Heavy lies the crown

It is to the Crown that we owe allegiance. Matthew Dennison considers the history of this most familiar attribute of royalty, which he finds as laden with the hopes of a nation as it is with glittering gold and precious jewels

- Matthew Dennison

St Edward's Crown, named for the last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor (William the Conqueror claimed succession from him, not Harold), and re-created by order of Charles II after the original was melted down by Oliver Cromwell. This colour photograph was taken by COUNTRY LIFE in 1937 and has been restored as part of the digitisation of the magazine's archive (www. countrylife.co.uk/digitisation)

THE hand that descends from heaven holds above the king’s head a golden circlet. Jewels stud the sturdy band, alternating egg- and lozenge shaped knuckle dusters. To the monarch’s left and right, in this 9th-century illustration of the coronation of the Frankish ruler Charles the Bald from a manuscript in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, stand bishops. Their gaze does not dwell on the king himself. Instead, it is the crown that transfixes their attention. At this moment of royal transformation, the crown embodies Charles’s preeminence. Above it is a cross, which, like the crown, is golden, gleaming.

Nothing expresses earthly kingship more powerfully than a crown. As an emblem of royalty and divinely ordained authority, it was assumed in evocation of Old Testament references by Byzantine Emperors from the 4th century. Charlemagne’s coronation by the Pope in Rome on Christmas Day 800 effectively introduced it to the kingdoms of the former Western Roman Empire and English kings are regularly depicted wearing crowns from the 10th century.