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.”

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Freedom of Belief

Politics

17 July 2025

4 min read

Anna Politkovskaya took on the Kremlin and she paid the ultimate price

The Russian journalist who became a martyr for truth

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A journalist wearing a body armour and a helmet looks defiant

Maxine Peak plays Anna.

Rolling Pictures

While truth recedes as a global public good, a war on journalists is taking shape. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the highest number of journalists killed since collecting data thirty years ago. A large number of these were killed in Gaza, but there were deaths elsewhere: in Mexico, Syrian, Pakistan, Haiti, Myanmar. Many more than these at least 124 journalists were physically threatened and abused online; an unknown number have been imprisoned and abused by state authorities, shadowy militias or criminal gangs.

The illiberal tide is more powerful than the flow of liberal ideas today in the unregulated online market of opinion. A groundswell of distrust in so-called mainstream media has been effortlessly generated by sources with no obligations to impartiality and fewer professional standards round fact checking and evidence gathering. While every news source needs to be assessed for accuracy and fairness, the labelling of journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ by President Trump in his first term strayed into language used by the world’s despots. Territory occupied for many years by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The 2025 film Words of War tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who rose to fame, and therefore to the attention of the Kremlin, through unvarnished despatches from the first Chechen war that uncovered terrible war crimes. Moscow learned its lesson for the second war in Chechnya by declaring the whole region off limits to reporters. For Politkovskaya, this provided an extra incentive to be there, returning to the country over forty times to document ever more awful crimes of disappearance, rape, and torture.

‘I witness very grave events and no-one else is reporting on them. I can’t not write about it’, Politkovskaya told the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford when they met. The meeting ended with some blunt Slavic advice: instead of interviewing a journalist about the war in Chechnya, the interviewer should be going there herself.

Words of War has an unreal quality to it. The actors are English, but the scenes are entirely Russian. It is a reminder of Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin and even shares an actor in Jason Isaacs, who swaps General Zhukov’s blunt Yorkshire accent for the more cultured tones of Politkovskaya’s anxious husband, Sasha.

Politkovskaya was a force of nature, and a devout Christian. She knew the kind of people she was messing with and what they were capable of, but she carried on the same, driven by an implacable will to truth. On flying to cover the appalling school siege at Beslan in 2004 – a scene the film begins with - she became violently ill, almost certainly a targeted poisoning like Alexei Navalny suffered on a plane over Siberia.

I get intimidating calls, people hovering in my hallway, she observed. There’ve been so many threats, there was a time when my editors decided my life really was in danger. But I’m used to it. If the FSB is so opposed to me, it only proves that what I’m doing is effective.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead as she entered her block of flats with a handful of groceries. It was Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually found guilty of organising and carrying out the murder, but the person who ordered the killing was never found out. Speculation round how high the order came from is, in a way, superfluous: this is the nature of Russia’s state in the twenty first century.

Elena Kostyuchenko is a millennial writer who features in the film as a young Novaya Gazeta intern and was inspired by her contact with Politkovskaya, ensuring a legacy in a younger generation:

She was the first person I saw when I came to the Novaya Gazeta editorial offices. Tall, radiant, with silver-white hair, flying down the hall. I didn’t recognise her. I was just struck by her beauty.

Stalin’s alleged mantra: no person, no problem, remains barely deniable Kremlin policy. The late politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are simply the highest profile of a large cohort of individuals barely known in the west who have opposed Putin with stunning levels of bravery. Caricaturing Russians as corrupt, rapacious and violent – as well as being a lazy trope - is to abuse the names of an untold number who retain their dignity, integrity and agency.

New histories are written in nations where regimes fall, but whether they tell a truthful story about the past depends on the environment the new authorities allow. The human rights group Memorial began this work in the early post-Soviet era, only to be shut down by Putin’s police officers. Words of War should have been made in Russia by Russians. One day maybe it will be, and Anna Politkovskaya will be seen across Russia for what she is: a martyr for truth. And not an enemy of the people.

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