poured into a golden spoon, dated on stylistic grounds to the late 12th century. It was the only piece of regalia to survive Oliver Cromwell’s order to destroy and sell off the redundant crown jewels. It was not melted down, but bought for 16 shillings by a Mr Kynnersley, who, after the Restoration, restored it to Charles II. The devout might detect the hand of providence. The spoon has been used at every English coronation for over 800 years.
The template is older than that of any other major public ceremony still staged, but this means that the slightest tweak is carefully choreographed. For example, Charles was invested with certain traditional items of regalia by representatives of non-Christian faiths, all of them peers. This innovation underlined the king’s professed desire to defend all faiths, while not compromising the unique position of the established Church which he had been obliged, by Act of Parliament, to swear to uphold at the beginning of proceedings – a practice dating from 1689.
This innovation was designed to reflect a religious and ethnic heterogeneity far greater than at Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Leaders of Christian confessions other than the Church of England individually bestowed blessings. More controversially, the homage of the peers, traditional from the 14th century at the latest, had been rendered practically impossible by the 1958 invention of life peers. It was replaced by homage by the Prince of Wales, and an optional pledge of allegiance by the whole congregation and all viewers – a virtual, quasi-Blairite people’s homage to their king, which almost eliminated any distinctive role for the peerage. This might have been presented as the integration into the coronation of the pledge of faith by all free men first attested in the reign of Alfred (871-900). Instead, the official commentary trumpeted it as unprecedented.
There were also changes which can with some confidence be credited to the monarch himself. The singing of a psalm in Greek was an expression of filial piety, but also of his reverence for Orthodox tradition. It cannot be an accident that the coronation took place on St George’s Day according to the Julian calendar, still current in the Orthodox Church.
If the much-adapted rite is pre-Conquest, the venue is 13th-century. But it is a grandiose Gothic rebuilding of the new church in which Edward the Confessor was interred within days of presiding over its consecration, and where he remains. Unless quite exceptional circumstances have prevented it, all monarchs from Harold II – whose coronation was sacrilegiously conjoined with Edward’s funeral – have been anointed close by Edward’s grave, transformed after his canonisation into his shrine. The new monarch sits in King Edward’s chair as St Edward’s crown is placed on his head. The crown had to be remade for Charles II; it is Edward’s nevertheless.
The venue thus transcends the Conquest, and connects with the period when the ordo was first composed. Continuity has always been a major theme of the English coronation, a re-affirmation of an official understanding of a collective past. From this lengthy perspective, the other anciens régimes, all of them now history, look to have been parvenus.
George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of St Hugh’s College and the author of The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? (Oxford University Press, 2021).
