Explainer

Culture

Royalty

29 April 2023

4 min read

Making sense of the coronation’s oaths, oils and acclamations

The significance of the thousand-year-old coronation ceremony is unpacked by Ian Bradley to reveal the vulnerability at its heart.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A medieval illustration of King Edgar's coronation shows him between his predecessor and successor, while angels hover above him.

King Edgar enjoys his coronation, the first in English history.

Life of St Edward the Confessor, CC BY-NC 3.0, University of Cambridge.

Coronations point to the sacred nature of the United Kingdom monarchy. Packed with religious symbolism and imagery, they exude mystery, bind together church and state through the person of the monarch and clearly proclaim the derivation of all power and authority from God and the Christian basis on which government is exercised and justice administered. At their coronations kings and queens are not simply crowned and enthroned but consecrated, set apart and anointed, dedicated to God and invested with sacerdotal garb and symbolic regalia. Here, if anywhere, we find the divinity which, as Shakespeare observed more than four hundred years ago, hedges the British throne.

The United Kingdom is the only country which still marks the accession of a new monarch with a coronation. Of the other European monarchies, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have never held coronations, Spain discontinued them in 1492 (they were not revived when the monarchy was restored there in 1975), Denmark in 1849 and Sweden in 1873. Norway abolished coronations in 1908 although since then its monarchs have undergone a ceremony of consecration or blessing in Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, with the royal regalia present in the church but not used in the ceremony.

Anglo-Saxon innovation

Coronations are religious services rather than constitutional ceremonies. While details have been subtly adapted over the centuries, the basic format has essentially remained the same for over a thousand years. The crowning of the monarch is just one of several distinct elements in the service. Others include recognition by the assembled congregation representing the people of their new sovereign, administration of oaths, anointing with holy oil, investiture with the royal regalia and celebration of Holy Communion. All these elements are present in the earliest surviving order for the coronation of an English monarch, prepared by St Dunstan as Archbishop of Canterbury for the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar in 973.

Edgar’s coronation, which took place in Bath Abbey, included many features found in all subsequent coronations. Held on Whit Sunday, the traditional day for ordinations to the priesthood, it laid considerable emphasis on the theme of consecration and the priestly aspects of kingship, exemplified by the wearing of priestly robes. Anointed and crowned by Dunstan, Edgar was entrusted with the protection and supervision of the church and graced with the titles rex dei gratia (king by the grace of God) and vicarus dei (Vicar of God). His wife, Aelfthryth, was anointed and crowned as queen. This practice, of a double crowning and anointing, was followed in the coronations of all subsequent married kings and queens as it will be with Charles and Camilla on 6 May.

Oaths and oil

Edgar was led into Bath Abbey by two bishops, as Charles will be as he enters Westminster Abbey which has been used for all English coronations since 1066. Before crowning, he was required to swear three oaths which form the basis of those still taken by every British monarch. As now framed, they include promises to adhere to the rule of law and the principles of justice and mercy, and to maintain the laws of God, the Protestant religion and the Church of England. Having taken the oaths, the monarch is anointed with holy oil, a further sign of being set apart and consecrated in the manner of a priest.

Earning the right

Edgar’s coronation included the celebration of Mass and it remains the case that the coronation is embedded in a celebration of Holy Communion. Dunstan’s order clearly established the church’s control over royal inauguration rites in England and specifically the key role of the Archbishop of Canterbury in presiding over the ceremony. In the sermon that he preached at a second coronation over which he presided, that of Ethelred the Unready at Kingston Upon Thames in 979, he preached on the duties of a consecrated king, describing him as the shepherd over his people and reminding him that while ruling justly would earn him ‘worship in this world’ as well as God's mercy, any departure from his duties would lead to punishment at Doomsday.

A sense of sharing

Rooted in tradition as they are, coronations still have the power to connect with the popular spiritual and religious instincts that remain strong, if often hidden, in our so-called post-Christian society. In a much-quoted article on Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 two sociologists, Edward Shils and Michael Young, described it as:

‘the ceremonial occasion for the affirmation of the moral values by which the society lives. It was an act of national communion and an intensive contact with the sacred.’

They noted that it was frequently spoken of as an ‘inspiration’ and a ‘re-dedication of the nation’. The ceremony had ‘touched the sense of the sacred’ in the population, heightening a sense of solidarity in both families and communities. They pointed to examples of reconciliation between long-feuding neighbours and family members brought about by the shared experience of watching the ceremony together on television.

We have recently witnessed something of this sense of national communion and intensive contact with the sacred in the public reaction to the death of Elizabeth II, as shown by the numbers who came out to witness the progress of the late queen’s coffin on its last journeys and to file past it in the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh and Westminster Hall.

Ultimately, Christian monarchy points beyond itself to the majesty, mystery and vulnerability of God. It is a lonely, noble and sacrificial calling. What our sovereign needs and deserves most is our loyal and heartfelt prayers. As we prepare for the king’s coronation, we could do well to reflect on and respond to the request that his mother made before hers:

“You will be keeping it as a holiday; but I want to ask you all, whatever your religion maybe, to pray for me on that day, to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve them and you, all the days of my life.”

Column

Culture

Nationalism

Politics

20 March 2025

4 min read

What Tom Paine really said about globalism and religion

We can’t live without homelands, but we need to be generous with them.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A statue of a 18th century man holding a pen and a book.

Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We live near Lewes in East Sussex, a town surrounded by genteel Conservatism but which inherits a certain edgy radicalism from Thomas Paine, whose utopian politics emerged there in the eighteenth century to inform both the French and American revolutions.

Paine haunts Lewes and his paraphernalia are everywhere. Walk the streets and it won’t be long before you spot posters quoting his most famous lines, among them “My country is the world and my religion is to do good”, from his seminal work Rights of Man.

He was a vicious critic of all organised religion, leading to the widespread assumption that he was an atheist. More accurately, he was a deist, a believer in a God who could and would deliver a global redemption of humankind, if we could and would only work towards that. The bit that’s most often left out of that famous quote is the phrase: “… all mankind are my brethren.”

Sometimes it takes a prophetic voice from outside mainstream religion to point us towards a world peace and a concord that seems beyond our faithful grasp. As ultra-nationalism is the go-to political ideology of our age, it’s such a voice that demonstrates that these populist creeds are the very antithesis of Paine’s globalist utopia.

There are tinpot nationalists throughout the world – Erdogan of Hungary, Meloni of Italy, Bolsonaro of Brazil, the list goes on – but it’s the superpowers that demonstrate most starkly the contrast between the narrow, inward and dark heart of ultra-nationalism and the generous, outward and illuminated vision of the globalist revolutionary.

It’s not just the contrast between what we currently have on the world stage and what we could have that’s remarkable, it’s the similarities between the psyches and prejudices of the ultra-nationalist super-powers, all of which sacrifice any worldview they might hold on the altar of their homeland self-interest. Take Russia, Israel and the United States. Don’t even start me on China.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is embarked on an imperial expansionism that is positively tsarist. The attempted annexation of Ukraine is only the start, before reclaiming what are purported to be “Russian” state assets in the Baltics and beyond. Putin channels Peter the Great. This isn’t just demented desire for historical legacy, it speaks at home to the restoration of the motherland.

It’s the same incentive for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Only continuing to oppress and purge the Palestinian state from its lands can the homeland of Israel be protected. It is precisely to satisfy the ultra-nationalists behind him that pushes him forward.

President Donald Trump in the US isn’t the peacemaker he fantasises about. To “make America great again” he has to put “America first”. This is about satisfying the baying boot boys that form the sump of Trump’s power base. Americans must live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world. Hence tariff wars, watch-the-lady trade deals and pan-arctic territorial aspirations.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially.

What these three world leaders absolutely have in common is a worldview that predicates itself on satisfaction of nationalism at home that has to be paid for with suffering elsewhere. What they tell us is the exact opposite of Paine: “My borders are my country and my religion is to do harm.” They might add the sub-phrase: “… only my people are my brethren.”

The difference between patriotism and nationalism spawns many aphorisms. One such is that patriotism prioritises love of one’s own people and nationalism prioritises hate for other people other than one’s own. That’s not quite right, because both still hold the primacy of one’s own people over others, while Paine inferred the primacy of all people.

That’s what ultimately gives religious fervour to his voice. His declared detestation of religion seemingly ignores the tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths of the world, which have in common the welcome of the stranger, a duty to the poor and equality of all before God.

These commandments extend patriotism to love of all people. And, rigorously, they leave no room for nationalism at all. As for ultra-nationalism, we’re in the territory of abomination and sacrilege.

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially. That’s admittedly a tall order, but these are qualities that can either be identified in or imported into national identities as diverse as the American Constitution and Zionism.

The methodology for that is, admittedly, demanding. But it requires the ability to look outwards to the world, rather than inwards towards nation. And that becomes a religious vocation.

Our instincts, as nations, are inwards, but our callings our outwards. Sometimes it takes an outsider, like Paine, to point us in the right direction, outwards.

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