Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong

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VIII: ‘But the Crown of England is an Empire of hitselff, mych bettyr then now the Empire of Rome: for which cause your Grace werith a close crown …’ All of this, however, was to take a very different direction after 1529 and the break with Rome.16

      The orb as we know it today also makes its first appearance in this century. Initially orbs, too, were imperial attributes, one being used first at the Coronation of Emperor Henry II in 1014. This orb was a sphere with a horizontal band of precious stones and a cross on its summit, a form which surfaces in an English context on the first seal of Edward the Confessor in use from 1053 to 1065. Under the Normans and later it was combined with the Anglo-Saxon long rod or verge, resulting in a curious form of attribute, a ball from which arose a foliated stem topped by a cross. This is what we see on the Great Seals. Modern scholarship concludes that it was Richard II who was responsible for the emergence of the orb to prominence. At his Coronation in 1377 he is described as being invested not with St Edward’s sceptre (likely to have been in need of repair) but an orb with a long stem and a cross at the top, which must have formed part of his personal regalia. It, or an approximation to it, appears in the portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey. His successors, the Lancastrian kings, took up the orb, changing it to the imperial form of a ball with a cross on its summit. The earliest appearance of it in this guise is in an illumination of Edward IV, and it first appears carried in the Coronation procession of Richard III where it is referred to as the ‘ball with the cross’ and as signifying ‘monarchie’. The king was not, however, invested with it. Although orbs now became part of a king’s personal regalia there is no mention of one for the Coronations of either Henry VII or Henry VIII, although, as we shall see, it resurfaces in response to particular circumstances in 1547 for Edward VI.17

      Side by side with the arrival of an imperial crown and an orb, the swords, which already by 1400 played such a significant role in the various processions as well as in the investiture in the Abbey, assume their final form. The association of ceremonial swords with royal authority goes back to the eighth century. An official royal sword is first recorded in England in the ninth century, while courtiers holding what must be the royal sword appear in the Bayeux Tapestry. The sword first surfaces as an item in the investiture in the Second Recension, and there is the record that three swords were carried in the Coronation procession of Richard I in 1189. The investiture sword, which eventually became known as ‘The Sword of Offering’, was at an early date symbolised by the use of a second sword which was called ‘The Sword of Estate’ (later reduced to State). The earliest reference to this ceremonial duplicate being used comes in 1380, significantly in connexion with a king obsessed by status and regal dignity, Richard II: ‘one sword for Parliament, set with gold, with diamonds, balasses, “balesets”, small sapphires, and pearls’. Thenceforth the sword of state, the visible symbol of the royal presence, recurs.18

      References to the various ceremonial swords increase during the fifteenth century and the texts begin to provide a symbolic gloss as to their meaning. From the Coronation of Henry IV in 1399 onwards they were multiplied to four in number, the fourth, symbolising Lancaster (of which he was duke), being the one which the king had worn at his landing at Ravenspur.19 Swords were new made for each Coronation, but in 1399 the chronicler Adam of Usk gives for the first time meaning to them: ‘one was sheathed as a token of the augmentation of military honour, two were wreathed in red and bound round with golden bands to represent two-fold mercy, and the fourth naked and without a point, the emblem of justice without rancour’.20

      The next text which invests the swords with meaning comes in a poem on the Coronation of Henry VI. The verses list three swords, although four were actually carried:

       Thre swerdis there were borne, oon poyntlees, and two poyntid; The toon was a swerde of mercy, the oothir of astate, The thrid was of the empier the which ert our gate. 21

      In this scenario they represented mercy (the sword Curtana), estate (state) and empire (perhaps the dual monarchy of France and England). Four were borne at Richard II’s Coronation and again they were given a gloss: a naked pointless one for mercy, two swords representing justice to the temporality and to the clergy, and the fourth, the sword of state.22 The meanings may shift, but what they reflect is an increasing desire to see these ceremonial objects as the embodiments of abstract concepts.

      During the fifteenth century the Abbey and its abbots strengthen their hold on the Coronation and any artefacts connected with it. The abbot now goes to the incoming monarch to instruct him in the mysteries of the rite. It is he, too, who is the custodian of the regalia around which ever more legend accrues. He and his monks bear these sacred relics to Westminster Hall on the Coronation day, and to them they must be returned. Throughout the whole ceremony the abbot is to be there guiding the king in the action and it is he, too, who now invests the king with the buskins, sandals, spurs, colobium sindonis and supertunica.

      This empire-building by the Abbey, it has been suggested, explains one of the more weird transmutations in the regalia which occurs sometime during the fourteenth into the fifteenth centuries. The armils began their life as bracelets with which the king was invested, a fact which is likely to have been lost sight of by the fourteenth century when bracelets were no longer part of men’s attire. But the Fourth Recension calls for armils, and the monks of Westminster must have searched in vain through what they called the St Edward’s regalia trying to identify them, deciding that a cloth-of-gold stole adorned with ‘ancient work’ in the form of shields bearing leopards’ heads (the leopard as an emblem of England is not earlier than c.1200) and vines together with jewels in gold mounts was indeed the armils. By 1483, in the Little Device drawn up for Richard III’s Coronation, an ‘armyll’ is described as ‘made in the manner of a stole woven with gold and sett with stones to be putt … abowte the Kinges nek and comyng from both shulders to the Kinges bothe elbowes wher they shalbe fastened by the seyde Abbott…’ What the monks of Westminster did not know was that the armils never had been part of the regalia but were supplied from the Royal Jewel House. Richard II was invested with both them and the stole, according to Thomas of Walsingham, and bejewelled bracelets were worn by both Lancastrian and early Tudor kings as part of their robes of estate. Along with the orb they were to surface in 1547 at Edward VI’s Coronation.23

      So during a period which was at times one of acute dislocation the aura surrounding the monarchy increased rather than decreased. Indeed kings, whether of Lancastrian or Yorkist descent, availed themselves of any opportunity to gain back some of what had been lost in terms of regal status through the coronation oath of 1308. To that development we can add another powerful force which again was dramatically to affect the Coronation. That was the rise of the laity. Up until the late Middle Ages the clergy who performed the rite of unction and Coronation were not only priests but, being educated and literate, were also the people who ran the government and held the great administrative offices of state like the treasurer and chancellor. The fall of Henry VIII’s minister, Cardinal Wolsey, in 1529 marked the end of the clerical dominance of these offices of state. In the sixteenth century royal power drew upon an ever widening spectrum of society, reaching out through and often across the aristocracy, which had threatened its stability, to the gentry and to townspeople. This, of course, affected the Coronation.

      The Abbey ritual was more or less fixed, but what happened on the days either side of it was open to accommodate every kind of innovation, resulting in a long series of accretions, each with a purpose. The Coronation became the occasion when peerages were bestowed and knights created, both designed to draw new allegiances to the crown and vividly demonstrating its role as the fount of honour. The event itself began to be prefaced by a state entry into London of increasing complexity, a vehicle which recognised the importance of the support to the regime of the City as represented by

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