King Charles' Coronation: Why it matters!

foreign [Applause] what I want to do this evening is to try and introduce some meaning into this the way in which the coronation has been I'm we were talking about tomatoes earlier on and the processes of propagation the way the the way the the propaganda comes from scattering seeds the way in which the coronation has been propagated so far seems to me to be extraordinarily misconceived there's been a drip feed of trivia about this Ivory rod and that Jewel will it be acceptable to the woke crowd or not that's not what the coronation is about the coronation is or should be two things and it incorporates two completely different views of what a king is on the one hand there's consecration that's the thing that goes back to the you know to our pre-history to the very first coronation of which we know anything it doesn't take place in Westminster Abbey it takes place in bath Abbey uh in 973 and it's for the coronation of King Edgar the short-lived great-grandson of uh of King Alfred who is the first real king not only of all the English Rex anglorum coins still survive but also the whole British Isles and the the coronation why is it held in bath it's held in bath because bath is the place that still had this is only four five hundred years after the Romans had left it's the place that was still the sense these enormous vast buildings of Imperial Rome so the coronation was Christian and invoking of course before Christ invoking the world of Judaism invoking the worlds of the kings of the Jews when we hear at the moment of anointing that Central moment of the coronation the bit we won't actually be able to see the the anointing of King Charles we'll hear handles great setting of The verses from the Old Testament zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king and the people Whatever May the King live forever and whatever an extraordinary moment well that is um the Christian side the religious side of the coronation but also it was invoking the idea of ancient Rome of the Roman emperors of that power remember we're a very peculiar civilization we are consciously in the shadow of a superior civilization that of Greece and Rome whose achievements we only matched in the 18th century I'm going to roam next week if you stand in front of the Coliseum if you stand in the uh in in the pantheon you're in buildings that we could not rival for nearly 1500 years civilizations die we need to remember we may be at a point of such a death right which is why what the book in society is about that connection of time past time present and time future is so important and why the coronation which represents that moment most specifically in the life of the monarchy is so important so on the one hand there's a sense of the king ordained by God Anointed with the Holy oils crowned by Bishops ornamented by prayers and whatever on the other hand the coronation and this is something that really develops after 973 the coronation is about something much more brutal much more political much more changeable the coronation of 973 if you actually look at the text you look at the anointing very little has changed it's quite extraordinary you know we're looking at nearly 1200 years very little change one thing has changed and change radically which is the other side of the coronation because the coronation isn't just consecration otherwise we would be an absolute monarchy and we're not what are we we're a royal Republic we have all the rights of a republic but more securely grounded not in the abstractions of a constitution but in the pattern of our history and the pattern of our history is one in which those rights emerge as such rights always do emerge by struggle so the other face of the coronation is the face of contract the coronation begins with Oaths it begins with the swearing of Oaths which the king is bound to and also the course of English History tells you if the king doesn't obey those Oaths there's a penalty for breach of contract and it is peculiarly unpleasant and we will go through a few of the peculiarly unpleasant ways in which that breach of contract has been visited on King so we've got then the the sense of what we're all familiar with what King Charles goes on about what the queen went on about that sense of the coronation as a royal dedication to duty okay we're all familiar with that the again the processes of anointing they go right back to well we're talking about it too Solomon even before Solomon to the first king of the Old Testament that's two generations before Solomon it's Saul who is Anointed by the prophet Samuel then you have David and and and and and then you have Solomon um and the apparatus of the anointing one tiny bit of it actually survives most of the coronation regalia that we will see uh uh on May the 6th is a reinvention because what you've got to remember is we always beat the French we beat the French in having a proper Revolution and a proper cutting off of the king's head and a proper but decent trial of the king and also the complete destruction of the royal regalia that the French preserved because it's late 18th century you have a sense of history at that point so you actually preserve large chunks of the French Royal regalia on the grounds of historical significance a century earlier in England there was simply the sense that being having a king and having symbols of a king was and they actually used the phrase it is unnecessary burdensome and dangerous and what you do is you absolutely eliminate every single trace of monarchy the entire instruments of sovereignty every one of them was burned or melted down and broken up and the single thing survives it is the spoon with which the holy oils were ladled onto the king's head onto the palms of his hands onto here the joints of the arms onto the breasts onto the shoulder blades and the reason why that's that ceremony is kept veiled is of course and you can imagine the problems that created with Victoria the Monarch has to be virtually naked for this process the most surprising bits have to be exposed and and once again the process of anointing had taken place the chrism on the head that was by chrism by the way is a kind of holy Brill cream um it's it's it's not just oil it's a compound it's an Emulsion very sticky Emulsion and it's put on the head and it's put on the hands and in both with both of those throughout the Middle Ages because it was so holy it was kept on and you actually had a coiff and lending cap that was put on your head and gloves that we put in your hands and the coiff was removed several days later in a ceremony and in the case of Henry IV the application of these luscious oils on the head led to a terrible outbreak of head lice we need to be aware of the physical the physical results of all of this so there is this and again the hands that have been anointed become sacred they become holy and right through to the beginning of the 18th century there was the belief that the Royal hams having been Anointed with the Holy oils are capable of actually carrying out miracles the king becomes a reflection on Earth of Christ and the King was believed to be able to cure people of scrofula which is called the king's evil that is to say it's a disease of the um it's it's tuberculosis of the uh the lymph glands of the neck and it's a jolly good disease to cure because it's liable to spontaneous remission so you know if if you if you do Hocus Pocus over it's pretty likely to go away but then it will come back again um and uh so the king Touches for the king's evil until the beginning of the 18th century there's also something else which is in terms of our modern superstitions have you noticed lots of other wires quite intelligent people where Bangles claiming they protect them against rheumatism well this actually goes back again to the late Middle Ages where you have what we call cramp rings and the the ceremony takes place on Monday Thursday and again the way in which all of this is so similar to Christ the King would lick his fingers and you would then rub rings of gold all mass thousands of the things as particular Services chanted over them and it was then believed if you wore them it protected you against rheumatism arthritis and whatever so if you see somebody being stupid enough to wear one of these rings on their fingers tell them they're resorting to Medieval Superstition so there is this very very powerful sense of the Monarch as divinely ordained now if that's a continued we would live in an absolute monarchy or we'd have longer go abolished it like the French and be contorting ourselves in the horrors that France goes through having abolished its monarchy but we did something else and this is the other face of the coronation which is just not been explained at all and should be explained for the Kings of England that peculi and remember the coronation is English the fact we talk about Britain just confuses the thing the list of Kings is entirely English it goes back to the Norman Conquest the there is there is no absorption of Scottish ceremony into the coronation at all you just get a squad of Scots turning up and nothing really to do apart from looking vaguely resentful and and remember the fate of Nicholas sturgeon um but the but but maybe think of Camper vans but but but but but yeah I know cheap jokes I apologize cheap jokes are always the best and they're and they're easy they are the easiest to do um but the the key thing to understand about the English coronation it's fundamentally about conditions so it's on the and it's a it's a great Paradox you have on the one hand this immense apparatus which signals King by the grace of God which appears on the coins you know Dale gracias and whatever and and uh uh A King by the grace of God and of course elaborated uh in the the very last moment of our belonging to the Catholic Church uh by the grant of the title Fiddy Defensor defender of the faith to Henry VII so there's a sense of Divine Right monarchy on the one hand but the fundamental of the English coronation is completely different it is the swearing of Oaths in which the king is accepted as King on condition it's conditional and it is in two ways one of them is very um how should I say one of them is is simply ceremonial and as the King enters the Abbey and he enters remember Westminster Abbey the extraordinary thing about Westminster Abbey it is actually purpose built for the coronation the church is created specifically by Henry III for the coronation and this vast space in front of the in front of the coronation Square in front of the choir screen there is actually called the theater this is a piece of visible designed ceremony and you lay this extraordinary pavement this this is in the in in the middle of the 1200s you lay this extraordinary pavement called the cosmati pavement which is modeled on the most extravagant things uh being done in Rome and the whole Space was originally gold Mosaic it would have looked very much like monreale and if anybody or indeed you may be more familiar with the Criterion restaurant in London which actually which actually Echoes Echoes the spaces of of of of of montreali so we have this extraordinary space but when the King enters the coronation theater the first thing that the Archbishop of Canterbury does and you'll see this at the as as the procession enters he turns to the four corners and says will you have this man to be your king and then there is this voice that arises from uh now of course they've had to bring in girls um originally from the from the boys of Westminster School vivat vivat Rex God save the cane God Save The King The acclim this is the Roman acclimation this is the acclimation of the Emperor or the acclimation of an Anglo-Saxon King then there is the peculiar English thing in all the coronation orders again going right back to 973 there were three questions essentially will you keep three O's will you keep peace between the church and the people will you this is very near the bone will you repress rapacity and iniquity will you finally do justice in Mercy and in peace mercy and Equity so those are the three questions and they become absolutely standard form everywhere in Europe and nobody takes them seriously except in England and in England we re-write them from 1308 this is the accession of Edward II the son of the Great Edward the first the malleus kotorum the Hammer of the Scots the Conqueror Scotland the reason why the king will be crowned in an extraordinary coronation chair with the stone of Schooners at the Schooners I never know you're the kind it's a problem when you're talking about scones isn't it what what are what are they called anyway the stone of schoon will be under him Edward II is the complete degenerate son of the great father he's a bit like me is interested in the wrong sex and all sorts of things anyway um he he they knew he was going to be a problem and what do they do they replace the Lost section of the coronation oath with an extraordinary promise you will promise to rule according to the laws which shall be chosen by the shall be chosen the future perfect by the community of your Realm You Will Rule which that means Parliament is just really begin getting going we're 100 years on from Magna Carta right Parliament is just really beginning to get going you promise that you will rule according to the laws which your people choose you've got a right to ascend to them remember the way a pilot with the way it's still true Parliament and all that passes through Parliament the actual declaratory Clause the Clause that that gives an act to Parliament its power is it be it therefore enacted by the king's most excellent Majesty with the advice and consent of the Lord's spiritual and temporal and Commons in this Parliament assemble that but it's that sense of the entire community of the realm and remember as early as about 40 years after Edward II judges will deal taxpayers have always been angsty for very obvious reasons and people would complain you know parliaments voted to tax on us and we haven't been in Parliament and as by by the time you're in about 3 1340 the judges have gotten absolutely standard answer everybody is represented in Parliament either in person because they're a bishop or a nobleman or by their representative because you voted in the county or in the town for somebody so that sense of parliament binding everybody and that idea from that point onward seems to me to be fundamentally implanted in England and because Edward brexit Edward is dethroned in 1327 and meets the most hollered and unspeakable death which if anybody here has got a Schoolboy imagination I will describe in detail but we will perhaps save that for questions afterwards um but again within the century that process is repeated the king of the Middle Ages who with whom I think in many ways were most familiar Richard II the subject of one of Shakespeare's greatest plays for whom we have two magnificent portraits there's the great coronation portrait showing him with the orb and and and the crown um against that wonderful go background and much more wonderfully and I was filming there only a few days ago the portrait that the will portrait in the National Gallery which is completely extraordinary because it shows the king at a moment of time it shows him on the 6th of January the Feast of the Epiphany he's born actually on the 6th of January I suppose a few of us here might even actually know what Epiphany means it's when Christ is recognized as being Immortal and the Son of God by the Gentiles and the three kings come to adore him and if you actually look on one leaf of the diptych you have the Virgin and the child and being adored and then on the other hand well you've got three kings you've got Richard kneeling you've got behind him Saint Edward the Confessor the founder Saint by the way the founder that's why Westminster Abbey is there it's founded by Edward the Confessor then it's rebuilt by Henry III specifically as the coronation church with the shrine of Henry the shrine of Edward the confess with its heart and every King from the Middle Ages to the revolution of the middle of the 17th century is actually crowned with the regalia of Edward the Confessor that's why we talk about the confessor's crown so so there's Edward the Confessor standing behind Richard holding up the ring which had been his ring which is then put on the finger of Richard when he is crowned and anointed and then next to him the martyrd king of the Anglo-Saxons said Edmund King of the angles who like Saint Sebastian though I think he kept his clothes on was was shot to death with Arrows by the Vikings and because the Vikings didn't believe in half measures and his head cut off as well so the Martyr the Martyr King of the East angles and then because also the Feast of of the 6th of January in the in the in the Middle Ages is also the feast uh of the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist so we have John the Baptist again presenting with holding the lamb uh uh uh um Richard to the Christ child now that's the vision of holy monarchy that's the vision of the sacredness of monarchy but when you actually look to the other side of the diptych it's most beautiful it's entirely this powerful blue it's blue Vice it's actually made with lapis lazuloni in gum which is why it thrill why the color the color of that blue Thrills at you it's that extraordinary pigment um and you've got the Virgin and the child in this extraordinary blue and then you've got all the Heavenly hosts with their wings and whatever and it all looks wonderfully holy and beautiful and Noble then you look a little bit more close in there wearing rather funny things then you look at Richard and you see Richard has got a collar around his neck you know the house of plantagenet the bloom the broom so he's got a collar a broom Cod so he's got a collar of the of the actual seed pods of the broom that have expanded and he's got the badge of the white heart hanging from it if you actually look across you'll see the entire Heavenly Host has been recruited by Richard because all the angels are wearing bloom collars and badges of the white heart and this sounds all very beautiful and Noble and pretty think football Hooligans they are wearing the these are retainers these are people who were there to do the king's Dirty Work what Richard is doing is elevating the private power of the Monarch as a vast landlord and as a vast retainer of men and he's using it to manipulate a kind of thuggish Mafia style monarchy of course there's a very good reason why he does it he's dealing with the peerage that our mafiosa style people with their own liveries and their own Livery collars as well but King had to be able to manage that and what he tries to do instead is simply to dominate it by the coin a phrase which I'm very fond of make historians call this method of retaining they call it bastard feudalism I said what Richard aimed to do was make himself the biggest bastard feudal Lord of them all and it fails horribly and he too Falls in 1399 he is condemned in the Great Hall Westminster Great Hall that he is rebuilding as This Magnificent Shrine of monarchy and the principal charge against him as it had been against Edward II it's breaking his coronation oath he said that the laws were in his mouth and they're not they are in Acts of Parliament and surprisingly all of that survives at your lawn you know you all know I'm interested in Henry VIII the astonishing thing is Henry VIII gets away with it Henry VII breaks those other sections of the coronation oath he breaks the oath to keep peace between church and people he breaks his Oaths to the pope how does he get away with it because he keeps his oath to Parliament the whole of that vast break with Rome is carried out through Parliament and with parliament's consent because what again we've got to remember the key to understanding the English Monarchy and the Miracle of the English Monarchy is you keep a representative assembly going because it's useful this is the disaster of the Supreme Court's judgment on Boris if you remember the Supreme Court said that the purpose of parliament is to oppose the purpose of parliament is to hold the Monarch to against the whole government to account it's not our government is based in Parliament our government controls Parliament parliaments are useless unless they're managed and Henry is the Pioneer manager is great ministers wolves not so much Woolsey but Cromwell are the Pioneer managers of parliament so Henry gets away with his extraordinary changes because he's able to carry Parliament with him and if you look at things like the confiscation of the monasteries many of you here are prosperous people who live in houses that were stolen from the monasteries you may well inherit your land from the stealing from the monasteries and the reason that that it's done is that the only people who suffered were the monks every other contract they'd entered into every other payment that they'd engage for was honored and if the monks went along with it they were paid big pensions as well it's done as a straightforward property deal and many of you here are in property and understand exactly what was going on right so the the great break then in our history comes with the succession of the alien house of Stuart and the again the Scottish succession at the beginning of the 17th century and it's very under important we understand how this happens it happens in defiance of the will of Henry VIII Henry VII that deliberately left the crown away from Scotland Elizabeth does not like this idea so we have a very very English solution to the problem Henry a left to will which was endorsed by Act of parliament which said under no circumstances is Queen is Mary Queen of Scots or the future James the first entitled inheritance English Throne how do they deal with it they look at it very solemnly in 1566 they say this is very very difficult they order a very large chest with two locks they put the will in the chest with two locks and it seems to me it's at this point that the king is able to have this bizarre idea that he wields Power by Divine Right rather than by that contract that I've been talking about so you then get this Dreadful conflict of the 17th century there's something else that's worth putting into that conflict which is that Henry VII again um we know a rule from Whitehall what is Whitehall Whitehall is the Palace of Henry VII we also know that Parliament meets in the Palace of Westminster the beginning of Henry VII's Reign sees his extraordinary process in which the Palace of Westminster the public bit where Parliament meets where the Law Courts meet where the extract meets that's preserved but the private bit of the palace burns down the King goes and lives for 20 odd years at Greenwich and he commutes by boat presentable when he has to be in London and it's only when Cardinal Woolsey Falls and your place the great House of the archbishops of Canterbury on the sorry the archbishops of York on the site of the present Ministry of defense is confiscated and Henry rebuilds it as this fast New Palace of Whitehall and from that point onwards we have been ruled by this tension between Whitehall and Westminster and Whitehall and Westminster seem to me to be again one of the things that lies at the back of the coronation and lies at the back too of what's going wrong now because the way in which you were able to wreck of the way you know we had a Civil War which was again fought over this issue of who controls finally law and as I said the monarchy was abolished in 1649 it was declared to be dangerous unreasonable and all the rest of it um and the reason is it's not that there were any real Republicans in 1649 there were instead two completely different views of monarchy there was the view of the Monarch as representing the proper way of doing things that's the monarchy of the Palace of Westminster and there's the other view of monarchy which is the actual direct personal private will of the Monarch as Incorporated in the privy Council Incorporated in the secretaries of state and cited in the Palace of Whitehall and it's the conflict between those two things that leads to the Civil War and so how finally is it reconciled why do we still have a monarchy why is monarchy brought back why is there still a coronation well the answer is we decided we couldn't do without a king we tried doing without a king under Cromwell and we discovered that what you get is an absolutist dictatorship and that what monarchy represents is power that is controlled you then bring back an extraordinary way we are the only country ever completely to have reversed a Revolution by itself Eastern Europe reversed revolutions that were imposed on it by Russia we reversed a revolution ourselves as a matter of choice this seems to me to be an absolute and fundamental point but the question is having done that how do you make the system work how do you cope with the fact you may have a richer the second you may have an edge of the second you may have a James a second you may indeed have a Charles III how do you make it work well the answer is you create the Office of Prime Minister and what the office of prime minister is is a genius figure he's designed to do two completely different but complementary things on the one hand he controls the Monarch on behalf of Parliament and on the other hand he controls Parliament on behalf of the Monarch and all of that is submitted in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 when that Clause that I mentioned that one at the beginning of 1308 that the Monarch shall rule in accordance with the the laws and customs which shall be chosen by the community of the realm it's Rewritten quite simply it says the monarchal rule in accordance with statutes made in Parliament and that's the key thing and what I regret to tell you ladies and gentlemen is since 1931 no Monarch has actually sworn that oath because they were seduced with the idea of Empire and Commonwealth there we are [Music]

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 94,577

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: ZoGgRvaZfk0

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023