The Man in Black at Westminster

A letter concerning His Majesty's Coronation, a verger, and a certain other possibility

My dear Edward,

I have been meaning to write to you about the matter of the black-robed gentleman at His Majesty's Coronation ever since our little investigation was concluded, but I confess that I have been waiting for the appropriate degree of distance from the event before committing myself to paper.

You will understand why.

There are certain things which one may say in conversation over a pot of tea which become considerably more alarming when written down.

I shall therefore put it at the outset, before either of us becomes too old to appreciate the joke:

I do not believe that the Grim Reaper attended the Coronation of King Charles III.

I should like that sentence entered into the record.

I should also like the following sentence entered into the record:

I am not entirely certain that he did not.

And there, Edward, lies the difficulty.

You will remember the curious business of the dark figure who appeared briefly in the background during the Coronation at Westminster Abbey on 6 May 2023. You will also remember that I was, rather improbably, selected to participate in a small and discreet group whose purpose was to determine what, precisely, had been seen.

I have never understood why they asked me.

I can think of at least six people who would have been more useful.

On the other hand, I am a philologist, an Anglican, an admirer of old buildings, habitual collector of unnecessary information, and a man who has spent an indecent proportion of his life examining things which other people would have had the good sense to leave alone.

Perhaps they knew what they were doing.

Or perhaps, as I have occasionally suspected, nobody else was willing.

The apparition

You have seen the footage.

There he is.

For a few moments, a dark figure passes through the background of Westminster Abbey.

He is dressed in black.

His face is largely obscured.

He carries what appears to be a staff or rod.

He moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who has every right to be where he is.

And this last detail is, to my mind, the most disturbing.

Had the gentleman crept furtively along a wall, peered suspiciously around a pillar, or otherwise behaved like an intruder, I should have dismissed the whole thing at once.

But he did not.

He walked as though Westminster Abbey belonged to him.

That is precisely how one imagines Death behaving.

He has been there before.

He knows where everything is.

He has no need to hurry.

And, being Death, he presumably has no appointments afterwards.

The internet, naturally, reacted with its usual restraint.

Within a remarkably short time, the figure had been identified as the Grim Reaper.

I confess that I found the proposition aesthetically persuasive.

Historically, less so.

Still, one must never underestimate the importance of aesthetics.

A man in black crossing the background of a royal Coronation in Westminster Abbey is already halfway to becoming an omen before anyone has had time to ask his name.

How I came to be involved

I shall spare you the details of how the little committee was assembled.

Let us simply say that I received an invitation of the sort which contains no information whatsoever about why one has been invited.

The language was discreet.

The purpose was described as "research".

The participants were not to discuss the matter publicly.

I was asked whether I would be willing to examine the evidence and provide an independent assessment.

Naturally, I agreed.

You know me well enough to understand that there are few things more dangerous than telling Timothy Monday that a matter is both obscure and supposedly confidential.

I arrived with a notebook.

I brought a magnifying glass, although I did not actually use it.

I also brought a flask of tea.

This last item proved considerably more useful.

The first instruction we received was to approach the matter without prejudice.

I thought this was sensible.

The second was that we were not to assume that the figure was supernatural.

I thought this was even more sensible.

The third was that we were not to assume that he was not supernatural.

At that point I became genuinely interested.

The obvious explanation

The obvious explanation presented itself almost immediately.

He was a verger.

Westminster Abbey subsequently confirmed precisely this.

This was, I confess, rather more astonishing than the apparition itself. The Abbey is not an institution ordinarily given to publicity. Indeed, it guards its public utterances with the sort of ecclesiastical discretion once reserved for the contents of the confessional. It is generally happier to let the bells speak, the stones endure, and the vergers go about their business without attracting the slightest attention from the outside world.

For Westminster Abbey to confirm something so plainly was therefore almost a historical event in its own right. One might reasonably have expected the matter to disappear beneath several centuries of institutional silence, perhaps accompanied by a polite suggestion that the public concern itself with more important things. Instead, the Abbey confirmed precisely what I had suspected.

I shall not pretend that this diminished my satisfaction. If anything, it increased it considerably. When an institution as magnificently discreet — and, dare I say, occasionally terrified of the public light — as Westminster Abbey breaks its customary silence to confirm that you were right, one is entitled to raise an eyebrow, straighten one's waistcoat, and quietly observe: Well, there we are.

Anyhow, that should, ordinarily, have been the end of the matter.

A verger is a lay official who assists with the practical and ceremonial life of a church. He helps with services, processions and order; he assists clergy and worshippers; and in a place such as Westminster Abbey he becomes part of the enormous machinery required to make an important service appear effortless.

This is an ancient and honourable office.

The verger is one of those people whom everybody notices only when he is absent.

A bishop may make a theological error and be remembered for generations.

A verger may prevent thirty people from standing in the wrong place, stop a door from being opened at the wrong moment, arrange a procession, deal with some practical emergency and ensure that the entire service proceeds exactly as intended.

Very few writers have ever made the verger the subject of a work of literature. The great exception is Somerset Maugham, whose 1929 short story The Verger gave us Albert Edward Foreman — perhaps the most famous verger in English literature.

But, in general, this circumspection is probably why vergers are so effective.

The Abbey's own employment material was particularly helpful to us. Ceremonial duties may involve the wearing of a cassock and ceremonial gown, while ordinary duties call for sober black clothing.

In other words, the man was not dressed like the Grim Reaper.

The Grim Reaper was dressed rather like a verger.

There is a distinction.

A small one.

But an important one.

The black gown

I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about the black gown.

The internet seemed to regard the black clothing as evidence of supernatural intent.

I regarded it as evidence that the man worked in a church.

This is one of those occasions when knowledge of Anglicanism becomes useful.

Black is hardly an exotic colour in ecclesiastical life.

Indeed, if a man were to turn up at Westminster Abbey dressed in a luminous orange jacket covered in fluorescent stars, I should be far more suspicious.

A black gown in Westminster Abbey is not sinister.

It is practically architectural.

The Abbey itself is full of black, white, grey, brown and stone.

The verger therefore disappears into the building.

And this, I think, explains much of the visual effect.

He did not look like a man who had dressed as Death.

He looked like a man who belonged to the Abbey.

And because our minds associate dark robes and concealed faces with Death, we supplied the rest.

Then we discovered the rod

This was more awkward.

You will appreciate why.

A black-robed figure carrying a rod through an ancient church is not the easiest visual material from which to construct a reassuring explanation.

But the rod turned out to be almost the strongest evidence for the verger hypothesis.

The traditional office of the verger is associated with a ceremonial rod or virge, the word ultimately deriving from the Latin virga, meaning a branch, rod or staff.

You can imagine my satisfaction.

Everyone else saw the staff and thought:

Death.

I saw it and thought:

Latin.

This is why philologists should never be allowed to investigate supernatural phenomena without supervision.

Where other men see omens, we see etymologies.

The irony is delicious.

The very object which made the man look more like the Grim Reaper was one of the things which most strongly identified him as a verger.

I confess that I found this almost unbearably Anglican.

The case for the Reaper

Nevertheless, I refused to close the investigation.

A proper inquiry must entertain its least convenient hypothesis.

So I asked myself:

What if it really was Death?

Not metaphorically.

Not symbolically.

Not "Death" in the sense that all men are mortal.

I mean the fellow himself.

The Grim Reaper.

Scythe and all, although presumably the scythe had been left somewhere sensible.

The case, I admit, had certain attractions.

First, the setting.

Westminster Abbey is hardly an arbitrary location.

It is a church.

It is a royal church.

It is the burial place of kings, queens, statesmen, poets and innumerable distinguished persons whose names are now remembered chiefly because somebody has carved them into stone.

The Abbey is full of mortality.

Second, the occasion.

A king was being crowned.

There is something inherently amusing about placing a symbol of mortality within a ceremony whose entire purpose is to proclaim continuity.

The man dies.

The Crown remains.

Third, the clothing.

Black.

Fourth, the staff.

Fifth, the manner of walking.

Sixth—

Well.

You know me.

I could have gone on all afternoon.

The beautiful women

There was another consideration which I confess I found philosophically significant.

The Coronation contained no shortage of beautiful women.

You will accuse me of wandering from the subject.

I assure you that I am not.

Beauty and death have been acquainted with one another since Eve looked at the forbidden fruit and decided that it was worth the trouble.

The Coronation offered an extraordinary display of human splendour: elegant gowns, jewels, tiaras, uniforms, orders and decorations, all beneath the ancient stones of Westminster Abbey.

There were faces which television had already taught half the world to recognise.

There were others which had never appeared on television before and perhaps never will again.

There were young women in magnificent clothes, older women wearing the accumulated dignity of years, and enough jewellery to make a medieval prince feel inadequately dressed.

And behind all this splendour stood an uncomfortable truth.

Everyone in that building was mortal.

The beautiful woman is mortal.

The handsome prince is mortal.

The Archbishop is mortal.

The King is mortal.

The verger is mortal.

Even the man with the television camera is mortal, although I suspect he would object to being reminded of it while working.

The jewels will outlive their wearers.

The robes will outlive their wearers.

The Abbey will probably outlive most of the institutions represented inside it.

And the Crown itself will eventually rest upon another head.

This is why I began to think that the Grim Reaper, if one wished to speak symbolically, had perhaps chosen the most appropriate possible moment to make an appearance.

The Coronation was already a sermon on mortality

This became the heart of my argument.

The Coronation was not simply a spectacular royal pageant.

It was a Christian service.

That distinction matters.

The King was not presented merely as the most important man in Britain.

He was called to serve.

He swore oaths.

He was anointed.

He received the regalia.

He was crowned.

And beneath all the gold and ceremony was a profoundly Christian proposition:

authority is temporary, and therefore it must be exercised responsibly.

This is an old idea.

Very old.

The crown does not make the man immortal.

It merely gives him greater responsibilities while he is alive.

And then another man inherits it.

One cannot spend long in Westminster Abbey without noticing the irony.

The building contains the graves of kings who were once the centre of precisely this universe.

They possessed crowns.

They possessed armies.

They possessed palaces.

They possessed wealth.

They possessed titles.

They possessed beautiful wives.

They possessed, in some cases, rather too much confidence.

And now they possess tombs.

That is Westminster Abbey's little joke.

It is also Christianity's.

I began to suspect that the Reaper had excellent taste

At some point during the investigation I formulated a hypothesis which I did not dare mention immediately.

Perhaps the Grim Reaper was not trying to frighten anyone.

Perhaps he simply has excellent taste.

Think about it.

If Death wished to observe the Coronation of an English king, where else would he go?

Buckingham Palace?

Too crowded.

The Mall?

Too much security.

A television studio?

Ghastly acoustics.

Westminster Abbey?

Perfect.

Ancient.

Beautiful.

Christian.

Full of kings.

Full of tombs.

Full of beautiful women.

Full of people who are about to become photographs in history books.

And, most importantly, staffed by vergers who already dress appropriately.

If I were Death, I should choose Westminster Abbey.

The scythe problem

There was, of course, one difficulty.

The scythe.

The traditional Grim Reaper carries one.

Our gentleman did not.

This is rather important.

I proposed several possible explanations.

Perhaps the scythe was considered incompatible with the Abbey's health and safety regulations.

Perhaps security confiscated it.

Perhaps Death has modernised.

Perhaps he has moved from agricultural imagery to administrative symbolism.

Or perhaps the simplest answer was correct.

He was not Death.

He was a verger.

The committee found this argument persuasive.

I found it irritating.

Could the Abbey have been mistaken?

One member of our group asked whether the Abbey’s identification of the figure as a verger might itself be mistaken.

I replied that, theoretically, it was possible. The Abbey, after all, is not infallible — although I should probably whisper that within the precincts.

But there was another curious point. Nobody appeared afterwards on a television programme, in a newspaper interview, or even on the usual parade of media panels to say: “Yes, that was me. I was the man dressed as the Grim Reaper.”

Perhaps he was simply too frightened to come forward. Perhaps he had been instructed to say nothing. Or perhaps — and here the matter becomes considerably more entertaining — that man did not exist at all.

One is left with the rather awkward possibility that we have an unidentified Grim Reaper, an institutionally confirmed verger, and absolutely nobody claiming to have been the person in question. In most mysteries, that would be considered a clue. In Westminster Abbey, I suppose, it may simply be Tuesday.

It was Newsweek that contacted Westminster Abbey, and an Abbey spokesperson confirmed that the figure was a verger, a member of the Abbey community. But I could not find any subsequent interview, television appearance, or other public statement from the individual himself saying, in effect, “Yes, that was me.” Nor does any of the reporting name the particular verger.

One can never prove an ordinary historical proposition with absolute philosophical certainty.

Perhaps the man had entered the building disguised as a verger.

Perhaps Death had obtained false identification.

Perhaps Westminster Abbey's entire staff had been deceived.

Perhaps the Church of England has been concealing the Grim Reaper's employment records from us for centuries.

But at that point we were no longer doing history.

We were writing a Gothic novel.

There comes a moment in every investigation when an alternative explanation becomes so complicated that it stops being an explanation and becomes an entertainment.

The verger hypothesis required no conspiracy.

No supernatural being.

No deception.

No unexplained entry.

No missing scythe.

It required only a verger doing his job.

I reluctantly conceded the point.

Yet I could not quite dismiss him

This is where my difficulty began.

The evidence was overwhelming.

The man was a verger.

The clothing was appropriate.

The rod was appropriate.

The setting was appropriate.

His presence was entirely explicable.

And yet I kept returning to the image.

Perhaps you know the one I mean.

The black figure.

The old church.

The fleeting movement.

The crowned King.

There is something about it which refuses to become entirely ordinary.

Not because it is evidence of the supernatural.

It isn't.

But because it accidentally produced a picture which seems to have been designed by a medieval theologian.

The King is crowned.

Death walks behind him.

The beautiful people watch.

The bells ring.

The ancient stones remain silent.

I cannot prove that Death was there.

But I can prove that the image made us think about Death.

And perhaps that is almost as interesting.

My favourite hypothesis

You will by now have guessed which explanation I favour.

It is neither the entirely rational explanation nor the entirely supernatural one.

I call it the Verger-Reaper Hypothesis.

It runs as follows.

The gentleman was, beyond reasonable doubt, a verger.

He wore the proper ceremonial clothing.

He carried the proper ceremonial implement.

He was performing the proper ceremonial duties.

There is therefore no historical reason whatsoever to identify him as the Grim Reaper.

However, in the particular circumstances of that particular day, he became—quite accidentally—a perfect representation of Death.

And perhaps, if one wishes to be slightly more mischievous, one may say that Death himself could hardly have chosen a better disguise.

The verger was already doing everything required.

He needed only to arrive.

The theological objection

There is, however, an objection which I think a Christian ought to make.

We sometimes imagine Death as an enemy who sneaks into beautiful places.

Christianity has a rather different understanding.

Death is an enemy, certainly.

But mortality is also part of the human condition.

The Christian does not defeat death by pretending it does not exist.

The Christian faith is built around confronting it.

A church is therefore one of the few places in which the sight of Death ought not to be entirely shocking.

The Christian walks into church knowing that he is mortal.

The King walks into Westminster Abbey knowing that he is mortal.

The Archbishop knows it.

The congregation knows it.

The beautiful young woman wearing the tiara knows it, whether she is thinking about it or

not.

The verger knows it.

And I know it.

We are all temporary residents.

The Abbey is merely more honest about it than most buildings.

What I finally reported

My report to the committee was therefore rather shorter than this letter.

I wrote, in essence:

The available evidence strongly identifies the figure as a Westminster Abbey verger. His clothing and ceremonial staff are consistent with that office. There is no credible evidence that the figure was the Grim Reaper.

That is the responsible conclusion.

I stand by it.

But I added a private note.

I wrote:

Nevertheless, the appearance of a black-robed verger carrying a ceremonial rod through Westminster Abbey during the Coronation of a mortal king constitutes an unusually perfect accidental memento mori.

That sentence pleased me.

I think it is the heart of the matter.

And then I asked myself one final question

Suppose, Edward, that the Grim Reaper really had attended.

Suppose that, contrary to all evidence, the old fellow had decided to come to Westminster on that particular Saturday.

What would he have done?

Would he have stood dramatically beside the altar?

Certainly not.

That would be vulgar.

Would he have carried a scythe?

Perhaps, but security would have objected.

Would he have announced himself?

Absolutely not.

Death has never needed publicity.

He would have done precisely what our mysterious gentleman did.

He would have walked quietly through the background.

He would have disturbed nobody.

He would have watched the King receive his crown.

He would have watched the beautiful women in their magnificent gowns.

He would have listened to the music.

He would have observed the ancient rites.

And then he would have left.

There would have been no need for him to take anyone with him.

Not yet.

The final verdict

So, my dear Edward, after all our investigation, here is my conclusion.

Was the Grim Reaper at Thy Brother's Coronation?

No.

The figure was a verger.

Can the evidence prove that he was not the Grim Reaper?

Historically and photographically, almost certainly.

Philosophically?

That is another matter.

Was the figure dressed like Death?

No.

Death was dressed like a verger.

Was Death symbolically present?

Without question.

He was beneath the floor.

He was carved into the monuments.

He was remembered in the tombs.

He was implicit in the Christian service.

He was present in the temporary nature of the Crown.

He was present in every beautiful face in that magnificent congregation.

And he was present in the fact that a mortal man was being crowned King.

That, I think, is the most amusing conclusion available to us.

The internet saw a Grim Reaper and was wrong.

The Abbey saw a verger and was right.

But the internet accidentally stumbled upon something the Abbey had understood all along.

A Coronation is not merely a celebration of the living.

It is a ceremony of continuity.

The man dies.

The Crown remains.

The King changes.

The Kingdom continues.

The Abbey remembers.

And somewhere in the background, a man in black walks quietly past.

I should like to think that he was merely a verger.

Indeed, I am almost certain that he was.

But if, by some extraordinary chance, he was the other fellow, I hope he will forgive me for saying that he chose an excellent afternoon for his visit.

There were crowns.

There was music.

There were splendid vestments.

There were beautiful women.

There was an ancient church.

And there was tea afterwards.

If Death has any appreciation of English civilisation at all, he could hardly have spent the afternoon better.

Yours ever,

Timothy