Dr Amy Hayes is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History at the Open University. Her forthcoming work on Scottish queenship in the late medieval period is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power series and explores the role of the queen consort in Scotland between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. She also has an interest in royal and elite childhood in the late medieval period.
Until 1329 there were no Scottish coronations. Every king before David II (r.1329-d.1371) was inaugurated, but not anointed. Traditionally this ceremony took place at Scone, where the king was acclaimed by the community and enthroned on the Stone of Destiny, with his genealogy read out by a Gaelic bard. There is no evidence for an equivalent ceremony for enthroning the queen consort – her status as the king’s wife was enough to see her secure in the position of queen.
With the right of coronation for Scottish kings came the right of coronation for their consorts, and every Scottish queen consort since the wife of David II has undergone a ceremony of coronation, but this has varied according to the status of the queen’s marriage and the political dramas that might have been unfolding around her. Despite being young children David and his first wife Joan Plantagenet (or Joan of the Tower) had an elaborate double coronation in 1331 although this was not the first time that Joan had been crowned. Shortly after her under-age wedding to David, who was then their heir to his father, Robert the Bruce, both children were crowned in a ceremony in parliament. This was clearly meant to emphasise Robert Bruce’s choice of his young son as his heir and to bind the children together in a way that meant that their wedding would be difficult to repudiate when Joan came of age. Scottish royalty may not have had the right to coronation at this stage, but they knew the importance of crown-wearing as a symbolic gesture of legitimate rulership.
David’s successors, Robert II (r.1371-1390) and Robert III (r.1390-1406) both crowned their wives in different manners. Robert III held a coronation for his wife Annabella on the day after his own, creating a multi-day affair that celebrated the king’s succession. His father, Robert II, had delayed crowning his wife, Euphemia, until almost two years after his own ceremony. This was due to fears over the succession. Robert II had three sons by his first wife, who were adults when their father acceded to the throne, and two young sons by Euphemia, who would be his queen. Robert’s first sons were born before his first marriage, and had been legitimated by this, but there may have been those who felt that his sons with Euphemia, born after the marriage of their parents, had a greater claim to the crown. Euphemia’s coronation was delayed until the point where the succession was formally agreed in parliament, meaning that supporters of her sons could not point to the fact that they were the children of a crowned queen in order to add more weight to their position in the Scottish succession.
Of the later medieval Scottish kings, both James II (r.1437-1460) and James IV (r.1488-1513) had the opportunity to crown their wives in a ceremony related to their wedding. Both kings had been crowned as minors, so their wedding and consort coronation allowed them to indulge in demonstrating their wealth, power, and authority. Both Mary of Guelders and Margaret Tudor were crowned queen consort in the immediate aftermath of their wedding. They married, heard mass, and were then crowned as queen. Mary was redressed in a robe of royal purple after her wedding and before her coronation, and her hair loosed about her shoulders, before being brought back into church to be crowned. After the ceremonies, celebrations were held in the form of a feast, with courses including a stuffed boar’s head, the stuffing of which was set alight, and a ship crafted with silver cords – although we do not know how edible these visual delights were.
Fifty years later Margaret Tudor was married and crowned as queen in a similar one-day ceremony. She was gifted a gold crown decorated with pearls for her wedding, which she wore over loose hair. Margaret is the first queen for whom we have evidence of anointing, and she was also given a sceptre, a symbol of royal power, which was presented to her by the king. No clear evidence for earlier queens having sceptres exists, although it has been argued that a ‘small sceptre’ made for the coronation of David II and Joan may have been made for the queen, suggesting Margaret Tudor’s coronation followed on from decades of royal ceremony, carefully developed from the point at which the right of coronation was granted to the Scottish crown.
Ecclesiastical History Society 