Elizabeth’s Coronation Oath
ON 31 JANUARY 1547, in the first known proclamation to deal with the succession of the reign, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer altered the form for Edward VI’s coronation in line with the 1534 Act of Supremacy. Conventionally, a king had been “elect chosen and required . . . by all three of the estates of the realm to take upon him the Crown and royal dignity of England.” Cranmer’s adaptation stated that “the laws of God and man” had already made Edward heir to “the Royal Dignity and Crown Imperial,” therefore announcing that Edward was King of England and Supreme Head of the Church by divine, rather than human, agency, an argument which was reinforced by the recasting of the ceremony itself, where it was stated that “kings be God’s anointed not in respect of the Oil the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power, which is Ordained, and . . . their Persons which are elected by God.”1 Since the fourteenth century, the coronation oath had elaborated five requests to the monarch on behalf of their subjects—to confirm the laws and liberties that previous kings had granted to the English people; to do likewise in respect to the liberties of the clergy; to promise peace and concord to clergy, Church, and people; to practice justice and mercy; and to observe the laws “as shall be chosen by your people.” Cranmer altered this so that the constitution of law, liberty, peace, and concord was determined by the crown to the Church and the people, but not to the clergy; abandoned the second clause altogether; and amended the fifth so that it was the people, not the king, who were to consent to new laws. At first consideration, this seemed an affirmation of the ruler’s divine right, but in legal terms, it meant something different.
The Edwardine reform of the Church was “momentous” in that it was accomplished not by royal prerogative but by statute, thus changing the form of the law itself.2 Acts of Parliament became not only “declaratory statements or definitions of the law as it was thought to exist,” but new laws in their own right, and thus the potential of statute was no longer limited in its authority. That is, the legislation which created a new and Protestant order was not the will of the king but generated by Parliament. So the casting of Deborah as a parliamentary ruler in the Fleet pageant was less a comment on the limitations of female authority than a recasting of royal authority in general. If the truncated reforms of Edward’s reign were to pass smoothly into law under Elizabeth, it was legally essential that she be crowned in the same fashion as her nine-year-old brother had been, to reassert the royal supremacy in a manner which would constitutionally permit the continuation of that reformation by her advisers.
This legal nicety explains the confusion surrounding the coronation oath sworn by the queen. After processing in her crimson coronation robes from Westminster Hall to the Abbey on a blue carpet a third of a mile long, Elizabeth was conducted to a stage in the center of the Abbey “crossing” with the high altar to the east and the choir to the west. Bishop Owen Oglethorpe asked if the people would have her as queen from each of the four corners of this stage, and when the enthusiastic cries had died down, Elizabeth offered at the altar, then seated herself in a chair of estate to hear the sermon, then knelt for the Lord’s Prayer. There was then some rather awkward maneuvering with books. The queen gave a book to “a lord” who handed it to the bishop, who gave it back and read from another book, after which Cecil popped up and handed a further “booke” to the bishop, who then read from it. One historian suggests that Elizabeth swore the oath “in the usual form” and suggests that the “booke” was probably the Latin text of the coronation pardon.3 Yet to know what Queen Elizabeth actually swore, it is necessary to look forward in time, as there is no record of the words she spoke.
Given the constitutional redirection explained above, it is highly unlikely that Elizabeth swore the same oath as Mary, who had emphatically not used the 1547 form at her coronation. One clue as to the words comes from the 1644 trial for treason of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Laud claimed that he had not altered the coronation oath of Charles I in order to enhance royal prerogative at the expense of parliamentary statute. Whatever alterations had been made, he stated, had occurred under Edward VI and Elizabeth I. We know that Charles I used the same oath as Elizabeth’s successor, James I (with an amendment restoring the pre-Reformation formula that the king was to observe existing laws). Yet James’s oath contained one formula found nowhere in any extant text, hence Laud’s attribution to the 1547 or 1559 ceremony. But since this was not used in 1547, it can only have been added in 1559, that is, expressly for Elizabeth. In Cecil’s articles for the coronation before 18 December 1558 is a reminder to provide a copy of the oath for the queen, and when her coronation began, Oglethorpe had no copy at all. The unique clause with which Cecil emerged at the vital moment was that, in respect of the law, the sovereign was to act “according to the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel established in the kingdom.” So there was nothing “usual” about the vow Elizabeth made to her people in the Abbey that day; on the contrary, her oath was, like her, unique. And while such focus on the words she spoke might appear a nicety, her coronation “forced the political culture of the Tudor monarchy into a new mould,” one which would have a profound impact on Elizabeth’s queenship and the future governance of the nation.