THE TWO REGALIAS.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 11347, 9 August 1902, Page 6

THE TWO REGALIAS.

Bt SIR HEBBKSE V-XVtEUb, BKRT., M.P.*

THE REGALIA OF ] ENGLAND. THE STORY OF THE " STONE OF DESTINY." The history of the outward emblems of the monarchy of England is a melancholy one. In 1643, the Long Parliament, which had decreed the abolition of the monarchy, appointed a committee under Sir Robert Harley to conduct the demolition of "monuments of superstition and idolatry" in Westminster Abbey and its neighbourhood. Down went the crosses in Charing and f Cheapside; the fine memorial altar to E4ivrard VI. in the Abbey, encrusted with statuettes by Torregiano, was smashed to pieces; the doors of the Treasury of the Abbey were forced, and the ancient iron chest containi ing the Regalia and Royal robes were prised open. Henry Marten, afterwards to figure fas a regicide, superintended this part of the work, and in derision arrayed George I Wither, the poet, with the crown, sceptre, *word and robes, "who," says old Anthony ' a Wood, "being thus crowned and royally arrayed, first inarched about the room with a stately gait, and afterwards, with a thousand apish and ridiculous actions, exposed those sacred ornaments to contempt and laughter." In 1649—the year when King Charles suffered—an inventory was taken of the Regalia which, since Marten and Wither had profaned them, had been removed to the Tower. There were no less than five crowns, namely, the Imperial crown "of massy gold" weighing 71b 6oz, the Queen's Crown, Edward Vl.'s Crown, the crown of Queen Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor, j and, most precious of all, "King Alfred's crowne of gould wyerwork, sett with slight stones and two little bells," weighing 79£oz.+ There were also four sceptres, the globe and I a large numbar of other articles. It is I heartrending to read at the foot of the inventory that all these "foremencioned crownes, etc., are accordinge to order of Parliament totallie broken and defaced." They were valued at £2652 9s 4£d, a large sum in those days, and were broken up and melted to provide sinews for the civil war. Even tha ivory comb of the Confessor, used to smooths the King's hair after the anointing, was cast away as a piece of rubbish. Oh, the pity—the'sin of it! Therefore round the gorgeous ensigns now pertaining to the English monarchy none of that priceless association lingers to connect the present Empire with the dawn of civilisation and the creation of patriotic loyalty. The Regalia, as they now exist, were made for the Coronation of Charles 11., at the same time and by the same hands aa the Mace of the House of Commons, and possess an intrinsic value estimated at about three millions sterling. THE ANCIENT ROYAL TREASURY. The ancient place for the custody of the English regalia was the Royal Treasury. Most people think of ths Treasury as that grimy bull ding reaching back from Whitehall to Downing street, but indeed that only contains tha modem Treasury Offices. Access to the real Treasury of England can only be had through double doors, to ba opened by seven separate keys, in the eastern cloister of Westminster. Here in the "depth of the Norman structure, is tha Chapel of the Pyx-r-the true Treasury— wherein for many centuries ths kings cf England hoarded their gold and silver, and stored the Regalia- with other precious things. When Edward J. was away at the Scottish war in 1503, some profligate monks of Westminster; plunuerßd this chamber, and the bullion was thereafter kept for greater safety in th* Tower. But still, «o inveterate are anoient customs, the Regalia was brought to Westminster from the Tower on the *ye of every Coronation; and still the First and Junior "Lords of the Treasury" discharge their function in tha State, little mindful of those far off days whan they were cßargsd personally with th* custody of that gloomy vaulted chamber in ths Abbey cloister.

Since the destruction cf the anoient Regalia of England, one glimpse has heen obtained of what the crown of the Plantagamets really was. It will be remembered that Edward L, when he died within view of Scotland in'l3G7, directed that bis bones were to be stripped of flesh, carried with his army, ..»p<J not laid to rest until that kingdom hod bees, subdued His orders were not fulfilled; he was laid in Westminster in that plain, sarcophagus which is so strangely in contrast with the ornate tombs of less mighty ones. Every two years, as lcng as tha Plantagenets kept the throne, the great Edward's tomb was reopened, and his cerecloth waxed anew. With the coming of the House of Lancaster that observance fell into disuse, nor was the tomb again opened until 1774, when the Society of Antiquaries obtained leave to pry into it. There lay the " Hammer of the Scots" wrapped in royal cloth of gold with an open crown upon hie head, m his right hand the sceptre, in his left the rod with the dove. True, these objects were but of copper or tin gilt; but they were models from the originals, then kept in tha Royal Treasury, and they correspond exactly w.th those represented on Edward's great seal. THE STONE OF DESTINY. These, and all the ensigns cf England's ancient monarchy, have passed away for ever; nevertheless, it is to King Edward that we owe tha possession of one genuine relic of another monarchy which be coveted. Among all the memorials of the independent kingdom of Scotland, none is more pathetic in its simplicity, none more'strangely in contrast with the hard, practical, matter-of-fact spirit of the present age than that which has been fondly termed the Lia Fail or Stone oi Destiny, whereon Scottish monarch sat of old at their Coronation. Anoient undoubtedly this atone is, for it has been aa object oi veneration at least since the beginning of the 13th century, but the far higher antiquity claimed fbr it will not stand application of the strict rules of evidence. First of all, what ia this reputed Stone, of Destiny, and how came it to Westminster? It is a block of reddish sandstone, 96 inches long, 16] inches broad, and inches deep, roughly dressed on the edges, with an iron ring hanging from a rivet at each end thereof, and enclosed within the frama and below the seat of aa oaken chair. Its presence in Westminster Abbey, eztd the legend most commonly current about its previous history, may be most easily explained by quoting Pennant, who in bis well-known, tow in Scotland during the latter half of the eighteenth century, visited Scone, the place where Scottish kings were formerly inaugurated, and wrote as follows:— "In the church of th: Abbey (oi Scone) was preserved the famous chair, whose bot- * Possibly'this maybevc been ths fpldea diadem of the last native Prise* «t Waits, which Edward I. hunt «p before St. £4yaj*'a altat i» Weettatswts* ,

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torn was the fatal stone, the palladium of th* Scottish monarchy. The stone, which I had first served Jacob for his pillow, was afterwards transported into Spain, where it was used as a seat of justice by Gathelus, contemporary with Moses. It afterwards found its way to Dunstaffnage in Argyllshire, continued there as the Coronation Chair till the reign of Kenneth 11., who, to secure his empire, removed it to Scone. , There it remained, and in it every Scottish monarch was inaugurated till the year 1296, when Edward 1., to the mortification of North Britain, translated it to Westminster Abbey, and with it, according to ancient prophecy, the Empire of Scotland." TRUTH AND TRADITION. It seems never to have occurred to Pennant to withhold credence from the whole o! this story; indeed it remained an article of faith with all true Scots, until such time as modern methods of research came to ba applied to archeology, ruthlessly sifting fact out of fable. Away, nowadays, must be cast all that fond belief about this stone having been Jacob's pillow on the night he beheld the vision of angels. One form of that tradition makes no mention of Gathelus, a personage invented to acoonnt for the nation of the Gaidhel or Gael, but, in order to explain the title "Scot," introduces a mythical Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, king of who first settled in Ireland with her people the Scots, bringing the stone with her, where it became known as Lia fail, the Stone of Destiny or the Stone of Tara. It is matter of sound history, indeed, that, in the sth century, the Irish chieftain, Fergus Mac Ere, led an expedition of Scots into the Pictish land of Alban, now called Scotland, founded a colony in Argyll, which developed into the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada (dal righ fhada—the territory of the tall king), thereof the seat of government was Dunstaffnage; but it is contrary to proved fact to account for the Stone of Scone, now in Westminster, by declaring it to be the true Lia aFail, brought with him by Fergus to Dunstaffnage, from "Tara's halls." Nennius is there to testify that the,Lia Fail was still at Tara in the '• eleventh century, and that "it used to sound under the feet of every man who assumed the kingdom of Erin.'' Ia fact it is probable that the first and only migration of the Scottish stone was in the cart which carried it to London in the train of Edward I. in 1296. Geologists are a cold, discouraging kind of folk; one of them, Professor Ramsay, was so heartless some years ago as to apply scientific analysis to the Scottish Coronation Stone. He pronounced it to be precisely the sams as the native rock for many miles round Scone. Now a king must sit upon something whtn he is crowned. In primitive times furniture would be mighty scarce along the Highland border; but there was never any scarcity there of convenient blocks of stone. Once let such a boulder be used on the solemn occasion of a Coronation, and it acquired an air of sanctity; myth gathered about it as surely as moss would have done had it been left en the moor or by the river; every floating fable about the origin of the nation was caught up and attached to tha stone, until it became the tangible symbol of the monarchy —the very core of a separate and independent nationality.

It was such symbol and core that King Edward, being determined to put an end to the monarchy, and crush the separate nationality of Scotland, thought it worth his while to carry this weighty and intrinsically worthless booty all the way to Westminster. Was he wanton, witless, or superstitious in so doing? Not he. Tha Crown of England never rested on a cooler, harder head than Edward Lcngshank's. It was neither witlessness nor wantoness, nor superstition that moved him, any more than they moved the British Government, two years ago, to get hold of and carry away King Prempeh's Golden Stool—an article worth possibly £10 or £20 sterling —even though it involved the spending of many hundreds of thousands of pounds upon a dangerous expedition against the Ashantis. THE CORONATION CHAIR. So King Edward brought the reputed! Stone of Destiny to Westminster. Probably it was cnly the seat of the stone chair which he carried off, part of a dignified permanent structure like the Marmorne Stub! in which Charlemagne sat, and whereon the German emperor used to be crowned. This is still preserved at Aachen or Aix-la-chapelle, being a plain slab of white marble on five steps, which, it is said, used to be covered with plates of gold at coronations. Having landed this stone in Westminster, King Edward commanded a bronae chair to be made to contain it, whereon the priest should sit when Mass was celebrated at the altar of St. Edward the Confessor; but presently, perhaps in consequence of remonstrance on the part of some rheumatic church dignitary, the King changed his mind, and directed that the chair should be _nade of oak instead of bronae, add there it remains to this day. It was originally richly painted, but it is painful to read in the "Annual Registrar" for 1821 that, previous to the Coronation of George IV. 'the dilipidated state to which the ancient ornaments were reduced had induced Mr Mash of the Lord Chamberlain's office to have them removed, and to substitute others oi preoisely the same character." Confound Mr Mash! say we; would that he had left the venerable ornaments alone. Again, when this ancient chair was being prepared for the Coronation of Queen Victoria, heartless officials must need bestow upon it a ccat of varnish, sadly suggestive of Wardour .treat.

On the Ist March, 1328, peace was concluded at York between King Edward DX and the King of Scots, and the second article of the treaty provided .or the restoration of the Stone of Destiny to the Scottish people. On Ist July in the same year Edward issued a writ under the Privy Seal, reciting that his Council had, in his Parliament held at Northampton, consented to «end this .tone back to Scotland, •Ad requiring the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to deliver it to the Sheriffs of London, who were to cause it to he carried to tha Queen-mother. But in the contemporary Latin chronicle of Lahercost it is explained that the people of London would by no means consent to part with the stone, and it is clear that the people of London had their way. A PROPHECY FULFILLED. But there is balm in an ancient prophecy about this stone for the wounded self-es-teem of Scotsman. It w_ 3 written of old— "Ni fallat latum Sccti, quocunque locatum Inevien. lapidum. regnare tenentur ibidem." Thus rendered by Bellenden in tha reign of Queen Mary— "The Scots fihail brook that realm as native ground {If weirds fall not) where'er this chair ia found.'" Students of prophecj aaaj perhaps rtcog-

nsse the of this in the destiny j which landed the Stuart dynasty on the j Throne cf England, and Edward VH., j Kin* of Scotn, will take his seat for Coro- j _.»tvc_, over tise same Tw_e blocfc of! tree- \ I stems wWrt*_i the C___c naonarehs ol Britain were crowned of old. -Sever, since it was deposited, there by Edward j ,'l—.\e toy Covetous, aa the Scots ca&ed. f him —has the Stone of Destiny left the sacred precincts of the- Abbey—never save once, and that was in 1653, when it was I carried into Westminster Hall, and Oliver Cromwell took his seat upon it as Protector of the Commonwealth. *