Updates/Clarification on the Coronation Oath Issues, Etc

When I talked to Anna Mitchell on the Son Rise Morning Show Thursday, May 4th, she had just read the news at the bottom of the hour (6:30 a.m. my time) that Vincent Nichols, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster would be the first Catholic prelate to be present at a Coronation since the English Reformation to offer this benediction: “May God pour upon you the riches of his grace, keep you in his holy fear, prepare you for a happy eternity, and receive you at the last into his immortal glory.” (Note that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales also issued a special prayer card for the occasion, urging Catholics to pray for the new King and Queen.)

So we had a brief discussion about who had been the last Catholic bishop at a Coronation and she was a little surprised to hear that the last Catholic Coronation had been that of Queen Elizabeth I. Owen Oglethorpe, the Bishop of Carlisle, presided over her Coronation on January 15, 1559 and celebrated the Catholic Mass too, of course.

Elizabeth I did not have many choices: her Reformation Parliament had not met yet; Reginald Cardinal Pole, the Archbishop of Canterbury had died the same day as Mary I, and other prelates either refused or were not to her liking. As Oglethorpe's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography explains:

He showed some firmness when called upon to say mass before the queen in the first days of her reign. Elizabeth forbade him to elevate the Host, which, according to a Roman authority, he insisted on doing (Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 73). The coronation soon followed. In the vacancy of the see of Canterbury, it naturally fell to the Archbishop of York to perform the ceremony; but Heath, alarmed by ominous presages of a change in religion, refused to officiate. Tunstall of Durham was too old, and perhaps shared in Heath's objection. It devolved, therefore, on Oglethorpe, as his suffragan, to take his metropolitan's place, and on 16 Jan. 1559, the other diocesan bishops attending, with the exception of Bonner, who, however, lent him his robes for the function, he placed the crown on the head of Elizabeth, but it is asserted that he never forgave himself for an act the momentous consequences of which he hardly foresaw, and remorse for his unfaithfulness to the church is said to have hastened his end. The same month he attended Elizabeth's first parliament, when he expressed his dissent from the bills for restoring the first-fruits and tenths to the crown, and the royal supremacy, the iniquitous forced exchange of bishops' lands for impropriate tithes, and other measures (Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. pp. 82-7). He was also present at the opening of the disputation on religion at Westminster in March 1559, and was one of those who were fined for declining to enter on the dispute when they saw which way things were tending. The fine imposed on him amounted to 250l., and he had to give recognisances for good behaviour (ib. pp. 129, 137-9). On 15 May, together with Archbishop Heath and the other bishops who adhered to the old faith, he was summoned before the queen, and, on their unanimous refusal to take the oath of supremacy, they were all deprived (ib. pp. 206, 210). He only survived his deprivation a few months. He died suddenly of apoplexy on the last day of that year.

That same entry by Edmund Venables explains that this was a change in character for Oglethorpe, for with the accession of young King Edward VI, "His conduct shows him to have being a man of no strength of character, with little love for the series of religious changes through which the clergy were being hustled, but reluctantly accepting them rather than forego the dignity and emoluments of office."

More detail about Elizabeth I's coronation here from a 1953 article by A.L. Rowse.

Also, just before we went on the air, I added the detail (via a Facebook message) that the Oath Charles III is taking today is a drastic revision of the the Oath as written after the Glorious Revolution. That oath contained several anti-Catholic statements. King Edward VII, Queen Victoria's son, had not wanted to profess those promises, but could not get the changes made; his son George V (Charles' great-grandfather) refused to open the next Parliament unless the oath was revised as it is now and was for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. The Coronation Oath before 1910 was this:

"I, A. B., by the grace of God King (or Queen) of England, Scotland and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God, profess, testify, and declare, that I do believe that in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper there is not any Transubstantiation of the elements of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever: and that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other Saint, and the Sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the Church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous. And I do solemnly in the presence of God profess, testify, and declare that I do make this declaration, and every part thereof, in the plain and ordinary sense of the words read unto me, as they are commonly understood by English Protestants, without any such dispensation from any person or authority or person whatsoever, or without thinking that I am or can be acquitted before God or man, or absolved of this declaration or any part thereof, although the Pope, or any other person or persons, or power whatsoever, should dispense with or annul the same or declare that it was null and void from the beginning."

Since the Glorious Revolution had overthrown the last Catholic King of England, James II and he was in France and his sons and grandsons would remain Pretenders to the throne, such an Anti-Catholic Oath was thought necessary.

See page 19 of the May issue of The Portal, the magazine of the Anglican Ordinariate in England for more background!