What does the Book of Common Prayer have to do with the Coronation?
by Iain Milne, Prayer Book Society:
Across its familiar services, the Book of Common Prayer teaches us the profound importance of prayer for
the sovereign – for the sake of the bodily and spiritual health of the King himself, of the Church of which he
is Governor, and of his kingdoms and their people. The coronation rite has never been formally included in
the BCP. However, its history and message is much more closely bound up with the BCP than this might
suggest.
The coronation service of medieval English kings retained a core traceable back to the pre-Conquest rulers
of the House of Wessex. The Liber Regalis, a 14th Century volume still held by the Chapter of Westminster,
records how these elements were intended to be enacted at a high medieval English coronation. This
beautiful manuscript continued in practical use well after most other public Latin liturgy had been set
aside outside of college chapels. The details of the coronations of Henry VIII’s children are complicated and
in some respects uncertain, but it is believed that the service was first held primarily in English for the 1603
coronation of James VI of Scots as James I of England.
It was not inevitable that the coronation rite and its Anglo-Saxon era symbols and prayers should survive
the Reformation. Its retention was possible because the Prayer Book established the English protestant
tradition as one which distilled down but fundamentally retained that which was most essential in its
medieval inheritance, and also strongly encouraged prayer for the monarch, the Church, and the wider
community. James and his religious counsellors could have tried to change direction, but by choosing to
approach the service in the Prayer Book’s spirit they laid the foundations of abiding precedent. Scottish
kings were also anointed with the oil of godly wisdom from the 14th Century and James had not only been
anointed as King of Scots as an infant (by John Knox) but had insisted on his wife Anne’s anointing and
coronation in 1590. When James came south, he brought with him ideas about Christian monarchy which
were compatible with both English Prayer Book and coronation ideas.
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