The English traveler Robert Curzon had an interesting encounter with the patriarch of Constantinople in Istanbul in 1837. He and his companions came with a letter of introduction to the patriarch from the archbishop of Canterbury but were “taken aback sadly” to discover that the patriarch was unaware of that prelate's existence or even of the Church of England. Trying to explain the archbishop's significance, they stated, “From time immemorial the Archbishop of Canterbury was the great dignitary who placed the crown upon the head of our kings—those kings whose power swayed the destinies of Europe and of the world; and that this present Archbishop and Primate had himself placed the crown upon the head of King William IV., and that he would also soon crown our young Queen.” The patriarch was unimpressed. But Curzon's recourse to the coronation as giving prestige to “the great Reformed Church of England” was telling.Footnote 1 The coronation was, it seems, the strongest demonstration of its legitimacy.
Anglican clergymen of all persuasions echoed Curzon around this time. J. R. Barber, a Low Churchman, considered the coronation to be “a form . . . not bound up with our Book of Common Prayer, but still no less an integral part of the formularies of the church.”Footnote 2 According to the liberal Thomas Arnold, it “declares in language not to be mistaken, that this kingdom is no longer a kingdom of the world, but in profession, at least, a kingdom of Christ.”Footnote 3 Frederick Oakeley, a Tractarian, saw it as “providentially preserved to us as the witness of a spirit above our age, and an augury of better things.”Footnote 4
Such exalted views of coronations sharply contradict the historiographical consensus concerning the coronations which occurred in Westminster Abbey during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: George III's in 1761, George IV's in 1821, William IV's in 1831, and Victoria's in 1838. Historians have long assumed that these occasions were vacuous, blunder-ridden spectacles with the clergy firmly in the background. Lawrence Tanner wrote in 1966, “With the Hanoverians coronations became pageants, pure and simple, without much religious significance, and they reached their climax in the gorgeous but theatrical coronation of George IV.”Footnote 5 According to David Cannadine, writing in 1983, such events “oscillated between farce and fiasco.” “Part of the problem,” he claimed, was “the lack of interest in ritual on the part of the clergy, who were either indifferent or hostile” during a period he characterized as “a low point in ecclesiastical ritual and ecclesiological concern.”Footnote 6 In 1990, David Sturdy claimed that “coronation ceremonial . . . was treated in cavalier fashion in the 1700s and 1800s,” arguing that the “nadir” of the rite was “probably . . . reached with the crowning of George III whose coronation was reduced almost to a shambles.”Footnote 7 Roy Strong includes a chapter on the Georgian era in his recent study of coronations entitled “Insubstantial Pageants,” in which he maintains that “an ancient liturgical rite . . . was cheerfully butchered.”Footnote 8
Yet historians’ assumptions do not accord with how many perceived coronations at the time. The word “solemnity” was constantly applied to them.Footnote 9 One newspaper stated of George IV's coronation, “There was a holy feeling in it, not derivable from its mere splendour. The MONARCH was seen by his people receiving the splendid ensigns of power and dominion in the House of GOD, and in the midst of their prayers and blessings.”Footnote 10 After the customary banquet in Westminster Hall was discontinued in 1831, the coronation was considered to be “regarded too exclusively as a religious rite” by some, because “the formal consecration was alone regarded as essential.”Footnote 11 Even radical critiques of coronations relied on the notion that they upheld pernicious religious doctrines.
Although the earl marshal was in charge of organizing coronations, the Church of England (officially the United Church of England and Ireland after 1801) had the central role. The archbishop of Canterbury presented monarchs to the people, administered their oath, anointed them, invested them with regalia, and celebrated communion. Bishops paid homage before the temporal peers, recited the litany, gave biblical readings, and preached. The dean of Westminster carried the regalia with his prebendaries, had offerings made on his altar, and assisted with communion. Throughout the country, Anglican parish clergy held special services, preaching sermons that were often published.
Two main aspects of the Church of England's part in coronations are discussed here: the development of theoretical understandings of coronations among the clergy and laity, and the tensions between church and state that coronations exposed. The liturgical dimension of the ceremonies is touched upon but is dealt with by the present author more fully elsewhere.Footnote 12 These topics are discussed with reference to the considerable surviving archival material on late Georgian coronations held at the College of Arms, Lambeth Palace Library, Westminster Abbey Muniment Room, and the National Archives, much of which has been neglected by historians. The study also draws upon substantial collections of contemporary sermon literature in the Bodleian Library and elsewhere.
This investigation allows us to probe the narrative of political secularization that has dominated recent historiography. Two accounts originating in the 1980s still loom large over any discussion of the Georgian nexus of religion and politics: those of Robert Hole and J. C. D. Clark. According to Hole, the established order ceased to use religious justifications for its authority during the early nineteenth century, substituting “humanly perceived utility” for “divinely imposed duty.” This “excluded religious arguments from constitutional debate” and “removed” the question of “the legitimate source of sovereignty . . . from the agenda of discussion.”Footnote 13 For Clark, “the years 1800–32 witnessed . . . the gradual numerical erosion” of the “social, religious and political hegemony” of the established church, followed by its “final and sudden collapse.” This collapse was precipitated by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic emancipation, and the Reform Bill, and it consigned “the Church's politico-theological position” to “a lost world.”Footnote 14
Where historians have acknowledged the significance of church and monarchy, they have generally argued against any significant alignment of the two. Edward Norman, while emphasizing the church's social role, contended that it was “surprisingly weak politically” and that Anglican clergy “did not, in general, associate the Church with political causes or act as political agents.”Footnote 15 James Sack doubted the existence of a “cult of royalty in late Hanoverian Britain,” suggesting that the Church of England rivalled and surpassed the monarchy as a focus for conservative allegiance.Footnote 16 Boyd Hilton wrote that the nineteenth-century monarchy's “appeal was far more social and domestic than medieval or ‘sacral.’”Footnote 17 For Hilton, the primary intersection of politics and religion was to be found in the allegedly “evangelical” outlook of a significant number of early nineteenth-century statesmen.Footnote 18 Linda Colley's study of the veneration accorded to George III suggested that monarchists’ use of religious language was a case of secular appropriation, while her theory of the emergence of a pan-British identity was premised upon the relative homogeneity of an essentially oppositional Protestantism across the United Kingdom.Footnote 19 Paul Avis writes of how, by the 1830s, “the ancient Anglican ideology of kings as the nursing fathers of the Church” had become “a dead letter.”Footnote 20
The continuation of an unmistakably political and specifically Anglican coronation rite during this period is highly anomalous within such frames of reference and is scarcely noted by any of the above historians. J. C. D. Clark, in the first edition of English Society, did conjecture that there existed “a belief that not only the formal, constitutional and contractual elements of the [coronation], but also the symbolic and religious, were attended to in the political nation at large.”Footnote 21 However, this passage is absent from the second edition of the work. More recently, Stewart Jay Brown has written that “the connection of Church and State in England was expressed in the coronation ceremony” but does not elaborate further.Footnote 22 The present study is both a response to the lack of scholarship focusing upon the religious dimension of the coronation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an exploration of the ways in which the rite provokes us to reconsider the nature of the late Georgian polity.
I. Theoretical Understandings of the Coronation Rite
Despite modifications to the coronation liturgy, the essential elements of the ceremony, which derived from an order devised in the tenth century and translated into English in the seventeenth century, remained relatively unchanged during the period under discussion. Among the most significant of these elements was the oath that the monarch took to govern according to the laws agreed in Parliament and to uphold the rights and privileges of the established church. Also central to the rite were the anointing of the monarch's body in three places using oil, the investiture of the monarch with the crown and other symbols of regal power such as the orb and scepter, the hallowing of the queen consort (performed in 1761 and 1831), and the homage that was paid to the monarch by the spiritual and temporal peers while kneeling. These rituals took place within the context of an Anglican communion service.Footnote 23 However, while the ceremony displayed a great measure of continuity, the ways in which it was understood by both Anglicans and non-Anglicans underwent significant shifts.
The medieval belief that English monarchs were anointed as divine representatives at their coronations had persisted into the eighteenth century. At George II's coronation, Bishop Potter of Oxford preached that the king was of “divine appointment,” as reflected “as well as in our intire [sic] submission to his Authority, as in the reverence we pay to his Sacred Person.”Footnote 24 Up to 1755, editions of the court handbook Magnæ Britanniæ Notitia stated that the monarch was “anointed with oil as the priests were at first, and afterwards the Kings of Israel, to intimate that his person is sacred and spiritual.”Footnote 25 Yet those who heard the latitudinarian archbishop Drummond of York preach at George III's coronation might have been forgiven for thinking that the Church of England was abandoning this understanding of the coronation. For Drummond was silent about the anointing, focusing entirely on the oath-taking and homage whereby “the King and People . . . declare their mutual engagements.”Footnote 26
This idea that coronations expressed an abstract agreement between monarch and people made in God's presence persisted in Anglican sermons until long after the eclipse of latitudinarianism and was still prevalent when George IV's coronation was held in 1821. The preacher at that occasion, Archbishop Venables-Vernon (later Harcourt) of York, said that the coronation was intended “to inspire the Subject with reverence for the authority and person of the Sovereign, and to impress on the Sovereign his obligations of duty to his People,” enforcing “the performance of that duty by the sanctions of Religion.”Footnote 27 Likewise, Bishop Blomfield of London spoke of William IV's coronation as “the formal ratification” of a “contract between king and people . . . on the part of the king, to govern according to law; to execute judgement in mercy; to maintain the true religion: on the part of his subjects, to render a willing and conscientious obedience.”Footnote 28
This emphasis on reciprocal duties precluded any clerical sanction for monarchical absolutism and was supported by a rich vein of English constitutionalism. Preaching after George III's oath-taking, the clergyman historian William Rider argued that “it is our peculiar Felicity, that we can trace the Form of this solemn Tie as far back as the Coronation of Alfred; I myself have seen it in Manuscript . . . and find it to be the Foundation of that which was taken by his present Majesty.”Footnote 29 The coronation oath was thus presented as a guarantee of national liberty. In 1821, Charles Le Grice preached that the rite “is not the pageant of a Monarch receiving the homage of his vassals; it is not the triumph of Despotic power. . . . The poorest subject is a party to the covenant which the King now makes; and if the solemn ceremony . . . be in any part honourable, and glorious, and triumphant, it is the glory, and honour, and triumph of the subject rather than of the King.”Footnote 30
However, no right of resistance was implied. Anglicans saw obedience to authority as a sacred obligation, placing a firm reliance on Providence. The Act of Settlement's disregard for indefeasible hereditary right and Anglican skepticism concerning post-Apostolic miracles made the role of Providence all the more important. Whereas before 1688, the coronation service had hallowed “ye Rightfull Inheritor of ye Crown of this Realm,” after James II's deposition, such references were removed.Footnote 31 In 1761, Archbishop Thomas Secker replaced the words “the gracious Assistance of God's infinite goodness” in the benediction with “the merciful Superintendency of the Divine Providence.”Footnote 32 The level of divine intervention in national affairs that was thereby implied invited Old Testament analogies. In a sermon concerning George IV's coronation, Edward Patteson hoped that, following the “majestic and affecting solemnity, the hearts of this our Israel shall be knit together.”Footnote 33
Providence was believed to act through human agents without conferring divine rights upon them. To Drummond, George III was “the instrument in the hands of Providence to bestow . . . blessings upon us.”Footnote 34 Rider preached that “we are far from acknowledging in Kings a Divine Right of doing amiss, or that GOD . . . would commission any Person to deprive Men of their Liberties.”Footnote 35 Monarchy was not considered an inherently divine institution; most preachers followed Bishop Lowth's principle that “government in general is the ordinance of God: the particular Form of Government is the ordinance of man.”Footnote 36 In Blomfield's sermon of 1831, this idea became a utilitarian rationale for monarchy. He spoke of God having prescribed no form of government except for the Israelites but having “given the sanction of his approval, and the authority of his will, to those which are so administered, as to answer the end of his own providential economy.” The end in question was “the glory of God, and the happiness of mankind,” the means a monarch “under the guidance of law.”Footnote 37 For William IV's coronation, Archbishop William Howley altered the petition that the monarch would “represent our Lord Jesus Christ in this Life” to a prayer that he would “faithfully serve our Lord Jesus Christ in this life.”Footnote 38 This distinction was important: the notion that the king was Christ's servant as opposed to Christ's representative implied the absence of a direct commission, which accorded with the clergy's providential understanding of the ceremony.
Despite such attempts to rationalize the coronation, its critics considered it to embody older absolutist doctrines. Though Blomfield's utilitarianism was inspired by the writings of William Paley, the latitudinarian archdeacon of Carlisle, Paley himself had not defended coronations. In his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), he presented coronations as a manifestation of submission to authority from unfounded “prejudice.” Hereditary titles were prescriptive prejudices, he argued, and were “corroborated . . . by that sacredness which men are wont to ascribe to the persons of princes.” Monarchs could “take advantage of this disposition, by claiming . . . a peculiar delegation from the Supreme Being.” This accounted for the introduction of “the ceremonies of investitures and coronations, which are calculated not so much to recognise the authority of sovereigns as to consecrate their persons.” Paley concluded that “the only ground of the subject's obligation” was “the will of God as collected from expediency.”Footnote 39 His view of the coronation as a groundless superstition was seconded by Edward Gibbon, who wrote in 1788 of how “this Jewish rite has been diffused and maintained by the superstition and vanity of modern Europe.”Footnote 40
In time, the notion that the coronation was an unfortunate anachronism became the almost exclusive province of declared opponents of the Church of England rather than supporters of the established order, like Paley or Gibbon. The French Revolution made loyalists reluctant to criticize any symbol of monarchy, however arcane. In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine had proposed that a new American constitution receive a coronation before having “the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony . . . demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.”Footnote 41 But it was not until George IV's crowning that coronations became a significant target for radicals. W. H. Stephenson, an Independent Methodist preacher, contrasted the Old Testament coronation of Rehoboam, conducted with “no bishops,” “in a quiet, religious manner, and with as little expence [sic] as possible,” with the “silly, childish, contemptible ceremonies that are practised in modern times.”Footnote 42 William Hazlitt, the son of a Unitarian minister, exclaimed of the occasion in 1823, “What does it amount to? A show—a theatrical spectacle! What does it prove? That a king is crowned, that a king is dead!”Footnote 43
To many, the coronation was a vestige of medieval Catholicism with no place in a reformed church. In 1761, this had seemed less plausible. The deputy earl marshal was ordered to invite “all the Peers except such as are Roman Catholicks” or otherwise disqualified, and the king recited a statutory oath declaring various Roman Catholic doctrines “superstitious and idolatrous” during the service.Footnote 44 Archbishop Secker was scrupulous in replacing references to the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification by works with affirmations of the Anglican belief in justification by faith.Footnote 45 When it was proposed that the Catholic Duke of Norfolk should exercise his hereditary rights as earl marshal in 1821, the Duke of Newcastle expressed his doubts as to “whether on such an occasion of the most solemn & purely Protestant ceremony, it would be rather decent, consistent or possible, according to the existing state of the laws to permit a Papist to officiate in person.”Footnote 46 The Duke of Norfolk remained disqualified on account of his faith, as did the hereditary standard bearer of Ireland, Patrick O'Hanlon, and the Steward of All Ireland, the Earl of Shrewsbury.Footnote 47 But, by this time, the Protestant monopoly on the ceremony was beginning to be dismantled. Roman Catholic peers attended the coronation of George IV, under whom the anti-Catholic oath became a parliamentary proceeding.Footnote 48 In 1824, an act was passed to allow the Duke of Norfolk to officiate in person as earl marshal.Footnote 49 One periodical stated of William IV's coronation, “There is so much of mummery, and . . . the worst part of old Popish superstition in it, that we are astonished that our prelates could go through it with grave countenances. . . . Indeed, we query whether the service was at all altered since Papal prelates crowned our kings.”Footnote 50 The radical dissenter Joseph Livesey castigated the bishops conducting Victoria's coronation thus: “You are dreadfully alarmed lest any man should believe in purgatory, or the priest's power to forgive sins, but here you retain the absurdities of past generations, ordained by the same authority upon which these dogmas are received.”Footnote 51
Anglicans responded to such critiques by asserting the Protestant character of the service and endeavoring to elucidate those aspects of it which appeared meaninglessly superstitious. The former concern was strikingly manifested by Blomfield in 1831. He quoted at length the apocryphal exhortation of Archbishop Cranmer, “the first protestant primate of our Church,” believed to have been delivered to Edward VI at his coronation, and eulogized the boy-king's “constant endeavours to advance the glory of God.”Footnote 52 Preaching at Victoria's coronation, Blomfield recommended “the good Josiah” as a model for her, recalling Cranmer's alleged description of Edward as “a second Josias, who reformed the Church of God in his Days” in his exhortation.Footnote 53 Similar tendencies had been evident in 1821. William Collyer, a dissenting minister whose chapel was patronized by royalty, supported Anglican claims by preaching that the coronation communion was “a distinct avowal of the Protestant faith; inasmuch as the King, being a layman, receives the sacraments in both kinds.”Footnote 54
By contrast, in Scotland, where Presbyterianism was the established confession, there was a clear reticence about regarding the coronation as an event of religious significance. Some Scots showed an interest in the ceremonies, as is demonstrated by a 1762 advertisement for the Scots Magazine, which boasted: “Accounts, much more full than in any of the English Magazines, of the Marriage and Coronation of the King and Queen of Great Britain.”Footnote 55 However, public festivities seem to have been largely lacking until 1831, when William IV was strongly linked to the cause of parliamentary reform.Footnote 56 Both in that year and in 1838, Scottish coronation celebrations appear to have been entirely devoid of religious elements.Footnote 57
A tendency of a quite different character was noticeable in the Church of England during the 1820s and 1830s. Whereas Anglican preachers in 1761 generally concentrated on the oath-taking and homage, early nineteenth-century clergy began to present the entire ritual as spiritually significant. In 1821, Patteson attempted to “prove” that he was not placing the coronation “in too grave a light, and magnifying a mere splendid ceremony into an affair of religious and political importance.” In addition to speaking of a “mutual and reciprocal” compact, he remarked that it was “a Church Service . . . of which the usual Litany, and the celebration of the Lord's Supper, form a principal portion”; that during the anointing “the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is most solemnly and specifically invoked”; and that in the benediction “every essential blessing . . . is devoutly implored.” “Here, then,” he surmised, “is a ceremony gravely and considerately devised, not merely to catch the eye, but to make a lasting and salutary impression upon the heart.”Footnote 58 These sentiments were echoed in 1831 by G. W. Lewis, who preached that, if considered as “more than dazzling pageantry,” the service could be “a valuable memorial of the true nature and objects of all righteous authority.”Footnote 59
The order of Victoria's coronation was the first to be widely disseminated in an affordable edition, enabling clergy to use it didactically. J. H. Gurney included lengthy quotations from its prayers in a coronation sermon, vicariously evoking the occasion in his parish church, and remarked that its liturgy was “much less known and read than it deserves to be.” He gave a Protestant emphasis by quoting the words accompanying the delivery of the Bible to the monarch, stating that “if that is the book for princes to rule by, it is the book for subjects to serve by.”Footnote 60 Samuel Allen cited the liturgy in his sermon, too, regretting that it had not been distributed among Sunday school children, who would thereby “have seen at once the folly of those, who . . . ventured to pronounce it ‘an idle and barbarous pageant,’ —‘an unmeaning ceremony,’ and the like.”Footnote 61
Tractarians also presented the coronation as meaningful, as part of their argument that Anglicanism had preserved neglected Catholic truths. “If Balaam's ass instructed Balaam,” asked John Henry Newman, “what is there fairly to startle us in the Church's doctrine . . . that oil may be blessed for spiritual purposes, as is still done in our Church in the case of a coronation?”Footnote 62 Oakeley saw “our noble Coronation Service” as exemplifying the “plain sanction” that “the Reformers” had given to sacramental worship. It was “valuable as recognizing the primitive practice of anointing,” in using “the word ‘altar’ for the more unassuming one adopted in the Prayer Book,” and because of “the offerings of the Sovereign, indicating the homage due to God's Church from the great of this world.”Footnote 63 Even the fiercest opponents of Tractarianism began to view the coronation sacramentally. For Arnold, the central act of Victoria's coronation was her receiving communion, which he saw as “our pledge, that the law and government of our country shall be Christian.”Footnote 64
By 1838, the belief that coronations represented much more than a compact was gaining ground. Despite his utilitarian leanings, Bishop Blomfield was not immune from this trend when preaching at Victoria's coronation: “The diadem, which encircles the brow of royalty, may be placed there by human hands, and after the letter of human compacts: but it bespeaks a majesty of a more exalted transcendent kind than any human agency can confer. As to the person, who is entitled to our allegiance, man's ordinances may be our guides; but the right motive to loyal obedience is this, that the power, which claims it, is of God.”Footnote 65 The shift did not go unnoticed. Lord Stanhope remarked that “in former days the Bishop of London would have been impeached for such a sermon as the one he preached at the Coronation.”Footnote 66 Philip Harwood, a Unitarian minister, noted the change of tone in Blomfield's sermons between 1831 and 1838: “From utilitarian, this most versatile prelate has become theocratic. Instead of Archdeacon Paley, we have Archbishop Laud. . . . The ceremony which, in 1831, was a mere ceremony, a thing ‘intended to remind’—has now grown into a reality, an investiture ‘by the hands of God's minister.’”Footnote 67
Robert Hole has argued that, for clergy and laity, “the process of secularisation in constitutional thought was effectively complete” by the 1830s, a process in which Paley “played a crucial role.”Footnote 68 But, as far as coronations were concerned, the opposite was the case. By responding to critiques of the service, the clergy, while still rejecting any notion of divine right, had rediscovered the ancient notion that coronations were intended to anoint the monarch's person. This might now be phrased in Protestant language and with deference to English constitutional sensibilities, but it was an anointing nonetheless. For Anglicans, the coronation became a tangible expression of the priority of “providential economy” over “political economy.”
II. Church-State Relations at Coronations
William Ewart Gladstone wrote in the fourth edition of The State in its Relations with the Church that “the most vivid exemplification of the nationality of the Church, and of the character of its connection with the State in England, is found in . . . the coronation.” After describing the ceremony, he stated:
Thus does the chief of the first estate of the realm, surrounded by its members, recognise and confirm, on the part of the whole body of the realm, the sovereign function of the head over that realm and over himself. Thus is the double character, the composite idea, of the Church, as catholic and as national, fulfilled in this most majestic office, of which it may with truth be said, that the gorgeous trappings, and even the magnificent pile within which it is performed, are far less imposing than the grandeur of its language, and the profound and affecting truth of its idea.Footnote 69
For Gladstone, the coronation illustrated the harmonious interdependence of church and state. Sermon literature and the coronation liturgy portrayed it in a similar light. However, this ideal was rarely reflected in practice. Throughout the period under discussion, the coronation was contested ground between clergy and governmental functionaries.
Many disputes concerned the extent of the privileges of Westminster Abbey, which, on the basis of an Elizabethan charter, claimed extensive jurisdiction over all that occurred in the royal peculiar. The involvement of officials in preparing the abbey for coronations created tensions. Believing their privileges had been infringed at two royal funerals during the 1750s, abbey clergy became particularly determined to guard them and were openly defiant during preparations for George III's coronation.Footnote 70 Abbey servants took “Mony [sic] at the Doors for the admittance of People during the building of the Scaffolding under a pretence of shewing the Tombs,” causing workmen to be “interupted [sic] & hinder'd from Working,” resulting in them “several Times Rebeling and refusing to work by throwing down their Tools unless their wages were advanced.” This prompted the deputy earl marshal, Lord Effingham, to request a Privy Council order granting him “the full Power of what belongs to the Choir at Westminster and also to be able to secure all the Doors going into it.” Despite protests from abbey clergy, they were ordered to relinquish their keys and not to keep any duplicates or break any locks. However, when a padlock was installed in the choir, the “Dean Preb[endaries] Vergers & Smiths forced [it] open” after coming “in Procession from their Chapter Room.” The abbey clergy then tried to sabotage a public rehearsal of the coronation music, telling the public that they “would lock up the Doors on that Day” and ordering workmen “to begin working with their Hammers before the Music was quite finished.”Footnote 71 This obstructive behavior had long-lasting consequences. The keys to the abbey were confiscated from its clergy before each nineteenth-century coronation as a matter of course.Footnote 72
By the 1820s, Westminster Abbey possessed an irascible champion of its rights in the person of its dean, John Ireland. Born in the year of George III's coronation, he was politically engaged, frequently publishing reproving letters to statesmen with whom he took issue. Vindicae Regiæ (1797) was a monarchist counterblast to remarks by the republican Earl Stanhope; the Letters of Fabius (1801) denounced William Pitt's proposed measures for Catholic emancipation; and his Letter to Henry Brougham (1818) was a spirited retort to accusations of misconduct in his financial management of a school.Footnote 73 Ireland's sparring with politicians continued during the preparations for George IV's coronation in the summer of 1820. Sir Matthew Ridley, MP for Newcastle, told the House of Commons that some old trees outside the abbey had been felled “for the purpose of creating a space intended to be let at a high price to persons who might be anxious to view the coronation,” which was “a reason disgraceful to the dean and chapter.”Footnote 74 Ireland wrote to Ridley to refute this allegation, asserting that it was a matter “with which . . . no member of Parliament has any just concern.”Footnote 75
Ireland was similarly forceful in dealing with the earl marshal and the Board of Works. After being informed that the government intended to occupy the entire choir, vaultings and transepts, he and the chapter petitioned the Privy Council, asking that “the Ceremony may be performed without prejudice to their ancient and acknowledged Privileges, and without the entire exclusion of them and their Families, in favour of Strangers, from the Choir of their own Church.” This claim was found “impossible to admit . . . without injury to His Majesty's Service.”Footnote 76 Ireland also wrote to the Lord President decrying the prospect of “the sale of meats & drinks within the Abbey” and requesting him “to protect the Church from this violation of its sanctity.” He remarked that “the degrading manner, in which the Statuteable custody of this Church has been lately wrested out of the hand of the D[ean] & C[hapter] reduces me to supplicate what my own authority ought to have been sufficient to order.”Footnote 77 This was to no avail.Footnote 78 There was an underlying threat of violence throughout proceedings. Ireland complained that workmen of the Board of Works had “stopped” him “at the West door, crossing their sticks and refusing me, for a while, admittance to my own Church.”Footnote 79 Following the coronation, he told Lord Sidmouth that if the earl marshal retained the abbey keys beyond the agreed time, it would “be altogether illegal, & unquestionably we shall resume the possession of the Church by force, if necessary.”Footnote 80 In another letter to Sidmouth, Ireland even criticized the king's order that the coronation Bible be retained by the bishop of Ely instead of the abbey:
If the King were informed of all the truth, his gracious mind would not cast an indignity on the humblest of his subjects; but while partial statements are made . . . I have only to obey, with whatever pain it may be attended. . . . Now, for the first time, the Dean & Chapter are accused of setting up new pretensions, & certain officers of the Crown are forward in imputing evil motives to the Dean & Chapter, though they only wish to have the same consideration shewn to them at present, which was graciously bestowed on their predecessors at the coronation of every other sovereign of the House of Brunswick.Footnote 81
According to the bishop, Ireland considered the Bible “his property because it had been placed upon the Altar; it is obvious to remark that upon the same grounds he might have laid claim to all the Regalia, which was also deposited upon the Altar.”Footnote 82
In 1831 and 1838, Ireland presented further petitions for better seating only to be told again that the desired seats were required for “the Public Service.”Footnote 83 He refused to admit workmen to prepare the abbey for Victoria's coronation during Holy Week due to “the peculiar services of the Church during this week,” remarking that “the publick will look, with much disapprobation, on proceeding with the works . . . when enlarged congregations are in the habit of attending.”Footnote 84 Ireland was too ill to participate in Victoria's coronation, and the struggle to maintain the abbey's privileges was taken up by John Thynne, the sub-dean. Thynne sent two representations to the lord chamberlain insisting on the abbey's retention of the inkstand used by Victoria to sign the coronation oath.Footnote 85 This claim was refused, and Thynne lamented that this “no doubt will lead to further encroachments.”Footnote 86 After the Bible used at the coronation was mistakenly given to a bishop, a series of strongly worded letters ordering its return to the government issued from the Office of Woods and Forests, which, Thynne complained, “only shew a spirit of animosity towards the D[ean] & C[hapter].”Footnote 87
Bishops could show a similar zeal for maintaining ancient privileges. In 1821, the bishop of Bath and Wells stated that he considered himself “bound in justice to myself, & Successors, not to forego” any ancient right, while the bishop of Durham expressed his firm intention of “transmitting to his successors in the See the right which he received” to support the king at the ceremony.Footnote 88 Nonepiscopal clergy who believed they held a “dignity” entitling them to attend were also insistent. According to Archbishop Manners-Sutton's secretary, the master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, “prosecuted his Claim with vigor in 1821. . . . He was very irate because I did not consider him within the rule!”Footnote 89
It was perhaps this overarching concern for rights and precedents which induced the clergy to retain many medieval outward forms long after they had rejected the beliefs that had originally accompanied them. In 1761, Archbishop Secker insisted on restoring the ancient practice of bishops kissing the monarch's cheek at the homage since the option of kissing the hand was not present “in any Coronation Office, till that of W[illiam] & M[ary].” Secker also wrote that “at the anointing of the King, I dipped my Thumb in the Spoon: finding it so appointed in the old Office of Coronation in Seldens Titles of Honour, & in other Offices of the Church of Rome, where anointing is used.”Footnote 90 This was despite his earlier condemnation of the Roman practice of anointing the sick as “a ceremony which hath long been useless, and, by leading persons into superstitious fancies, might be hurtful.”Footnote 91 The archbishop also prolonged the use of the cope, a vestment now reserved for coronations, by ordering one for himself, which he “carefully laid by for my Successors.”Footnote 92
The revival of the coronation after an interval of sixty years in 1821 presented certain practical difficulties, some of which had been anticipated by George III. John William Whittaker, one of Archbishop Manners-Sutton's chaplains, related this in a letter to his mother:
The late King told [Manners-Sutton] that there were a prodigious number of mistakes made by Archb[isho]p Secker at his coronation, and bade him to be on his guard, “as another coronation will in all probability occur during your primacy.” He also told him, that the greatest difficulty would be to find two Bishops who can chant the Litany and so [it] proves: so His Grace has made arrangements fo[r] [t]he two Bishops to read instead of chan[t] that part of the Service.Footnote 93
George III's anxiety had been justified. The coronation required the Anglican clergy to perform a series of actions and to wear vestments that diverged from the contemporary Anglican liturgical standard. Nevertheless, in 1821, the dean and chapter of Westminster wore embroidered copes of purple, crimson, and gold.Footnote 94 Moreover, this predilection for a Catholic aesthetic was also evident in the 1830s. A temporary “Gothic . . . Gilt Altar frame” and a “Gothic Chair” for the archbishop of Canterbury were made in 1831.Footnote 95 In 1838, the choir sang the pre-Reformation Gospel acclamation, “Glory be to thee, O Lord,” as well as an anthem commissioned from William Knyvett, “This is the Day,” described as “somewhat in the style of the modern mass,”Footnote 96 In 1831, Howley was faced with a challenge when William IV, who had initially desired to have no coronation ceremony, told the earl marshal that “he did not approve of the Bishops performing their Homages before the Peers down to the Viscounts inclusive,” but “he would not interfere to make any alteration.”Footnote 97 He nevertheless attempted to alter the manner of this homage, directing that the bishops should not kiss him. Howley seemed “to consider that part of the Ceremony as indispensable,” and, when he “remonstrated,” the king “knocked under” and the practice was retained.Footnote 98 The overall effect was not lost on observers accustomed to Catholic ritual. The French ambassador told Queen Victoria that he was “so surprised ‘que les Cérémonies Protestantes fussent aussi belles’ [that Protestant ceremonies were as beautiful]; and that he had seen Napoleon's Coronation when the Pope officiated, and that it had not been so touching or ‘si imposant’ [so imposing].”Footnote 99
The irony that the outward aspects of the rite increasingly diverged from its Protestant liturgy and accompanying preaching reflected contemporary understandings of Anglicanism. Coronations afforded the ideal opportunity to present the Church of England as a venerable institution promoting reformed doctrines. Edward Rice described how the doctrinal purity and moderation of the church had “infused into it, through the lapse of centuries, a strength which promises to render it imperishable, as the sacred stem which gave it birth.”Footnote 100 The assumption was that the Protestantism of the church was a function of its antiquity, a product of accumulated wisdom. Hence, a post-Reformation liturgy could be encased within pre-Reformation ceremonial, and the clergyman George Croly was not alone in hymning a “Ritual bequeathed through a thousand years.”Footnote 101
Besides functioning as a demonstration of the church's antiquity, many clergy saw coronations as a valuable opportunity to castigate those in authority. Archbishop Venables-Vernon had opposed George IV's divorce bill in the House of Lords, bemoaning the “introduction into every family, of . . . odious and disgusting details regarding it” and asserting that there was “no mention of such a thing as religious expediency to justify such a proceeding” in the Bible.Footnote 102 The king was affronted by these sentiments and “turned his back upon” Venables-Vernon at the following court levée.Footnote 103 Despite this, Venables-Vernon was asked to deliver a sermon at George's coronation by Archbishop Manners-Sutton, who asserted his right to appoint the preacher.Footnote 104 Venables-Vernon used the platform he was thus afforded to give a stern warning against court immorality: “If . . . those who surround the Throne . . . are worthless and wicked, the influence of their example will extend itself in every direction, and profligacy, originating in this source, will be rapidly diffused though all the gradations of Society. . . . [H]ow, indeed, shall the laws of man be enforced in a Community where the Laws of God are set at defiance?”Footnote 105
This time, the king did not demur at the archbishop's admonitions. His private secretary, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield, wrote to Venables-Vernon the day after the coronation, “His Majesty continues to express His sense of the value of your Grace's Discourse upon the august solemnity of yesterday.”Footnote 106 Patteson remarked of the sermon, “Happy that prince, whose subject fears not thus to instruct him: happy that Nation, whose Sovereign is willing so to be instructed.”Footnote 107 On occasion, extremes of disloyalty were evident. Following the ceremony, an informer wrote to Lord Sidmouth recounting a sermon given on coronation day by his Leicestershire vicar, Matthew Browne, who had proclaimed, “If the King will have no law but his own Will; if he will not retrench his extravagancies and relieve his subjects from distress & taxation, let him be assured that we shall see those scenes which took place in modern France from the same causes & which were applauded by many among us.”Footnote 108 Silence could also be a conspicuous sign of dissatisfaction. In 1831, it was observed that the custom of publishing sermons concerning coronations appeared “to be dying out” on account of William IV being considered “the people's king” as opposed to “the priests’ king.”Footnote 109 The proliferation of coronation sermons for Victoria proved this judgement to be premature, indicating that such publications were not formulaic propaganda but rather a contingent phenomenon.Footnote 110
That recalcitrant methods were consistently employed by clergy in this period suggests an underlying insecurity. The anticlericalism of some politicians was alarming to many clergy, as were the prospects of Catholic emancipation and the erosion of their financial privileges. After Matthew Ridley's allegations concerning Westminster Abbey's felling of trees in 1821, James Webber, an abbey prebendary and friend of the MP, wrote to him of how “it is not fair . . . in these turbulent times, to set us up as objects of scorn w[hic]h we do not deserve.”Footnote 111 This consciousness of the turbulence of the times produced turbulent priests.
The challenge which Catholic emancipation posed to the church was manifested tangibly in the alacrity with which Roman Catholics began to appropriate coronations in the 1830s. In 1821, George IV had made a post-coronation visit to Dublin, where he was widely feted on account of a misconception that he favored Catholic emancipation.Footnote 112 The realization of Catholic hopes in the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 precipitated greater Catholic interest in the coronation rite. An Irish Roman Catholic petitioning to be a hereditary standard bearer at William IV's coronation wrote that, whereas his family had been excluded from previous coronations on account of their religion, “by Catholic Emancipation these Barriers are broken down which Eneables [sic] you as a Roman Catholic to Enherit [sic] your right.”Footnote 113 Several Roman Catholic bishops attended the ceremony wearing “the Roman prelatic hat, and gown, with the purple collar and stockings,” which was believed to be their “first public appearance . . . in the proper costumes of their rank” for 140 years. This “attracted curiosity, but was treated with respect.”Footnote 114 On the same day, Roman Catholics in Newcastle held a service at which their priest “invoked the blessings of heaven on this beloved country, and its patriotic and reforming sovereign, and the coronation anthem was sung.”Footnote 115
The laying of the foundation stone of the Roman Catholic church of St. Mary's, Derby, was planned to coincide with Victoria's coronation. At the service, George Spencer, a convert from Anglicanism, preached that this choice of day was apposite on the basis that Roman Catholics were capable of greater loyalty than his former coreligionists, whom he addressed: “Your very existence, as a Church, depends on a principle of disobedience and insubordination. Talk not, then, to us of submission to divine authority in princes, you, who have rebelled against the far more highly sanctioned divine authority of those, to whom the son of God has said: ‘He that hears you, hears me.’”Footnote 116
Spencer's emphasis on Anglican “disobedience and insubordination” was appropriate, albeit not in the ultramontane sense he intended. For the attitude of the clergy to state officials at coronations belies the common assumption that the church had been reduced to a “department of state” by the 1830s. The clergy were usually compelled to compromise, but the constant pressure they applied must have prevented the state from drastically diminishing their role in the rite. The survival of most of the ancient elements of the abbey service stood in stark contrast to the complete abandonment of the coronation banquet after 1821.
III. Conclusion
The early nineteenth century was not a propitious time for European coronations. France witnessed its last sacre in 1825, the Netherlands and Belgium opted for secular oath-takings when inaugurating their constitutional monarchies, and the last Danish coronation would take place in 1840. Some had predicted that Britain, which had already abandoned such practices as touching for scrofula and royal foot-washing during the eighteenth century, would follow suit. James Mill wrote of George IV's coronation, “The folly of it, by the ostentation of the present performance, will become so apparent, as probably to prevent a repetition.”Footnote 117 Yet William IV's attempt to make the coronation oath a parliamentary proceeding in 1831 failed, and the English coronation rite has survived relatively intact. This invites the question: why did Britain not desacralize its monarchy in the early nineteenth century?
The classic Victorian answer to this question was given by Walter Bagehot. In The English Constitution (1867), he argued that, by transcending parliamentary complexities, monarchy had provided “an intelligible government” commanding the respect of an ignorant populace. He commented, “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”Footnote 118 The implication was that, as the masses became better educated, monarchy would cease to be useful. Bagehot's constitution had no place for the monarch's ecclesiastical role or the part of Anglican clergy in coronations. His positioning of monarchy in the realm of popular culture, as opposed to organized religion, was highly influential throughout the twentieth century as sociological explanations were sought for the monarchy's resilience. In 1953, Shils and Young saw the coronation as “an act of national communion,” in which the church merely “served the vague religiosity of the mass of the British people without raising issues of ecclesiastical jurisdiction or formal representation.”Footnote 119
However, the church played a far more active role in the modern history of the coronation. Between 1761 and 1838, Anglican clergy developed a formidable response to arguments that the ceremony was an outmoded superstition. They placed coronations firmly in the context of hegemonic notions of “providential economy” and consensual constitutionalism and posited a coherent sacramental symbolism in the anointing, investiture, and communion. Successive archbishops of Canterbury made the coronation liturgy distinctively Protestant and Anglican while retaining the outward appearances of the past to emphasize their church's venerability. In their dealings with the state, clergy tenaciously defended their ancient rights in relation to the ceremony and were far from reticent in using the occasion to question authority. The picture emerges of a church neither Erastian nor lethargic.
Furthermore, the close ties between the monarchy and the church exhibited at coronations presented the latter with significant opportunities to exert an influence over society and promote ecclesiastical interests above those of secular authorities. This offers a significant challenge to the conventional view that the early nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the political strength of Anglicanism, as propounded by Hole, Clark, and Avis. Moreover, it suggests that the monarchy continued to derive its legitimacy from religious sources, qualifying Hilton and Sack's insistence that monarchy had become secularized. In this sense, a sacral monarchy persisted, albeit not one that conformed to seventeenth-century absolutist archetypes. Additionally, the exclusive Anglicanism of the coronation militated against the extension of the kind of pan-British, pan-Protestant identity postulated by Colley. It is noteworthy that there is not a single Scottish sermon concerning a coronation from this period in the National Library of Scotland. Scotland remained aloof from English developments, while Irish and English Catholics made some attempts to claim the ceremony as their own. Nevertheless, on the whole, the coronation was an occasion that simultaneously promoted Anglicanism as the state confession and the monarchy as its defender.
Rather than magnifying royal power, this process of Anglican sacralization placed clear limits on it. For if the oath-taking and homage really were a binding compact made in the sight of God, and if the anointing really represented sacerdotal permission to govern, then the monarch's power to deviate from religious and political conventions was drastically reduced. This understanding of monarchy lay at the root of several constitutional crises, accounting as it did for George III and George IV's insistence that royal sanction of Catholic emancipation contravened the coronation oath and William IV's efforts to obstruct Whig church reforms.Footnote 120 The constitutional and political potency of the Anglican monarchical ideal promoted in the coronation rite suggests that the Church of England was a far more assertive institution than is generally appreciated.Footnote 121 This was especially evident at the end of the period in Bishop Blomfield's coronation sermon of 1838:
The Word of God, and the history of his providential government, warrant the conclusion, that Religion is the true secret of national happiness and honour; and the religious state of every country must be greatly influenced by the religion of its rulers. Them that honour me, saith the Lord, I will honour. A steady adherence to the true faith; a determined upholding of that Church which is its depository and dispenser . . . will bring down upon God's anointed Servant an abundant measure of his blessing . . . and will revive . . . the peaceful and durable glories of internal improvement and stability, —faction extinguished; dissensions healed; commerce extended; learning and the arts encouraged; the Church reformed and strengthened; the pure Gospel preached to all the people of the land; and the consequent growth of every thing that is lovely and of good report.Footnote 122
Apprehending threats to their position at the heart of the state from utilitarian politics, religious pluralism, and radical ridicule, the Anglican clergy sought to make the coronation a vehicle for a stridently Anglican message to the nation. Their message was that the interests of the Church of England were also the interests of the nation.
