The Anointing Behind the Screen

A letter from Sir Timothy Monday to the Earl Marshal, written from Cumbria some weeks before the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III

The Lakes, Cumbria, April 2023

To His Grace the Duke of Norfolk,Earl Marshal of England,and through him to those charged with the ordering and preparation of the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III.

My Lord Duke,

I am much obliged to those who have thought me sufficiently acquainted with the peculiar conjunction of ecclesiastical history, English custom, biblical literature, and the more elusive business of national sentiment to be consulted upon a question which, at first hearing, might appear to belong principally to the gentlemen responsible for the placement of cameras and the negotiation of broadcasting contracts.

I refer, of course, to the proposed treatment of the anointing of His Majesty at Westminster Abbey: whether that portion of the Coronation Service ought to remain concealed from public view, as it was at the Coronation of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, or whether the demands of television, together with the understandable curiosity of millions who will witness the occasion from their homes, justify the abandonment of that ancient reserve.

I write from my accustomed retreat among the Cumbrian lakes and fells, where the rain has lately been conducting a prolonged and apparently constitutional inquiry into the right of the sun to exercise its functions. The weather has not yet reached a conclusion. I am less certain that the gentlemen of television will be so patient.

Let me state at the outset that I possess no authority to settle the matter. I am neither the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor the Earl Marshal, nor a minister of the Crown, nor a gentleman whose opinion is likely to cause a camera to be switched on or off. I am merely an Ulster-born Anglican of the old, kneeling sort, with an inconvenient fondness for historical continuity, a somewhat excessive acquaintance with the habits of British institutions, and a suspicion that the modern world sometimes confuses the privilege of seeing a thing with the right to see it.

My opinion, therefore, is offered in the spirit in which it is requested: not as a ruling, but as a consideration which those entrusted with the decision may accept, amend, or consign to the same dignified obscurity in which I should be perfectly content to leave the anointing itself.

I should begin by asking what, precisely, is being concealed.

If the question concerns a crown, a sceptre, a royal robe, or the placement of some object whose historical significance may be appreciated by the public, I see no compelling reason why the camera should be denied its employment. Indeed, the Coronation is among the rare occasions on which the ordinary Englishman may be forgiven for taking an interest in the apparatus of his own constitution. There is a certain educational value in allowing the public to observe the ancient objects through which the history of the Crown has been transmitted. Even a sceptre, for all its solemnity, is an object that may be inspected without violating the dignity of its office.

The anointing, however, is of another order.

It is not simply another episode in the procession of splendid objects. It is not a decorative interval between the presentation of the regalia and the placing of the crown upon the sovereign's head. Nor is it a theatrical effect, designed to furnish a suitable climax for the evening news. It is a religious act, situated within a Christian liturgy, whose meaning cannot be exhausted by the ability of a camera to record it.

The distinction matters.

The Coronation is at once a constitutional occasion, a national ceremony, a historical inheritance, and a Christian service. These descriptions are not interchangeable, and their respective claims upon the occasion are not necessarily identical. A broadcaster may reasonably desire an uninterrupted view of an event to which it has devoted considerable resources. The nation may reasonably desire to witness the installation of its sovereign. The Church, however, must ask what it is actually doing when its archbishop anoints a king.

That last question, I suggest, ought to precede all negotiations concerning the first two.

I. What the oil signifies

The oil prepared for His Majesty's anointing possesses a history which deserves to be recalled, for it demonstrates that the proposed act is neither an arbitrary survival nor a piece of ecclesiastical stagecraft invented for the amusement of antiquarians.

The oil was prepared using olives harvested from two sites on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem: the Monastery of Mary Magdalene and the Monastery of the Ascension. The former has a particular association with the British Royal Family, for it is there that Princess Alice of Battenberg, His Majesty's paternal grandmother, lies buried.

The olives were pressed, and the oil was perfumed with essential oils, including sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, amber, and orange blossom. The preparation was intended to provide the oil for a rite whose religious associations reach far beyond the history of the British monarchy.

The oil was consecrated at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the place venerated by Christians as the site of Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. The consecration involved the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem.

There is something profoundly fitting in this geographical and ecclesiastical conjunction. The oil originates in the land where the biblical history of anointing belongs; it is consecrated at a church associated with the central events of the Christian faith; and it is subsequently brought to Westminster Abbey for the anointing of a British sovereign.

Yet I would caution against interpreting this sequence too extravagantly. Its significance is Christian before it is dynastic. The oil does not travel from Jerusalem to London in order to announce that one family possesses a mysterious property of the blood. It travels to serve a religious ceremony in which the sovereign is set apart for an office understood, within the liturgy, in relation to God.

The association with Princess Alice adds a personal dimension to the story. It may remind His Majesty that his own family history is entangled with the history of the Church, and that the monarchy is not merely a constitutional abstraction. But the burial place of an ancestor does not, by itself, establish a doctrine of hereditary sanctity. Sentiment, however genuine, must not be permitted to masquerade as theology.

I should be particularly reluctant to encourage any interpretation which suggested that the royal family constitutes a superior order of Christians, possessing by birth an exclusive proximity to the Almighty. Christianity has never required us to believe that grace descends through a pedigree as reliably as a title to an estate.

If anything, the biblical understanding of anointing ought to make the sovereign more conscious of obligation, not less.

II. Solomon and the Christian understanding of kingship

There is another historical detail which, I suspect, will interest those responsible for the service, though I hope they will resist the temptation to turn it into an advertisement for the antiquity of every object in the Abbey.

At the Coronation, the anointing oil is to be poured from a vessel fashioned in the shape of a golden eagle into the Coronation Spoon, an extraordinary survivor from the medieval past.

The spoon is generally dated to the twelfth century. When the Crown Jewels were dispersed and the regalia destroyed or sold following the execution of Charles I in 1649, the spoon survived. It had been sold during the upheavals of the Civil War period and was returned for the Coronation of Charles II in 1661.

It is important to distinguish the two objects. The spoon is the medieval survivor; the eagle-shaped vessel belongs to the seventeenth-century regalia. The eagle must not be granted an antiquity which belongs to its companion merely because the combination makes a more satisfying historical picture.

Nevertheless, the spoon's survival is remarkable. It passed through a revolution which sought to dismantle the material expression of monarchy and returned to service when the monarchy was restored. It has outlived political passions which their authors may have imagined eternal.

I confess to a weakness for such objects. A philatelist is accustomed to finding that the smallest surviving artefact may preserve a history more faithfully than the loudest speech. A stamp, properly examined, may disclose the rise and fall of governments, the habits of empires, the movements of armies, and the stubborn continuity of ordinary communication. A coronation spoon can perform a comparable service, though its usefulness at breakfast is perhaps less obvious.

But I would not have us mistake the survival of the spoon for proof that monarchy possesses an indefeasible divine sanction. Its history demonstrates continuity, resilience, and the capacity of institutions to recover from catastrophe. It does not demonstrate that every political arrangement which has survived is therefore ordained by God.

The biblical text traditionally associated with the anointing is even more instructive.

At the Coronation, the choir is to sing George Frideric Handel's Zadok the Priest, composed for the Coronation of George II in 1727. Its text recalls the biblical account of Solomon's anointing, in which Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint Solomon king.

The anthem has accompanied every British coronation since its composition. Its familiarity may cause some to receive it as a musical emblem of the Crown, but the words are not merely a declaration of national continuity. They recall a specific episode in the history of Israel, in which kingship was understood within a covenantal and religious order.

The account in the First Book of Kings describes Solomon's anointing amid a political crisis over succession. David's kingdom was not transferred to Solomon through the simple operation of an abstract constitutional mechanism. The succession involved human decisions, religious authority, and the public recognition of the king.

The comparison with a modern British coronation is necessarily imperfect. His Majesty does not become king through the anointing; he succeeded to the throne upon the death of his mother. The Coronation recognises and solemnises a kingship already possessed under the constitutional order. The anointing does not replace the law of succession, nor does it create a new legal title to the Crown.

Yet the biblical reference remains significant. The monarch is presented not merely as the beneficiary of a hereditary arrangement but as one who undertakes an office whose proper exercise is subject to moral and religious expectations.

That is the point at which I should prefer the discussion to dwell.

Solomon himself is hardly an uncomplicated advertisement for hereditary monarchy. His reign is remembered for wisdom, building, wealth, and splendour; but the biblical narrative also records his failures, his excesses, and the eventual division of the kingdom.

If the anthem invokes Solomon, it invokes not merely the grandeur of kingship but a biblical history in which the king remains answerable to a standard higher than his own wishes.

The lesson, as I understand it, is not that a sovereign is set above ordinary humanity by the application of sacred oil. It is that the office of the sovereign is placed within a moral framework which the sovereign does not create and cannot rightfully abolish at pleasure.

III. Why the screen matters

The question before you, my Lord Duke, is whether this act should be shown.

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 provides an immediate precedent. Her anointing was concealed beneath a canopy, and the ceremony was not televised. The intention was not to prevent the public from discovering that the anointing had occurred. It was to preserve the rite itself from public spectacle.

For the forthcoming Coronation, a specially designed screen is intended to provide a comparable protection. Its form, decorated with religious symbolism, is itself an expression of the Christian character of the act it conceals.

I understand the arguments for abandoning this reserve. Television has transformed the relationship between the monarchy and the public. Millions who would never enter Westminster Abbey can now witness the service as it unfolds. The cameras may bring the nation into a common experience, making the ceremony more intelligible and less remote. The broadcaster may argue that a rite which is central to the Coronation ought not to remain the one part of it which the public cannot see.

There is some force in this argument. It would be foolish to pretend that the public has no legitimate interest in the ceremony, or that every ancient custom must be maintained merely because it is old. Antiquity is not a sacrament. Some traditions deserve preservation; others deserve an honourable retirement.

But the question is not whether the public should be permitted to know about the anointing. It plainly should. The question is whether witnessing the physical act is necessary to understanding its significance.

I think not.

A screen does not make the rite unknowable. It establishes a boundary around it. The public may know what the archbishop is doing, why he is doing it, what words accompany the act, and what the act means within the service, without being given a close-up of the oil touching the sovereign's skin.

Indeed, there may be a certain loss of understanding when the camera is permitted to show everything. Television encourages the spectator to believe that seeing is equivalent to comprehending. The lens supplies the image, the commentator supplies the explanation, and the viewer is left with the agreeable impression that the matter has been mastered.

But religious understanding is not always improved by visual access. A church does not become more sacred because its most solemn moments are made available for repeated viewing. Nor does the faithful necessarily approach God more closely because a camera has been positioned at a more advantageous angle.

I should not wish to be understood as opposing television. The broadcasting of the Coronation is a valuable means of allowing the public to participate in an event of national importance. I would, however, resist the suggestion that the broadcaster's capacity to transmit an image creates a corresponding obligation upon the Church to provide it.

The camera is a servant of the ceremony, not its presiding officer.

If the screen is retained, the anointing may be explained before it begins. The Archbishop of Canterbury may describe its theological significance. The service may make clear that the concealment is deliberate, traditional, and religiously motivated. The camera may return to the Abbey after the rite, allowing the public to see the sovereign emerge from this moment of prayer and consecration.

The absence of the image need not be an absence of explanation.

IV. Is this a matter of theology, or merely of tradition?

I suspect the answer is both, though not in equal measure.

If the screen were retained solely because a committee had discovered that the practice had been followed in 1953, the argument would be incomplete. The fact that Elizabeth II was anointed privately does not automatically settle what ought to happen at every subsequent Coronation. A precedent may guide judgment without  the obligation to exercise it.

Tradition is not the repetition of an act without understanding. It is the transmission of something believed to possess enduring value. If the value can no longer be explained, the tradition risks becoming a costume worn by habit.

The theological question, therefore, must be asked directly: what is the Church doing when it anoints the sovereign?

Within the Church of England's Coronation rite, the anointing is understood as a sacred act, invoking God's blessing upon the monarch for the duties of the Crown. It belongs to the religious heart of the service. The oil is not merely an aromatic substance selected for its association with Jerusalem, and the spoon is not merely a museum piece temporarily returned to employment. Together, they serve an act of worship.

Yet one must be precise about what such an act does and does not claim.

The anointing is not a sacrament in the same sense as Baptism or Holy Communion in Anglican theology. Nor does it confer a new constitutional office upon the king. The monarch's accession has already occurred. The anointing belongs to the liturgical solemnisation of the office, expressing the Church's prayer that the sovereign may discharge his responsibilities under God's judgment and blessing.

This distinction is essential if the ceremony is to be understood in a modern constitutional state.

The British monarch does not govern by an unrestricted personal mandate, and the anointing does not grant permission to disregard Parliament, the law, or the constitutional conventions governing the Crown. A religious ceremony cannot reasonably be treated as a licence for arbitrary power.

Nor should it be used to imply that the monarch's political judgments are immune from criticism because his head has been touched with consecrated oil. The king remains a human being, subject to the limitations of human knowledge and the moral demands which apply to all Christians.

Indeed, if the anointing is to retain its Christian seriousness, it ought to discourage precisely that sort of presumption.

A sovereign who is prayed for, blessed, and set apart for duty is not thereby declared incapable of error. He is reminded that the office he holds is not simply an instrument for his own satisfaction. The greater the dignity, the greater the responsibility.

This, to my mind, is the theological argument for preserving the anointing as a distinct and solemn act. Whether the screen is itself a matter of binding doctrine is another question. I know of no reason to suppose that Christian theology requires a particular arrangement of fabric, however beautiful or historically appropriate it may be. The screen is a means of preserving the character of the rite, not the source of that character.

It follows that one should not argue that removing the screen would automatically invalidate the anointing, or that a Coronation conducted before television cameras would cease to be Christian. That would be to attribute to the screen a theological status which it does not possess.

But neither does the absence of such a doctrinal requirement make the screen irrelevant.

A practice may serve a genuine religious purpose without being indispensable to the validity of the rite. The question is whether that purpose remains persuasive.

I believe it does.

V. The constitutional objection

There is, however, a difficulty which I should not wish to conceal behind a cloud of incense.

The Coronation of a British sovereign is not the installation of an abbot, the consecration of a bishop, or the private dedication of a Christian to a particular vocation. It is a public event involving the head of state. The monarchy belongs to the constitutional life of the nation, and the Coronation is funded, organised, and broadcast as an occasion of national significance.

One may therefore ask whether a rite which helps to solemnise a public office should be conducted in a manner which denies the public visual access to its central moment.

I do not regard this as an absurd question. Those who ask it need not be irreligious, still less hostile to the monarchy. They may simply believe that public institutions should be intelligible to the people in whose name they operate.

But I would distinguish between public accountability and unrestricted visual access.

The public is entitled to understand the constitutional significance of the Coronation. It is entitled to know what the ceremony represents, what obligations the sovereign undertakes, and how the religious character of the service relates to the constitutional position of the Crown. It may reasonably debate whether the established Church and hereditary monarchy remain appropriate institutions for the country.

None of these rights necessarily requires that the anointing be filmed.

A public institution may preserve private or restricted elements without thereby placing itself beyond scrutiny. The question is whether the restriction serves a defensible purpose and whether its meaning is honestly explained.

In this instance, the purpose is not difficult to identify. The Church wishes to preserve the anointing as an act of worship rather than turn it into a spectacle. The screen does not conceal the constitutional existence of the king, the legal basis of his succession, or the words of the Coronation Service. It protects a particular religious action from the visual conventions of broadcasting.

I would therefore resist the claim that secrecy is necessarily an enemy of accountability. There is a difference between concealing an act because its nature is sacred and concealing an act because its nature cannot withstand examination.

The former may be a legitimate expression of reverence. The latter would be a matter for suspicion.

The burden lies upon those responsible for the ceremony to make the distinction clear.

VI. What must prevail?

I should be wary of answering this question as though the parties were engaged in a contest between religion and the public, with the Earl Marshal required to declare a victor.

The broadcaster has a legitimate interest in producing a clear and compelling account of the Coronation. The public has a legitimate interest in understanding the ceremony. The Church has a responsibility to conduct its worship according to its own understanding of the rite. The Crown has an interest in preserving the dignity and continuity of the institution it represents.

These interests need not be irreconcilable.

Nevertheless, where a genuine conflict arises, I would give priority to the integrity of the religious act over the demand for a more complete television picture.

I do not say this because every ecclesiastical custom must prevail over every secular consideration. I say it because the Church cannot consistently describe the anointing as the most sacred moment of the service and then treat it as an ordinary visual event merely because a broadcaster finds the existing arrangement unsatisfactory.

If the rite is sacred, its character should govern the manner in which it is presented. If it is not sacred, the Church should explain why it has retained the language and ceremonial forms of consecration. What cannot reasonably be maintained is that the act possesses profound religious significance when the programme is being written, but becomes an ordinary piece of television content when the cameras are switched on.

I would therefore recommend retaining the screen.

I use the word recommend deliberately. I have no power to issue an instruction, and I should be most uncomfortable if an opinion offered in correspondence were mistaken for a decision properly belonging to those charged with the Coronation.

My recommendation is not that the screen be retained because the monarch must be protected from the eyes of his subjects, nor because the royal family possesses some secret quality which ordinary Christians lack. Such reasoning would be both theologically questionable and constitutionally unhelpful.

I would retain it because the anointing is an act of Christian worship, and because the distinction between worship and spectacle is worth preserving.

The public should be told what happens behind the screen. It should be told why the oil has been brought from Jerusalem, why the Archbishop anoints the sovereign, why the rite recalls Solomon, and why the Church considers this moment different from the placing of the crown upon the king's head. The historical survival of the Coronation Spoon may be explained, as may the destruction of the regalia in 1649 and the return of the spoon for the Coronation of Charles II in 1661.

The public may be shown the oil and the vessels before the anointing, and the sovereign may be shown afterwards. The liturgy can be explained with clarity and without embarrassment. The screen need not be treated as an object of mystery in itself.

What should not be offered is the suggestion that the audience has been denied a glimpse of some occult ceremony, or that the royal bloodline acquires a secret supernatural privilege through the application of oil. Such interpretations may attract attention, but they do not represent a responsible account of the Christian rite.

The Church should neither encourage conspiracy nor manufacture mystery for its own protection.

There is a certain irony here. The more insistently one declares that an act must remain concealed because it is sacred, the more likely some spectators are to imagine that the concealment protects a secret doctrine of hereditary superiority. If the purpose of the screen is to preserve reverence, the explanation must be equally reverent and entirely candid.

The act is not hidden because the king is a different species of Christian. It is concealed because the Church wishes to distinguish a moment of prayer from the spectacle surrounding it.

That distinction may not persuade everyone. But it is a distinction which can be stated openly, examined critically, and defended without embarrassment.

VII. The danger of making the sovereign sacred

There is one final consideration which I hope you will permit me to address, for it concerns the future understanding of the monarchy more deeply than any dispute over television.

The language of anointing carries a considerable historical burden. In the ancient world, the king's relationship to the divine was frequently employed to justify the authority of the ruler. In Christian Europe, the anointing of monarchs helped to express the religious understanding of kingship, sometimes in ways which strengthened the claim that royal authority stood above ordinary political challenge.

It would be foolish to deny this history. The Coronation is not a ceremony without political meaning, and the Church should not pretend that its religious language has never been used to support claims of exceptional royal privilege.

But history also provides the means of correcting a mistaken interpretation.

The biblical kings were not above divine judgment. David was rebuked by Nathan. Solomon's wisdom did not prevent his failures. The prophets did not regard the throne as a refuge from moral accountability. The Old Testament repeatedly presents the king as a servant of a law which precedes and judges him.

The Christian tradition, too, contains a profound warning against confusing worldly authority with spiritual perfection. Christ's kingship is not a straightforward endorsement of earthly magnificence. The Christian sovereign who receives anointing should therefore be reminded not only of the dignity of his office but also of the limitations of his power.

The Crown may possess historical continuity, but continuity is not the same as infallibility. The monarchy may have a religious ceremonial character, but that character does not exempt it from constitutional restraint. The sovereign may be prayed for by the Church, but the prayers do not make every royal action righteous.

If the anointing is to mean anything in a Christian service, it must be capable of expressing these obligations.

I would go further. I should prefer the Coronation to be understood as an occasion on which the monarch is reminded of the demands of his office, rather than an occasion on which the nation is invited to admire the exceptional nature of his person.

The oil should signify service. The prayer should signify dependence upon God. The anthem should recall the biblical history of kingship, including its warnings. The crown should signify an office whose authority is bounded by law and whose dignity carries responsibilities towards the people.

The screen, in this understanding, does not shield a royal privilege from public inspection.

It protects a moment in which the sovereign is not being presented to the public at all, but is being addressed, through the liturgy, in the presence of God.

There is a difference between the two interpretations, and I should be sorry to see it lost.

VIII. A final word from the lakes

My Lord Duke, I have written at greater length than I intended, a weakness which I attribute partly to the weather and partly to the fact that questions of ecclesiastical ceremonial seldom remain as simple as they first appear. One begins with a screen and ends, if one is not careful, with the relationship between divine authority and the British constitution.

Yet I believe the question deserves serious consideration precisely because it is not merely a question of staging.

The Coronation of King Charles III will be watched by millions, and many of those viewers will have little familiarity with the theology of the Church of England. Some will regard the service as a historical pageant; others as an expression of national identity; others as a religious act whose significance they accept; and still others as an anachronism whose continued existence they question.

The ceremony cannot compel them all to interpret it in the same way. Nor should it attempt to do so.

What it can do is present its own meaning honestly.

If the Church understands the anointing as a sacred act, it should preserve the conditions under which that act can be performed with dignity. If the Crown understands the Coronation as an expression of constitutional continuity, it should not allow the pursuit of spectacle to obscure the obligations which accompany that continuity. If television wishes to bring the event into the homes of the nation, it should be willing to explain why a particular moment is not being shown, rather than insist that every moment must be made visible.

The oil from the Mount of Olives, the association with Princess Alice, the consecration at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the medieval spoon which survived the destruction of the regalia, and Handel's anthem recalling Solomon all contribute to the extraordinary historical and religious character of the occasion. None of them requires us to believe that the sovereign possesses a mysterious superiority of blood. Together, they tell a story of inheritance, faith, political continuity, and responsibility.

The question is what the nation will be invited to see in that story.

I should hope that it sees not a family elevated above the ordinary moral obligations of mankind, but a sovereign reminded of those obligations in a particularly solemn fashion. I should hope that the Church does not allow the sacred language of anointing to become a convenient ornament for political prestige. And I should hope that the broadcaster, having been entrusted with the public presentation of the Coronation, understands that not everything which can be shown must necessarily be shown.

My recommendation, then, is to retain the screen, to explain the rite fully, and to resist the temptation to confuse visual access with public understanding.

But I submit this opinion with the proper modesty of one who has neither the authority to arrange the Coronation nor the presumption to suppose that an afternoon's correspondence from Cumbria can settle every difficulty of Church and Crown.

The final decision belongs to those entrusted with the service. I ask only that, in reaching it, they consider not merely what the public wishes to see, but what the Church believes it is doing.

For if the anointing is no more than a spectacle, then the screen is unnecessary. If it is an act of worship, then the camera must learn that there are occasions upon which its proper place is outside.

I remain, my Lord Duke,

Your Grace's obedient servant,

Sir Timothy John Paul Platt Monday, Bt.

Philologist and Grammarian

Fellow of the Royal Philatelic Society London

Carrickfergusian Faithful Anglican of the old, kneeling sort

Dwelling by the Lakes and Fells of Cumbria

P.S. I should be grateful if the gentlemen of television would resist the temptation to provide a close-up of the Coronation Spoon whilst the Archbishop is speaking. The spoon is an admirable piece of medieval craftsmanship, and I should be delighted to discuss it at length over tea. But I fear that, at the very moment when the Church is praying for the king, an extended shot of a twelfth-century utensil might encourage the nation to suppose that the spoon, rather than the prayer, is the principal object of the exercise.