Читать книгу Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong - Страница 20

It is only at this period that for the first time we begin to get some impression of what these events must have looked like. England, however, produces nothing comparable to the magnificent Coronation Book of Charles V of France prompted by his Coronation on 19 May 1364. This contains no less than 38 miniatures closely related to the text ordo but expanding it in terms of showing setting, dress, gesture and action.⁴⁴ As a reflection of its English equivalent it must be discounted, although it does include a record, albeit a diagrammatic one, of a Coronation stage. A narrow flight of steps leads down to the high altar. The enclosure floats on narrow wooden pillars painted with golden fleur de lys and the rails of the stage have been draped with rich fabrics as we know happened at Westminster. That at least provides an impression of what went up in the abbey, although reduced in the miniature to toy-town proportions.

In the case of England we are confronted from the mid-thirteenth century onwards with a series of illuminations seemingly depicting Coronations. Some, like those in the Lytlington Missal and the Liber Regalis, are actually set into copies of the Coronation ordo. Most, however, were occasioned by another circumstance, for their recurrence in chronicles reflects the fact that the accession of a new ruler measured time. Royal bureaucracy actually measured time by regnal years. The richest sequence of these Coronation scenes occurs in a Flores Historiarum on loan to the British Library. Illuminated in Westminster in the 1250s while the new church was arising, it includes no fewer than ten Coronation tableaux, starting with King Arthur. Even though they emanate from a scriptorium in the Coronation church, they cannot be relied upon in any way as accurate depictions of a late medieval Coronation.⁴⁵

The grandest of the sequence, in tune with its origin, shows that of Edward the Confessor. He is seated on a regal seat with a footstool, while one bishop pours oil from a vessel on to the already crowned head of the royal saint, a reversal of the actual sequence, and the other bishop places the rod with the dove in the king’s left hand, just as prescribed in the Fourth Recension. To one side there is a throng of clerics while, on the other, a complementary assembly of magnates lifts their swords in salute, much in the way we saw done in the Coronation of Harold in the Bayeux Tapestry. This image is very similar to the one which was in the Painted Chamber at Westminster, executed probably during the 1260s. In this version, however, the laity are entirely excluded in favour of seventeen bishops and mitred abbots. The rod with the dove is placed this time in the king’s right hand in accordance with how it appears on the great seal of Henry III. Nor do the illuminations which accompany the ordines in the Liber Regalis or Lytlington Missal take us any further, beyond an incidental detail in the Liber which has a scene of a double Coronation, with the queen’s throne shown correctly as lower than the king’s.⁴⁶

The most arresting of all these Coronation images is that which prefaces the ordo in Anglo-French for Edward II. It dates from about 1325–30 and the owner has been tentatively identified as Henry de Cobham.⁴⁷ Lord Cobham probably participated in the Coronation of Edward II or Edward III in his role as a Baron of the Cinque Ports. It is difficult otherwise to account for the Coronation ordo appearing in a book whose main text is the Apocalypse. Opinions vary as to whether the king depicted in the illumination is Edward II or Edward III, but what we see does seem to reflect some knowledge of the Coronation. The king is seated on a chair whose back is adorned with fleurons and which resembles the Coronation chair. Although what the king wears in no way accords with the vestments listed in the regalia, it does show some semblance of knowledge as to what was actually worn. There is a white ankle-length undergarment over which comes a bright red tunic, then a dalmatic with broad yellow and golden horizontal bands, and finally a pallium in gold and peach-coloured brocade fastened in the manner of a cope with a morse. In his right hand the king holds a rod topped by a fleuron and in his left an orb arising from a series of fleurons. The king is surrounded by six bishops, two of whom support the crown, and two others, in the foreground, who proffer containers whose purpose has so far defied identification. This without doubt is some kind of composite image of the king at his enthronement.

These miniatures show that king-making was by the fourteenth century a consensual process.⁴⁸ The king is no longer an isolated figure upon whose head a crown is bestowed by an angel or the hand of God. The throne in every instance is surrounded by people, the rapidly emerging estates of the realm. These miniatures spell out the great shift in climate which has taken place as we move through the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century. This is a period which witnesses the emergence of a new thinking about political systems, about the involvement of citizens and how they should participate. The monarchy is recast into a greater vision which includes the notion of consent by drawing in an enlarged constituency of those ruled. Although still in our terms narrow, in medieval understanding it was very wide. This huge change in the concept of kingship and the structure of the state was the result of the reception of Aristotelianism, a philosophy in which sense experience was established as the origin of universal knowledge. The consequence of that was that those capable of responding to reason should be brought into the consensus of kingship: males, the secular nobility and bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and lawyers. Aristotelianism and the recognition of the powers of reason also meant a cultivation of the arts of persuasion. In the case of the coronation those arts would embrace music, visual spectacle, rhetoric and ceremonial, all aimed no longer at an ecclesiastical audience but at a lay one. In its final form the English Coronation utilised all those powers in a gigantic festival whose aim was to reconcile divine election with popular consent.