It’s the oldest piece of furniture in Great Britain still used for the purpose for which it was created. It’s over 700 years old and only used when a monarch of England accedes to the crown.
The Coronation Chair (not to be confused with a throne, for the Coronation Chair’s only purpose is to anoint and crown the monarch) was created by King Edward I. Originally, it was to be a magnificent bronze chair to house his greatest relic, the Stone of Scone (pronounced, scoon), the celebrated stone of lore that every Scottish king was said to sit upon to get his crown. No one knows if it was housed in a similar chair in Scotland, but its capture in 1296 signaled to the Scots that England was now in charge. Edward still had battles to fight and needed money to do it, so the bronze chair idea was scrapped and he instead commissioned a wooden chair. Historians are not certain that his heir Edward II, or his heir Edward III, or even his heir Richard II were crowned sitting on the chair, but it is believed to be so. In fact, every monarch since sat on that chair except for the following:
Even Oliver Cromwell used it to become Lord Protector, and he had it removed from the Abbey to Westminster Hall to do the deed.
The first king that we know for certain to have been crowned sitting in that chair was King Henry IV, Henry of Bolingbroke.
The Stone of Scone has a lot of names: Jacob’s Pillow, the Royal Stone, the Stone of Scotland, the Coronation Stone, and the Stone of Destiny. It is supposed to be the stone that biblical Jacob used as a pillow in Bethel. As legend has it, it was taken into Egypt with Jacob’s sons and then the daughter of the Pharaoh, Scota (from which the name of Scotland was supposed to derive, but didn’t – It comes from Scoti, a late Roman word used to describe the Gaelic regions), took it with her to Spain. From Spain it is said to have gone next to Ireland and to the sacred Hill of Tara. There it was supposedly called ‘Lia-Fail,’ the ‘fatal’ stone, or ‘stone of destiny.’ Irish kings were made by sitting on the stone – a very popular thing to do, apparently. Legend had it that it was supposed to groan if you had the right, and keep silent if you didn’t. Finally, in the sixth century, Fergus Mòr Mac Earca, legendary King of the Picts and perhaps founder of Scotland, brought it to his western Scottish lands, where a later ninth-century King of the Picts and also supposedly the first king of the Scots, Cináed mac Ailpín, left it at the monastery of Scone in Perthshire for safekeeping.
It’s not a very impressive rock. Gray, made of sandstone, carved and knocked about, it weighs 336 pounds, with two iron rings attached to it. It’s 27 inches long by 17 inches wide by 11 inches high. In 1996, sophisticated tests proved that the stone’s origins came from less than a mile from Scone. So much for the Egyptian/Irish tale.
For the purposes of this story, I took two fictional liberties (only two?): I moved up the date for Parliament to meet (so we wouldn’t drag the story) and I had the Stone stolen in the fourteenth century (so we would have a plot). But it was never stolen, that is, not until Christmas Day in 1950 when it was taken by Scottish Nationalists. It really wasn’t made for lugging around, and it had a deep flaw in it anyway, and the thing broke into two pieces. After four months on the run, the Stone was repaired and finally returned. And from then on it was placed in the same vault that kept it safe during World War II and only brought back out to the Coronation Chair in February of 1952 for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.
In 1996, the British Prime Minister, John Major, announced that the Stone would be going back to Scotland with the proviso that it be returned when crowning a new British monarch. After all this time, the return of the Stone was greeted not with adulation by the Scots, but with a sneering sense of ‘Really?’ So if you wish to visit the Stone today, you will have to go to Edinburgh Castle. If you wish to visit the chair, you need to be in the opposite end of the UK in Westminster Abbey.
And this is all well and good, but there has been some question as to whether King Edward I actually got his hands on the real Stone of Destiny in the first place all those centuries ago. Did the monks hide the real stone and give him something like the lid to a cesspit, complete with its iron rings to carry it? After all, the stone is made of the same stuff that can be found around the abbey. Either all the other stories about the stone are fancies – and as we know from research into relics, they very well can be – or is there an even bigger conspiracy afoot, lost to the marches of time? Because some say that the seat of kings was made of basalt, and much larger, and decorated with carvings and the following inscription:
Ni fallat fatum, Scoti, quocunque locatum
Invenient lapidem, regnare tenentur ibidem
(If Fates go right, where’er this stone is found
The Scots shall monarchs of that realm be crowned.)
Was Edward duped all those centuries ago? Even he was suspicious and sent his knights back to the abbey two years later to tear the place apart, looking for the real stone. None was found. It might be buried at Dunsinnan Hill, where the real King Macbeth secreted it. It might be in Skye. Or at the bottom of the sea.
Or it really is the same stone. It’s the kind of thing where no one will ever really know the complete truth.
In this book, we also finally meet Katherine Swynford. She was the sister-in-law of Geoffrey Chaucer, and that was, no doubt, how Katherine met John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, as Chaucer lived in his household. By all accounts by her contemporaries, we can extrapolate that she was witty, charming, able, and dignified. But the details of her life are sketchy at best. We don’t even know what she looked like.
She married Hugh Swynford when she was about twenty and had two children from him, Blanche and Thomas. When Hugh died in 1371 in Aquitaine under Lancaster’s command (very David and Uriah), Katherine’s association with the Lancaster household only deepened. She had started as lady’s maid to his first wife, Blanche, and was already governess to Lancaster’s daughters – Philippa and Elizabeth – when it is believed somewhere around 1372, a year or so after Katherine’s husband died, that she became John of Gaunt’s mistress. They had three children together, and all, by law, were considered bastards. This sort of activity was not uncommon, but a deeply religious man such as King Richard found it distasteful. He was utterly devoted to his own first wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia, and even though they had no children, Richard is not known to have any bastards of his own.
Katherine had a brief falling out with John for a few years, but then resumed their relationship. And when John’s second wife died – a match made purely for land, profit, and prestige – Gaunt had nothing more to prove and, like Charles and Camilla, married his longtime love at last. (Heck, he was already the richest man in England. What more did he need?)
The children sired by Gaunt were declared legitimate by King Richard, but they were barred from ever inheriting the throne. However, Gaunt’s eldest son by Katherine Swynford, John Beaufort, had a granddaughter, Margaret Beaufort, whose son became Henry VII and took the throne from the last Plantagenet, Richard III. And Henry VII in turn married Elizabeth of York (who was also related to John of Gaunt), thus ending the York and Lancaster feud known as the War of the Roses. Their descendants inherited the throne after all.
In fact, Katherine’s descendants are not just great in number but great in prestige. Her descendants include five American presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush – as well as Princess Diana, Sir Winston Churchill and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. How’s that for a legacy for a person about whom history knows very little?
Now let me just say one thing about the book Katherine by Anya Seton, by which many of us were introduced to Katherine Swynford. The book, written in 1954, would seem to be the definitive word on Katherine, when in fact, much of it was speculation. As I have mentioned before, we don’t know much about Katherine, even to the year she was born. I did not refer to the novel for my own characterization of Katherine or John of Gaunt. I read it too many years ago to remember it, and I don’t find that novels are good places to do research. Instead, I took the contemporary accounts of each character and drew my visions of them from that. Seton’s Katherine will always be well-loved, but it can’t necessarily be gospel.
And then there is John Rykener. We first met him in The Demon’s Parchment. John Rykener is a real fellow from fourteenth-century London, cross-dressing and serving as a male prostitute as well as spending time as an embroideress. So there was diversity in London all along, even though the term ‘homosexual’ was a long time away and understanding one’s orientation even further. John got in trouble with the law not for his homosexuality or even for prostitution but for his cross-dressing, a distinct no-no for men as well as women; one was not to dress as the opposite sex.
Crispin and Jack, as usual, had a lot to contend with in this book and there is no end of trouble as their story continues in yet another tale of mayhem and death in the next installment,A Maiden Weeping.