Henry the Sixth, for instance, was not crowned till eight years after
the crown had descended to him. Again, in the "_Pleas of the Crown_," it
was held, that the king was fully invested with the crown the moment it
descended to him; that he was absolutely king although there should have
been no coronation. If the coronation of a king, important as he held it
to be, proceeded from the sovereign will, _a fortiori_ it must be so
with that of a queen-consort. The rights of the queen-consort did not
proceed from any coronation; they flowed from her relationship to the
sovereign. Her rights were complete and absolute without any coronation.
Nor was it essential to the people, for the queen-consort occupied no
political station. This view of the right was strengthened by the
important preamble of William and Mary, which settled the coronation
oath. The language of the act applied to queens regnant, not to
queens-consort, for to the latter no oath was administered. As the oath
was prescribed, it became necessary that every reigning monarch should
be crowned, that there might be the oath and recognition; but the law
made no mention of any thing that rendered such a ceremony requisite in
the instance of a queen-consort. How then could the crowning of a
queen-consort be considered a necessary adjunct of the coronation of the
reigning monarch? No part of the ceremony rendered her presence
requisite. Selden's work had been quoted in support of the memorial;
amongst other things, Selden expressly said that the "anointing, &c. of
the queen-consort, were dignities communicated by the king." Selden
further stated, that the anointing of the queen, as well as her
consecration--it was, in fact, a consecration rather than a
coronation--proceeded from the "request" and "demand" of the king, after
he had been crowned, made to the metropolitan, who had performed such
ceremony. Bracton had entered largely into the particulars _de
coronatione regis_, but not one word of the queen's coronation. There
was not a single law-writer that had touched upon the existence of such
a right, as appertaining to a queen. Blackstone had it not, nor Lord
Coke, nor Selden. He next adverted at some length to the precedents
quoted by his learned friends opposite, beginning with that of William
the Conqueror. The very precedents quoted by his learned friends raised
the inference, if there were no other arguments, that the act, so far as
related to the queen, was entirely dependent on the will of the king.
The Attorney-General then referred largely to Reymer, from whose book he
quoted apposite passages, in support of his main argument, that the
ceremony of a queen's coronation was entirely dependent upon the order
of the king. In all, from the time of Henry the Seventh, six queens had
been crowned, and seven had not; so that the majority was against the
present claim, which it had been attempted to support on the plea of
ancient, uninterrupted usage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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