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Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century. Roy Strong
Читать онлайн.Название Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century
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isbn 9780007397129
Автор произведения Roy Strong
Издательство HarperCollins
Henry III left an indelible legacy in this church. He lies buried on the site of the former tomb of the Confessor, hard by the new shrine which he built, on which he lavished gold and precious stones and around which he accumulated relics of the Holy Blood, a nail from the Cross, the Virgin’s girdle and the stone on which Christ had stood at his Ascension.4 To these his son, Edward I, was to add more, and one in particular to which we must turn our attention and which was to play a major role in the history of the Coronation, the Stone of Scone. Although Edward was overlord of both the Welsh princes and the kings of Scotland, his ambition was to totally subjugate them and bring the entire island under his rule. In the case of Wales and the erection of a network of castles he would be successful. In that of Scotland he would fail.
The Stone of Scone upon which Alexander III, King of Scotland, had sat in 1249 when he was crowned, was taken by Edward I in 1296 during his Scottish campaign and presented, along with the Scottish crown and sceptre, to the shrine of the Confessor. It remained in the Abbey ever since until a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, at the very close of the twentieth century returned it by diktat to Scotland on the back of devolution. By this act a unique medieval artefact was vandalised.
What in fact is the Coronation chair and when did it enter the Coronation story? Modern scholarship has shed a mass of new light on this intriguing object.5 We know that the Stone was acquired in the summer of 1296 and that Edward I had decreed that a chair cast in bronze was to be made to receive it and that it was to be placed next to the altar at the west end of the shrine of St Edward. To make that bronze chair a wooden mould or pattern had to be made. That is likely to have been designed by the king’s master-mason, Michael of Canterbury, who was used to designing thrones, and carried out by the king’s painter, Walter of Durham. In the summer of 1297 all of that was abandoned due to the expense of the war in Flanders. Instead, a wooden chair was made and installed on a low painted step or dais next to the shrine’s altar. This had a canopy or cover over it, which Richard II was later to restore or repair. The existing chair is, therefore, not earlier than the summer of 1297 and not later than March 1300. Its initial decoration was not very complex, with only gilding over a lead white base.
There is no connexion with the Coronation, explicable in the sense that for the next thirty years any reference to the Stone is always to it as a sign of victory. It is significant that the Coronations of both Edward II and Edward III pass by with no reference to its use, nor, which is more to the point, is there any reference in the two sets of negotiations for the Stone’s return to Scotland in 1324 and 1328. If it had been used for the Coronation of an English king it would certainly have been pointed out on one or both of those occasions, but then the kings of England never officially styled themselves as kings of Scotland. It is from 1300 onwards, after the Stone had come to England, that the earliest legendary histories of the Stone surface, different in both countries. According to Scottish myth the Stone was brought to Scotland by Pharaoh’s daughter Scota and it arrived via Ireland. In the English version it was the stone on which the patriarch Jacob had laid his head at Bethel and dreamt of a ladder of angels stretching from earth to heaven (Genesis 28: 10–22). In both sets of negotiations it figured as an artefact attached to the shrine of St Edward and as a sign to the English of a great victory. Nothing came of the 1324 request for its return, but in 1328 Edward III actually ordered the Abbey to send it north. The abbot, in fact, refused. It is precisely around this time that the Jacob legend appears, and it would seem likely that a far more elaborate programme of gilded and pounced decoration was applied to the chair in its newly enhanced status. Although in an inventory of 1300 it is referred to ‘in order that the Kings of England and Scotland might sit on it on the day of their Coronation’ the line is, in fact, crossed. Its earliest certain use was to be in 1399 for Henry IV, but little is known about it for most of the fourteenth century, although its use at Coronations during this period cannot be ruled out. Thomas of Walsingham, when describing the form and manner of an English Coronation, writes that details are to be found in books in the Abbey and with the Archbishop of Canterbury, including the enthronement of the king upon the royal seat above the Stone.6
Westminster Palace also underwent a building programme under the aegis of Henry III, particularly in terms of interior decoration and elaborate wallpainting.7 It, too, both internally and externally, was the setting for much of the Coronation, providing the secular space through which the processions moved and where the feast was staged. With the loss of the continental empire under John the monarchy ceased even more to be migratory, and Westminster became the administrative centre of Plantagenet government. To the exchequer and treasury, which had arrived in the twelfth century, were to be added the Court of Common Pleas in the thirteenth and the Court of the King’s Bench in the fourteenth. But it was the palace as a royal residence which was to expand and develop in regal splendour, reflecting accurately all the aspirations of Henry III. Of these developments the most significant was the Painted Chamber.
In all probability this existed in the twelfth century before Henry III’s radical transformation of it into one of the most splendid rooms in the palace.8 The Painted Chamber, which was the king’s own principal apartment and bed chamber, was 26 feet wide, over 80 feet long and 30 feet high. It was in this room that the kings of England, according to the Fourth Recension, passed their Coronation vigil. During the second half of the thirteenth century it was redecorated with a series of wallpaintings of Old Testament scenes, representations of Triumphant Virtues and, above the royal bed, the Coronation of St Edward with attendant scenes telling the story of the Confessor, St John and the ring. This story first appears in the life written by St Ailred of Rievaulx in 1163. It tells how the king was approached by St John the Evangelist in disguise as a beggar, and the Confessor, his purse empty, gave him as alms a ring. Several years later two English pilgrims encountered St John in the Holy Land, this time disguised as a handsome old man. He gave them the ring with the instruction that they should deliver it back to the king and tell him that he, too, would shortly join the company of saints.
What we are witnessing here is the king’s identification of himself with the Confessor, manifested in a programme of decoration in the inner sanctum of royal secular power. Palace and Abbey were linked by the same imagery, but it is striking that the main scene chosen to be depicted in the wallpainting was not the moment of unction, when the Holy Spirit descended, but instead the king enthroned, holding in his right hand the rod with the dove and with his crown supported by the archbishops of Canterbury and York. I shall return to the significance of that, along with other early representations of Coronations, at the close of this chapter.
Henry III’s obsession with St Edward gradually permeates outwards to sanctify virtually anything of any age connected with the rite of Coronation. The king inherited his crown from his father and we have no notion as to its age or appearance, but Henry III saw it as the crown of St Edward. In 1267, when there was a great sale of royal jewels, it was exempted on the grounds of it being the ‘diadem of the most sainted King Edward’. So it attained the status of a hallowed relic and was left as such by Henry III to be used at the Coronations of successive kings of England. The ancient chalice or regal together with its paten are referred to at the Coronation of Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, in 1236, as those of St Edward and, in the words of Matthew Paris, as being ‘from the regalia of the kings of old’. He, on that occasion, equally describes the sword Curtana as being the saint’s, and six years later St Edward’s sceptre makes its