We owe Westminster Abbey to one of the lesser-known kings of England, Henry III. Henry, the son of King John, was nine when he came to the throne in 1216. He reigned for 56 years, dying in 1272. While contemporaries were often critical of Henry’s rule, they also regarded him as a ‘most Christian king’, a ‘rex Christianissimus’. One aspect of Henry’s piety, admired then by his Christian subjects, abhorrent now, was his persecution of the Jews. Another, the most central, was his devotion to his patron saint and predecessor, Edward the Confessor. This brings us to Westminster Abbey.

Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king of the true line, built the first great abbey of Westminster and was buried there following his death on 5 January 1066. Both the building and the burial are vividly depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry. Just under a hundred years later, in 1161, Edward, thanks to the efforts of the Westminster monks, was canonised by the pope. Henry III, however, showed little interest in the Confessor until the 1230s when he faced a civil war and was threatened with deposition. He was thus all the more susceptible when the monks of Westminster urged him to place his faith not in deceitful temporal ministers but in his sainted predecessor. The Confessor’s intercession would bring Henry success in this life and a swift passage to the next.

Henry was convinced and thought nothing would please the Confessor more than to pull down the now dilapidated abbey at Westminster and construct a new one in its place, while at the same time translating the Confessor’s body to a dazzling new shrine. Between 1245 and 1269 (when the new church was consecrated and the Confessor’s second translation took place), Henry built the heart of the church we saw at the coronation – everything save the nave and towers at the west end and Henry VII’s chapel at the east. He was deeply involved in the details of the design, urged on the work and provided all the money from the general revenues of the kingdom, making sure the men got their pay when they threatened to strike.

Henry’s aim was to build a church both strikingly new and strikingly magnificent: hence the abbey’s internal height (some 20 feet higher than other great churches in England) and its sumptuosus (‘sumptuous’, a favourite Henry word) decoration. Henry thus honoured the Confessor. But, more than any previous king, he was also very aware of the abbey’s status as a coronation church. With Westminster controlled by rebels, Henry’s first coronation in 1216 had been at Gloucester. But, as all coronations since 1066 had been at the abbey, that was clearly deemed unsatisfactory. So in 1220 Henry was crowned all over again, this time at Westminster, the only king to be crowned twice. Not surprisingly, Henry became fascinated by the coronation. He investigated the spiritual gifts conferred by the anointing with Holy Oil, and had painted behind his bed in Westminster palace a superb depiction of the Confessor’s own coronation.

Against this background, the coronation influenced many features of the abbey’s design. It was why the abbey owed so much to the great French cathedral at Rheims, for Rheims was the French coronation church and thus absolutely right as a model. From Rheims came the form of the abbey’s windows, the rounded east end with radiating chapels, and the constructional techniques that made possible the abbey’s height. But the needs of the coronation also caused Henry to go beyond the Rheims design in two significant ways, each with a view to housing ‘the people’ who would play a vital part at the coronation. The first was the great length of the abbey’s transepts, the arms of the church standing to the north and south of the central space where the coronation would take place. Both were two bays longer than those at Rheims. At many coronations (though not in 2023) they have housed stands, thus increasing the capacity and improving the view. At the 1953 coronation, as a little boy, I sat high up in the north transept. The second departure was the construction of great galleries with external windows at triforium level (now the Queen’s Galleries where the abbey’s treasures are displayed). Such galleries had been common in 12th-century churches but by the 13th were quite out of fashion. Yet Henry insisted on them, despite the great extra cost. His reason was to accommodate the crowds who would come to coronations and other great ceremonies. In 2023, it was in the triforium gallery that scholars of Westminster school chanted ‘Vivat, vivat, vivat’ as the king and queen processed into the abbey.

If coronation concerns linked the abbey to Rheims and to France, they also linked it to Rome and to Italy. The great pavement before the high altar, on which the 2023 rituals were played out, was installed in 1268 by the Cosmati family of Italian mosaicists. The art historian Claudia Bolgia has recently suggested that this was probably modelled on the pavement in St Peter’s Rome, on which emperors were anointed by the pope. How fitting then that a pavement of the same type should see the anointing of England’s king.

There was one final feature of the abbey’s design linked to the coronation, which for Henry was the most important of all. Sitting in his coronation chair as he was anointed and crowned, the new king – in Henry’s vision – would look towards the high altar and see, rising high above and beyond it, the shrine of Edward the Confessor. The Confessor, therefore, would preside over the coronation ceremony, guarding and guiding the new king with his heavenly power.

Here, however, Henry’s vision failed. The Confessor’s body is still there in his shrine, but a screen erected in the 15th century now blocks the view and cuts the rest of the abbey off from its spiritual heart. Still, not all connections between the coronation and the Confessor are lost. The crown is still called ‘King Edward’s crown’, just as it was at Henry’s coronation in 1220, and one of the insignia with which King Charles was invested is called ‘King Edward’s rod’. Above all, the coronation still takes place in the sumptuous church that Henry created in the Confessor’s honour. 

David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and the author of Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement, 1258-1272 (Yale University Press, 2023).