Who crowned Elizabeth I? Not the Archbishop of Canterbury
On this day · 15 January 1559
Elizabeth I was crowned on 15 January 1559 by the Bishop of Carlisle, after Canterbury's archbishop died the same day as Mary I.
Elizabeth I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 15 January 1559 by Owen Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle, not the Archbishop of Canterbury who normally performs the rite. Canterbury was vacant, and the Archbishop of York had refused to take the service.
The vacancy was an accident of timing. Mary I died early on the morning of 17 November 1558, the day Elizabeth became queen; by seven that evening her Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, was dead too. That left a church hierarchy appointed by a Catholic queen to crown a Protestant-leaning one, and the senior survivor declined. The ceremony itself signalled change: it was conducted partly in the traditional Latin and partly in English.
The day before: a procession with a script
On 14 January 1559, Elizabeth was carried from the Tower to Westminster through streets lined with pageants. At the Little Conduit in Cheapside, told that a figure on the stage represented Time, she replied: “Tyme hath brought me hether.” When the allegorical Truth passed her an English Bible, she kissed it, held it up in both hands and laid it on her breast, thanking the City.
Those famous moments come from the official pamphlet by Richard Mulcaster, printed nine days after the procession and reprinted that year. It insists on the queen’s spontaneity. But evidence uncovered in 1978 showed that Elizabeth had helped shape the pageants herself by supplying costumes for the players, so the delighted, unscripted queen was in part the show’s co-producer. Two other eyewitnesses, the Venetian envoy Il Schifanoya and the London diarist Henry Machyn, help test Mulcaster’s version; the envoy, for one, names vices in the pageants that the pamphlet leaves out or renames.
The Bible moment came at a pageant built around two hills: one “cragged, barreyn, and stonye”, labelled a decayed commonwealth, and one fresh and green, a flourishing one. With Truth in her hands, the new queen was cast as the road from the first to the second.
She reigned for 44 years from her accession and was buried in the same abbey on 28 April 1603.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
