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Battle of Flodden, John Balliol, King Alexander II of Scotland, King Charles I of England and Scotland, King Charles II of England and Scotland, King Edward I of England, King James VI of Scotland, Pope John XII, Scone Abbey, Scottish Coronations, Stone of Destiny, Westminster Abbey
Scottish coronations were traditionally held at Scone Abbey in Perthshire, with the monarch seated on the Stone of Destiny. The original rituals were a fusion of ceremonies used by the kings of Dál Riata, based on the inauguration of Aidan by Columba in 574, and by the Picts from whom the Stone of Destiny came.
A crown does not seem to have been used until the inauguration of King Alexander II in 1214. The ceremony included the laying on of hands by a senior cleric and the recitation of the king’s genealogy. After the coronation of John Balliol, the Stone was taken to Westminster Abbey in 1296 and in 1300–1301 Edward I of England had it incorporated into the English Coronation Chair.
Its first certain use at an English coronation was that of Henry IV in 1399. Pope John XXII in a bull of 1329 granted the kings of Scotland the right to be anointed and crowned. No record exists of the exact form of the medieval rituals, but a later account exists of the coronation of the 17-month-old infant James V at Stirling Castle in 1513. The ceremony was held in a church, since demolished, within the castle walls and was conducted by the Bishop of Glasgow, because the Archbishop of St Andrews had been killed at the Battle of Flodden.
It is likely that the child would have been knighted before the start of the ceremony. The coronation itself started with a sermon, followed by the anointing and crowning, then the coronation oath, in this case taken for the child by an unknown noble or priest, and finally an oath of fealty and acclamation by the congregation.
King James VI had been crowned King of Scots in the Church of the Holy Rude at Stirling in 1567. After the Union of the Crowns, he was crowned at Westminster Abbey as King of England and Ireland on July 25, 1603. His son Charles I travelled north for a Scottish coronation at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh in 1633, but caused consternation amongst the Presbyterian Scots by his insistence on elaborate High Anglican ritual, arousing “gryt feir of inbriginge of poperie”.
King Charles II underwent a simple Presbyterian coronation ceremony at Scone in 1651, but his brother King James VII-II was never crowned in Scotland, although Scottish peers attended his coronation in London, setting a precedent for future ceremonies.
European Royal History 