The assistant offices of the coronation are, for the far greater part, ecclesiastical or hereditary. They are connected therefore with all the religious changes, and family honours of the empire. The nobility bear in person a part in the royal day, and approach and actually touch that crown, from which, as the fountain of honour, they seem to renew, and re-invigorate, their most ancient claims to distinction: while the metropolitan of the English Church enjoys the exclusive right of consecrating and crowning the monarch. As early as the Norman Conquest, this privilege of the see of Canterbury is spoken of as well-established; and but two subsequent instances occur of its being overlooked or denied: both remarkably associated with the history of the papal power in this country[56]. In the first, that of the coronation by the archbishop of York of prince Henry, son of Henry II., may be traced the incipient cause of the assassination of archbishop Becket, whose martyrdom became conducive to the highest triumphs of that power: in the second, queen Elizabeth's coronation by Oglethorpe, bishop of Carlisle, and the refusal of all the other prelates to assist in the ceremony, we behold its dying struggles for a dominion never more to be renewed. Mr. Lingard, who, as a Catholic, may be supposed to state these transactions with a sufficient leaning to his own church, as expressly connects the murder of Becket with a jealousy on this subject as any other of our historians. Henry II. had employed the known enemy of the archbishop, Roger of York, in the consecration of his son above alluded to; but the primate and the king met on friendly terms at Rouen, in the following month; they compromised their differences; and the former set out on his return to his diocese. The Pope, however, "before he heard of the reconciliation, had issued letters of suspension or excommunication against the bishops who had officiated at the late coronation." The archbishop had at one time resolved to suppress these letters, our historian admits; and surely it was now an imperative duty so to do. But the prelates concerned, it seems, who knew that he carried them about him, had assembled at Canterbury, and sent to the coast Ranulf de Broc, with a party of soldiers, to search him on his landing, and take them from him. Information of the design reached him at Witsand: and "in a moment of irritation," says Mr. L., "he despatched them before himself by a trusty messenger, by whom, or by whose means, they were publicly delivered to the bishops in the presence of their attendants. It was a precipitate and unfortunate measure, the occasion, at least, of the catastrophe that followed."