God Saves the King

(See front cover)

The silver trumpets blew and loud shrilled the choir boys: "Vivat! Vivat Georgius Rex!" With a rustle like the wind, all the crowded stands of Westminster Abbey rose up with a flash of crimson and ermine, gold, diamonds, silver, blue, scarlet and green. The helmeted Gentlemen-at-Arms snapped to attention and down the deep blue carpet that stretched the full length of the Abbey came George VI to his Coronation with all the pomp and panoply of a medieval ceremony more than 1,000 years old.

It was the Middle Ages in the midst of Modern Times--arc lamps, newsreel cameras, a radio microphone hanging high above the chancel, pneumatic tubes to speed copy from the pressbox to the telegraphs downstairs (see p. 39). The crowd that rose in the Abbey to greet their King was aware of all this. Five months of intensive propaganda had told them what this 1937 Coronation was held for: a gorgeous and expensive pageant of the solidarity of the British Empire and the permanence of British institutions in a changing world. Most of them had read many times other details of the procession that was moving so slowly towards them.

They knew that St. Edward's Crown, six pounds of jewels and gold and the most important piece of regalia, was being carried by the elderly Marquess of Salisbury, Lord High Steward of England; that among the nine pages supporting the King's robe were three young sons of World War heroes, inheritors of their titles: Earl Haig, Earl Jellicoe, Earl Kitchener; that because of an ancient squabble over precedent, the King's golden spurs, symbol of knighthood, were carried one apiece by Lord Hastings and Lord Churston; and that the bearer of the Standard of England had no title at all but was plain Mr. Frank Seaman Dymoke of Scrivelsby Court, who has the hereditary right of being King's Champion. Mr. Dymoke's ancestors were supposed to ride in full armor into Westminster Hall, fling down a gantlet and challenge to mortal combat any who doubted the right to the throne of the newly crowned King.

Of all this the British press had made much. What the crowds accepted as thoughtlessly as they accepted the noble groans of the Abbey's new Coronation organ was the significance of the words spoken.

Legally and technically George VI was every inch as much a King the moment after Edward's abdication was signed as he was after last week's ceremony. What went on in the Abbey was a purely religious rite sanctifying King George as a monarch, anointing him as a persona mixta (half priest, half layman) and inheritor of the divine right of kings. All through the three-hour ceremony, the most important person there was not the King, his nobles or his ministers, but a hawk-nosed old gentleman with a cream-&-gold cope who stood on a dais as King George approached: The Rt. Hon. and Most Reverend Cosmo Gordon Lang, D.D.. Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England.

Church Inviolate. Earlier that morning another procession of deep significance had taken place through the Abbey cloisters. All night long the regalia--crowns, orbs, sceptres, swords of justice and mercy, etc., etc.--had lain in the Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber. Here they were blessed and sanctified, and then the Dean of Westminster and his prebendaries in their copes of state carried the regalia through the cloister to the royal robing room. Behind the bishops came state trumpeters and trombones. In the robing room the regalia were entrusted to the Lord High Constable who in turn distributed them to the various great peers who were now bringing them back into the Abbey to be laid on the high altar before use.

It was not only strictly a religious ceremony but a ceremony of the Protestant Church of England alone. Of all the diplomats accredited to the Coronation, only the delegate of the Church that built and consecrated Westminster Abbey set no foot inside the door. In his purple papal robes, Apostolic Delegate Most Reverend Giuseppe Pizzardo sat in a special grandstand opposite the Abbey entrance.

Almost immediately after presenting the new sovereign to the four sides of the Abbey, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked:

"Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by Law do or shall appertain to them?"

King George answered: "All this I promise to do."

Stone Rite. When the King had taken his oaths at the high altar there came a full communion service, and after that King George seated himself in the ancient high-backed Coronation Chair for his anointing. Under him was a rough block of sandstone, the Stone of Scone, traditionally the stone upon which Jacob had his vision, and over which all British kings have been crowned since Edward I.

Forward stepped four Knights of the Garter in mantles of deepest blue velvet holding a golden canopy over their sovereign's head. While the King sat garbed only in a crimson satin under-robe, the Archbishop, dipping his forefinger in a spoon of holy oil. touched King George on the palms of both hands, on the breast and on the crown of the head, saying:

"As Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be you anointed, blessed and consecrated King over the Peoples, whom the Lord hath given you to rule and govern."

Then in turn other bits of regalia were put upon the King until finally the Archbishop took from the Dean of Westminster the heavy golden Crown of St. Edward. He raised it high, placed it on the King's head and at that precise instant everyone shouted, "GOD SAVE THE KING!"

The peers in flashing unison put on their coronets, silver trumpets blew and (at a telephoned signal) the first of 103 guns boomed out from the walls of the Tower of London five miles away. After the anointed King had been blessed enthroned and received the homage of his bishops and peers, Queen Elizabeth went forward to be anointed and crowned.

Why Canterbury? Roman Canterbury, near the seacoast of Kent, was a convenient stopping place for travelers to Britain. Here in 597 A.D. came that ardent Benedictine, St. Augustine, a missionary from Rome, to found a monastery and become the first Archbishop of Canterbury, even before the Norman Conquest. Ever since then Canterbury's archbishops have been England's primates, by simple priority. The archbishopric of York, far to England's north, was established two centuries later, not to challenge the authority of Canterbury but purely for administrative reasons.

Why Westminster? Westminster Abbey is not a Cathedral. It is just what its name implies, an Abbey church, the oldest and finest in ancient London, built on the site of a Roman temple of Apollo. Britain's kings have always been crowned there because it was the church of Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror. London's Cathedral is the many times larger St. Paul's on the crest of Ludgate Hill. Here such state ceremonies as the Thanksgiving after the Armistice and the Jubilees are always performed. The former Dean of St. Paul's, "Gloomy" William Ralph Inge, was known to thousands who never heard of that able amateur artist, the Very Rev. William Foxley Norris, Dean of Westminster. Coronation year was his year. The Abbey is Dean Norris' parish church; he was as responsible for the ecclesiastical details of last week's ceremony as the Duke of Norfolk was. for the civil. In copes of gold (woven for the Coronation of Charles II) his humblest prebendaries had places in the Abbey procession, while most of the Bishops of Britain, many of them Lords, sat in scarlet & white on the sidelines.

Why Lang? The seventh son of a seventh son, dour, hawk-nosed Cosmo Gordon Lang, 72, was not raised in the church that he governs. His father was a Presbyterian preacher, the Very Rev. John Marshall Lang, Principal of Aberdeen University.* At University of Glasgow precocious Cosmo Gordon Lang won his M.A. degree at the age of 18 and a year later a valuable scholarship at swank Balliol College, Oxford. Always a politician, always ambitious, Student Lang was elected president of the Oxford Union over such potent undergraduates as Lord Curzon, Sir Edward Grey, Novelist Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (The Prisoner of Zenda). At that time he had no intention of going into any church. He studied law for six years at the Inner Temple, but the night before he was to take his bar examinations came his conversion. Cosmo Gordon Lang telegraphed excuses to the Benchers, went to a theological seminary and was ordained a minister of the Church of England a year later. Two men are supposed to have been responsible for this conversion: the late Bishop of Lincoln and the present Bishop of London, popular, tennis-playing Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram.

Sticking close to the Best People, Cosmo Lang became Dean of Divinity at Magdalen, Oxford, and four years later, on the recommendation of Arthur Balfour, vicar of the largest parish in England, St. Mary's, Portsea. This parish had a vast industrial population and employed 15 curates, but right across Spithead (scene of this week's Coronation Naval Review), was the Isle of Wight, and on the Isle of Wight sat aging Queen Victoria. Cosmo Lang was soon Queen Victoria's favorite preacher at Osborne, and his career was assured.

A crisis in the Lang career occurred in 1908. Already Bishop of Stepney, London's East End diocese, he was offered the more important post of Bishop of Montreal. After deep thought he turned it down. A month later came his appointment as Archbishop of York, youngest archbishop in Europe at that time. In 1928 on the death of Randall Thomas Davidson he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Church authorities felt that as a near lawyer, politician and ardent High Churchman, no man could better cope with the recurring demand among British liberals for disestablishment of the State church. Since then it has been generally accepted that future Archbishops of York shall be comparatively young men, in training for the See of Canterbury.

A great temperance crusader, the Archbishop of Canterbury can be tempted to drink port, claret, whiskey, brandy and hock, but never champagne. Like his good friend George V, the Archbishop heartily dislikes most U. S. citizens and their ways --with the notable exception of J. Pierpont Morgan, whose home he has visited, on whose yacht he has cruised the Mediterranean. Generally humorless, the Archbishop has uttered many startling statements. He has been quoted as saying, "I am the chief spokesman of God to my fellow countrymen." In 1914 he nearly caused a riot by remarking, "I retain many pleasant memories of the German Kaiser." In 1928 the newly chosen Archbishop of Canterbury visited the Rowntree Chocolate factory at York and blandly observed: "The mere sight and sound of these girls stirred up all the instincts of my youth, and I found, as I constantly find, that the instincts of youth within me are very much alive, and very little subdued by the passage of years."

Notably unpopular with his own clergy, the Archbishop is scarcely on speaking terms with his Dean of Canterbury, the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson (TIME, April 26), who said, on his return from a visit to Leftist Spain three weeks ago: "There is more Christianity in Soviet Russia and Red Spain than there is in England."

Crisis. Nobody has ever doubted the ability of the stiff-lipped Archbishop of Canterbury. When Edwardian liberals talked wildly of disestablishmentarianism, as Archbishop of York he was more than a match for them. When farmers rioted against still paying tithes to the Church of England four years ago, he could cope with them, too (TIME, Aug. 14, 1933). And when in Edward VIII he found a King of whom he could not approve either as a churchman or as a politician, Cosmo Gordon Lang was ready for that. With God's aid he saved the Kingship.

The public will never know the exact parts in the abdication crisis played by the Archbishop, Prime Minister Baldwin and the leading tycoons of Britain. Certain it is that they conferred long and often, and that in the midst of their worrying about Mrs. Simpson a handy helper was the chunky, jovial Bishop of Bradford. A North of England episcopus who likes to eat with his servants and play golf, the Bishop of Bradford has insisted ever since that his famed speech to his diocesan clergy last December was dictated or suggested by nobody, that he had never heard of Mrs. Simpson until after the speech was delivered. What he said was: "The King needs the grace of God. . . . We hope he is aware of his need! Some of us wish he gave more positive signs of his awareness."

This was all the Archbishop, the Prime Minister and the Press Lords needed. Within 24 hours the crisis was all over the front pages and within ten days it was ended. That the Archbishop of Canterbury was largely responsible for dethroning a once idolized King was then very present in the minds of thousands of British subjects. But this realization had been well erased by last week.

Apotheosis, Last week before an audience of the world's great. Cosmo Gordon Lang achieved the biggest attainable goal of a British prelate. He crowned a King and with holy oil anointed him a demi-priest in God's service. And it was a King of whom he could be proud-- dutiful, earnest, orthodox, obedient, anxious to please. Much has been written of the physical strain of a Coronation service for a monarch. For an elderly Archbishop who must stand on his feet through all the hours of the service the strain is even greater. The crimson-coped Archbishop of York, plump William Temple, had little to do but weave about among the regalia. In 1902 at the Coronation of Edward VII, his father was Archbishop of Canterbury. Vividly last week he must have recalled that at that lengthy service Archbishop Temple's hands trembled so that he nearly dropped St. Edward's crown, finally clapped it on King Edward's head hindside foremost. Cosmo Gordon Lang did not tremble, his voice did not falter once. From the depths of his heart he was able to give the Coronation Benediction, the noblest words in the entire service:

"The Lord bless you and keep you; and as He hath made you King over His people, so may He prosper you in this world and make you partake of His eternal felicity in the world to come. Amen.

"The Lord give you fruitful lands and healthful seasons; victorious fleets and armies, and a quiet Empire; a faithful Senate, wise and upright counsellors and magistrates, a loyal nobility, and a dutiful gentry; a pious and learned and useful clergy; an honest, peaceable and obedient commonalty. Amen."

* Still a Presbyterian is the Archbishop's little-known brother, the Rt. Rev. Marshall B. Lang, since 1935 Moderator of the Church of Scotland.

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