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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.

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