LITMIR.BIZ

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      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

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