"No attempt was made to crown the Empress; the legate simply proposes that she should be elected Lady of England and Normandy. It is just possible that the consecration which she had once received as empress might be regarded as superseding the necessity of a new ceremony of the kind, but it is far more likely that, so long as Stephen was alive and not formally degraded, the right conferred on him by coronation was regarded as so far indefeasible that no one else could be allowed to share it."[244] Dr. Stubbs appears here to imply that we should have expected her coronation to follow her election. And in this he is clearly right. Mr. Freeman, however, oddly enough, seems to have looked for it _before_ her election. This is the more strange in a champion of the elective principle. He writes thus of her reception at Winchester, five weeks before her election:— "If Matilda was to reign, her reign needed to begin by something which might pass for an election and coronation. But her followers, Bishop Henry at their head, seem to have shrunk from the actual crowning and anointing ceremonies, which—unless Sexburh had, ages before, received the royal consecration—had never, either in England or in Gaul, been applied to a female ruler. Matilda was solemnly received in the cathedral church of Winchester; she was led by two bishops, the legate himself and Bernard of St. David's, as though to receive the crown and unction, but no crowning and no unction is spoken of."[245] At the same time, he recurs to the subject, after describing the election, thus:— "Whether any consecration was designed to follow, whether at such consecration she would have been promoted to the specially royal title, we are not told."[246] But all this uncertainty is at once dispelled when we learn what was really intended. Taken in conjunction with the essential fact that "domina" possessed the special sense of the interim royal title, the intention of the Empress to be crowned at Westminster, and so to become queen in name as well as queen in deed, gives us the key to the whole problem. It explains, moreover, the full meaning of John of Hexham's words, when he writes that "David rex videns multa competere in imperatricis neptis suæ promotionem post Ascensionem Domini (May 8) ad eam in Suth-Anglia profectus est ... plurimosque ex principibus sibi acquiescentes habuit ut ipsa promoveretur ad totius regni fastigium." We shall see how this intention was only foiled by the sudden uprising of the citizens; and in the names of the witnesses to Geoffrey's charter we shall behold those, "tam episcopi quam cinguli militaris viri, qui _ad dominam inthronizandam_ pomposé Londonias et arroganter convenerant."[247] [161] _Will. Malms._, p. 724; _Gesta Stephani_, p. 56. [162] _Will. Malms._, p. 724. See Appendix E.