Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher
The coronation of King Charles III has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the first world war. It was then that British royals turned into a strange mix of an oddly middle-class family that was given to stagey, mock-historical popular pageants, with an increasing display of military uniforms to boost Britain’s failing international image. Thespian imperialist Lord Esher, who headed the coronation planning committee in 1902, had very little time for the ordinary British people he called ‘millions of drudges’. He insisted that everyone in royal ceremonies – not just the military – had to wear a uniform. It was meant to distinguish them from the mere mortals who could watch from the sidelines. Ultimately these events were always about international politics. The coronation of Charles III occurs in the context of Brexit and deep economic crisis and carries as much international weight as anything that has gone before.
Archive films
Contemporary historical reconstruction of the Coronation of Edward VII, 1902 (Le Sacre d’Édouard VII) by French studio director Georges Méliès. The film premiered the same day as the real ceremony. Courtesy of Iconauta Free Video Library for those interested in History of Cinema. Watch here.
BBC TV Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II: Westminster Abbey 1953 (William McKie) Courtesy of Archive of Recorded Church Music. Watch here.
Read on
Read Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London 2005). It’s by far the most readably intelligent and entertaining account of British coronations from earliest times to 1953. Then look at David Cannadine’s almost equally readable ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: The British monarchy and the ‘‘invention of tradition’’, c.1820-1977’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1993). This is what kicked off the debate about whether or not modern monarchy is a late Victorian invention.
William Kuhn, Democratic Royalism (Basingstoke 1996) appears to argue that Cannadine’s ‘invention of tradition’ essay was a communist plot. But Kuhn’s book belongs to a particular school of conservative historiography best treated with benevolent neglect. Dip into the book for Kuhn’s accounts of Davidson, Esher and the Duke of Norfolk which are hilarious and revealing. You can draw your own conclusions.
You should, however, read Richard Williams, The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Aldershot 1997) as a corrective to Cannadine. Williams persuasively puts the case that Victoria, although controversial, was never in fact unpopular. He develops the thesis that the thanksgiving for Edward’s recovery from typhoid in 1872 was in fact the turning point. He adds his own colourful details of royal ceremonial badly done.À
Add to this Paul Readman’s ‘The place of the past in English Culture c.1880-1914’, Past & Present 186, (2005), pp. 147-99. Readman considers late Victorian attitudes towards history and convincingly argues that history was very much the popular thing by the end of the nineteenth century. Everything we have seen agrees that it was a key context. See also Mark Girouard’s emjoyable, The Return to Camelot. Chivalry and the English Gentleman (Yale University 2005) which we talk about in the discussion.
Having got that clear, Thomas Richards, ‘The image of Victoria in the year of jubilee,’ Victorian Studies 31 (1987), pp. 7-32 is a revealing account of Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee, including details of the advertising that exploited Victoria’s homely image.
And don’t forget the Darlington and Stockton Times account of when the Edward, Prince of Wales, caught typhoid at a Scarborough house party. You can find it in its lucidly entitled ‘When the Prince of Wales caught typhoid at a Scarborough house party’, 13 December 2021, online here.
Parliament’s own website has an uncharacteristically well-informed briefing on the coronation by David Torrance, prepared in January 2023 for the coronation of Charles III. See it online here.
For the planning of 1902 itself use Peter Hinchcliff’s ‘Frederick Temple, Randall Davidson and the Coronation of Edward VII,’ in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997). Hinchcliff tells the extraordinary story of the writing of the coronation ceremony. You can find Herbert Thurston’s enjoyably ironic comment on the bogus scholarship surrounding the revival of old ceremonial, ‘Is the crowned king an ecclesiastical person?’ in The Nineteenth Century and After 51 (1902), pp. 444-55. You can retrieve it on archive.org.
Ben Roberts, ‘The Complex Holiday Calendar of 1902’, Twentieth Century British History 28 (2017), pp. 498-515 gives all the jokey detail (much more than we could include) of angst over bank holidays in 1902, and how much the public actually cared.
There are vivid details of 1902 coronation street scenes and filming in Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt (eds.), The Edwardian Sense, Art, Design and Performance in Britain, 1901-1910 (New Haven 2010). Read the short chapters by Bronwen Edwards, Angus Trumble and Tom Gunning. Also Deborah Sugg Ryan’s illuminating essay on Edwardian historical pageants.
Elizabeth Ezra George Méliès (Manchester University 2000) has more detail on the French filmed mock up. So too does Richard Brown, ‘“It is a very wonderful process…” film and British royalty, 1896-1902’, The Court Historian 8 (2003) pp. 1-22. Don’t miss its final footnote on the discussion that followed the initial presentation of the paper, when a PhD student was able to reveal the identity of the courtier who was leaking information about the coronation ceremony to the film-makers.
For George IV’s extraordinary coronation in 1821, you have to read Geoffrey de Bellaigue’s wonderful ‘A royal mis-en-scene: George IV’s coronation banquet’, in Furniture History 29 (1993), pp. 174-83. (So glad to be able to direct you to Furniture History!) Also Valerie Cumming’s equally fun ‘Pantomime and pageantry. The coronation of George IV’, in Celina Fox (ed.), London – World City 1800-1840 (University of Yale and London 1992), pp. 39-50.
We weren’t able to look at early modern coronations in any detail in our discussion. But it’s a fascinating field. David Cressy has an excellent account of the coronation of Charles I in his Charles I and the English People (Oxford 2015). It was untypical because it occurred in the context of London still beset by plague. The king arrived at Westminster by barge.
Siobhan Keenan discusses the extent to which the Tudors and early Stuarts did or did not relate to the English public in The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-42 (Oxford 2020).
Similarly Dale Hoak looks at the coronation of Elizabeth I in ‘A Tudor Deborah? The coronation of Elizabeth I, parliament and the problem of female rule’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds.), John Foxe and his World (Abingdon and New York 2017).
See also the careful scholarship of Jennifer Loach in her account of Henry VIII’s coronation and other ceremonial ‘The function of ceremonial in the reign of Henry VIII,’ Past & Present 142 (1994), pp. 43-68, which we refer to in our discussion.