The Queen’s death: Royal and ritual language and procedures since

Long to reign over us…

This post describes and examines some of the language and ritual associated with the accession of the new King.

On Thursday evening, 8 September, the unexpected death of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle was announced to a stunned world. The sovereign who had seemed immortal, and only two days before had invited Liz Truss to form a government, had left us. As a friend recently phrased it, before that it had been possible to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head: that the Queen was very old and that she would live forever.

Though the timing of the Queen’s death took many by surprise, subsequent events unfolded with what to outsiders like me looks like exemplary, if not miraculous, smoothness. This was due to plans which had, naturally, been drawn up long ago – some even as far back as the 1960s – organising Her funeral and the accession of a new monarch. The master plan was ‘Operation London Bridge’, with ‘Operation Unicorn’ due to come into operation if she were to die in Scotland. It has been said that the Queen wished to die in Scotland, and it is hard to resist the thought that she must have known when she went up to Balmoral in July that she would not leave.

The Prime Minister (PM) was informed by the Queen’s private secretary using the code ‘London Bridge is down.’

The Queen was for me, as for so many people, a key part of our national identity and therefore of our and my individual identity. I still cannot quite connect the picture of the diminutive Granny of the Nation peering smilingly over her glasses at Liz Truss on Tuesday 6 September with her death a mere two days later. The extent of the affection, regard and respect for her shown by the public since her death amounts to that oxymoron, a secular canonisation. I am not ashamed to say I have shed a tear or two – I can, at the drop of a hat— but, contrariwise, I am now beginning to feel a bit royalled out.

The Demise of the Crown

The death of the monarch is known in law as ‘Demise of the Crown’, referring to the transfer of authority from one sovereign to another. In keeping with the arcane nature of some of the associated ritual, Demise here has its own special pronunciation, ‘dimeeze’ (/dɪˈmi:z/), instead of the normal /dɪˈmʌɪz/, which rhymes with despise.

There is no gap in the continuity of the monarchy, no hiatus, no interregnum. No sooner has the King or Queen died than their heir appointed in statute becomes King or Queen. As a noted eighteenth-century jurist observed: ‘The law ascribes to him [the King], in his political capacity, an absolute immortality. The king never dies … and … his heir … is eo instanti [instantly] king to all intents and purposes.’

Nevertheless, certain procedures must be followed. And there was huge media intrigue because those procedures had last been put into effect 70 years ago and were therefore outside most people’s memory span. A House of Commons Library paper set everything out down to the minutest minutiae, though some wordings had to be changed to reflect the Queen and King now involved and other political changes of the last 70 years.

Though the King’s reign had in effect already begun with the death of his mother, his accession had to be ratified and proclaimed. 

The Accession Council

The steps to do that can be summarized as follows:

The Cabinet meets;The Privy Council summonses privy councillors and other to attend an Accession Council to proclaim a new monarch;An Accession Proclamation is read and signed by those present at St James’s Palace;The new sovereign joins the Council to make a non-statutory Declaration and take an oath to defend the Church of Scotland;The Proclamation is then read aloud in various cities and towns.

The idea of proclamation belongs to an age before any of our modern forms of communication, when word of a new king had literally to be shouted out at important places throughout the land. What was entirely novel was that the Accession Council had never before been filmed, though the BBC managed to unearth some flickering footage of earlier Proclamations.

Thus it was that at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, 10 September, the Accession Council convened at St James’s Palace, a largely Tudor brick building in Westminster constructed by order of King Henry VIII.1 Those leading the proceedings are styled the ‘Platform Party’, whose head is The Lord President of the Council (Penny Mordaunt). Around 200 Privy Councillors attended, among them six former prime ministers.

The whole process can be watched here, and where necessary I give timings for a particular phrase or event.

After the Lord President announced the Queen’s death (30:20), she invited the Clerk to the Council to read the Proclamation – Step 3 above (31:30 The full text of that proclamation can be read here, in my earlier post about it. It is a remarkable document, well worth reading).

The Proclamation begins with the solemn words ‘Whereas it has pleased Almighty God to call to His Mercy our Late Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth the Second’, and then refers to ‘the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this Realm … proclaiming and publishing’ that the new King is King.

Those ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal’ included the aforementioned Privy Councillors and those in the Platform Party not already mentioned, namely the PM, the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord Privy Seal and the Earl Marshal, and the two members of the Royal Family who are Privy Councillors, Prince William and the Queen Consort.

The idea of a small group of royal advisers such as the Privy Council goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, and until Cabinet government became the norm the Privy Council played an important role in advising the monarch of the day. Indeed, the Accession Council can ultimately be traced back to the councils in which Saxon Kings were chosen from out of the ranks of eligible royal males.

The Privy Council’s members are mostly senior parliamentarians, a small, select number of whom generally meet monthly with the ruler of the day. The King or Queen remains standing at such meetings, which means those attending cannot sit, thereby keeping the meetings short. (If only that meeting convention applied everywhere!)

Pursuivants, heralds and Garter Kings-of-Arms

Until well into the fourteenth century, an English dialect of French known as Anglo-French or Anglo-Norman was the official language of the English royal court.

It is therefore understandable that the names of the officials and institutions mentioned above, who are connected with the court, are mainly of French origin: Privy, Council, Chancellor,2 Chamberlain, and Marshal as also are the words Majesty3 and liege (pronounced ‘leedge’) used in the Proclamation, heir, and herald.

Among the Platform Party, the only person dressed in special attire was the Earl Marshal, the eighteenth Duke of Norfolk, whose family have held the hereditary title of Earl Marshal since 1672.

Earl Marshal is an interesting compound noun which is in a sense a microcosm of the Norman Conquest, for it unites the Old English/Anglo-Saxon eorl with the Norman French marshal. Marshal has echoes in French maréchal and Italian maresciallo. Though it came into English via Norman French, its origins are in Germanic, Old High German marahscalc ‘groom’, from marah, horse, + scalc, servant, that marah being from the same base as mare. Chamberlain is also ultimately of Germanic origin, based on Latin camera, ‘room’ and a suffix related to –ling.

Formerly, an Earl Marshal would have been in charge of the King’s stables and horses and have had military duties. Now his role is largely ceremonial. He is, however, responsible for organising events such as coronations and state funerals. In addition, he oversees the College of Arms, the body responsible on behalf of the Crown for all matters relating to heraldry, that is, coats of arms and related matters, and genealogy.

Stage 5, reading the Proclamation aloud, takes place on the gallery overlooking the courtyard of St James’s. This is the most medieval-seeming part of the process as the Garter King-of-Arms, the Earl Marshal, Serjeants at Arms, Heralds and Pursuivants assembled. That spelling serjeant, by the way, is not a typo but an archaic, alternative form. It is worth taking a look at about 1:25 in to see the trumpeters and then other officials in their brilliantly colourful archaic garb emerge onto the gallery.

Pursuivants are officers of arms below the rank of Herald. At 37:00, after the Proclamation had been read in the Picture Gallery, the Lord President directed ‘the King’s Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms to attend at the Court of St James’s to proclaim’ Charles King.

And the pronunciation of pursuivant caused the Lord President of the Council to stumble, understandably, given its rarity.

Collins suggests it is pronounced purse-ee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːsɪvənt), but it can also be purse-swee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːrswɪvənt). The Lord President pronounced it something like pur-syoo-vee-uhnt (pəˈsjuːvɪənt). The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary recommends purse-ee-vuhnt (ˈpɜːsɪvənt). The word comes from Old French poursivre, ‘to follow, attend upon’ from which comes English pursue.

Kings, monarchs, sovereigns

English is famously rich in synonyms. Such synonyms often reflect the different strands that have been stitched together to create its multicoloured tapestry. And lending their colours to that great tapestry in particular are, as regular readers of these posts will know, Latin, French, and Greek on the one hand and the Germanic basis of English on the other. Thus for the adjective relating to kings and queens, we have royal (French), regal (Latin) and kingly (formed by derivation from king).

Thus, king and queen come from the Germanic bedrock of English, and king finds obvious echo in German König and Danish kong. In contrast, monarch comes via Late Latin monarcha via Byzantine Greek from Classical Greek monarkhos (μόναρχος), originally meaning in English ‘sole ruler’ but then broadening to its current sense. The original Greek word consists of the mono– element, meaning ‘sole, alone’ as found in so many words, e.g. monorail, monounsaturated, and the Greek arkhein (ἄρχειν) as embodied in the political anarchy which has prevailed in Britain in the past when there has been no clear line of succession.

The Accession Proclamation contains the phrase ‘by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory’. Sovereign is of French origin, coming from Old French soverain in the thirteenth century as a noun referring to a supreme ruler, and in the fourteenth as an adjective meaning ‘supreme, paramount’, as in the modern phrase ‘sovereign lord’.

It was also once a gold coin with a value of roughly a pound, just as another word associated with royalty, the crown, was also once legal tender, as in the well-known coin before decimalisation of a half-crown, or 2s. 6d, or as in the modern currencies that use the word for ‘crown’ in the relevant language, such as the Swedish krona or the Czech koruna.

Incidentally, the word crown ticks all three boxes of linguistic provenance, coming as it does from French corone, from Latin corōna ‘wreath, crown’, ‘from Greek korōnē (κορώνη), ‘crown’.

A pair of other royal words mentioned so far have Latin sources. Interregnum is straightforward Latin, literally ‘between reign’, inter + rēgnum, and rēgnum has, via Old French reigne, given English the verb and noun reign. Consort as in the Queen Consort, Camilla, comes via Old French from the Latin consors, consortem, ‘partner’, in Latin literally one who shares – con – possessions with you. Accession is borrowed partly from Latin and partly from French, as is proclamation.

And finally, talking of Latin, as a TV commentator has suggested, we have left the Elizabethan era and entered the Carolean one, Carolean being based on the Latin for Charles, Carolus.

1. It gives its name to The Court of St James’s, to which all ambassadors and high commissioners are accredited. Ironically, there is inside a fireplace on which are carved the initials of the King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, whom he caused to have beheaded.

2. The equivalent of chancellor in German, Kanzler, has been used for the Head of State since 1867, and Angela Merkel was die Kanzlerin.

3. On a completely orthogonal note, the Spanish for ‘the royal we’ is based on the Latin for ‘Majesty’ maiestas, -ātis and has always tickled me: el plural mayestático.