Francis Young

How the ancient rites of the coronation survived

The coronation of King Henry III, 13th century (Image: Getty)

It is a cliché to say that Britain’s customs were invented by the Victorians. In the case of the coronation, it is also not true: the 1838 coronation of Queen Victoria was possibly the most underwhelming in British history, even if it did give us the Imperial State Crown and Coronation Ring. It is true that some of what we think of as ‘ancient’ in the coronation rite isn’t quite as old as you might expect. While St Edward’s Crown is from 1661, for example, it has only been used in modern times since the coronation of George V and lay abandoned, stripped of its jewels, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.  

But on the whole, an astounding amount of Britain’s coronation rite has survived from a truly remote period of history. Apart from the language (English rather than Latin), there’s a good chance that a time-travelling Edward the Confessor would recognise exactly what is happening today. 

Yet few have asked why the coronation is such a conservative rite? Why has it evolved so slowly, and why does it still essentially retain its original Anglo-Saxon form? Britain (and England’s) monarchy has undergone radical changes: the Norman Conquest put a foreign dynasty on the throne, the Royal Supremacy transformed the monarch’s relationship with the Church, the Reformation abolished medieval religious rites, the dynastic union of England and Scotland formed a new polity, the execution of Charles I imperilled monarchy itself, the Act of Union created a new state, the Hanoverian succession established the de facto constitutional supremacy of parliament, Enlightenment tastes further squeezed the space for archaic rituals, and the monarchy struggled to assert its relevance in modern Britain. Perhaps most significantly of all, rules of primogeniture were established that meant a coronation was no longer even necessary to establish who had the right to rule.

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