Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England episode 354.

Parlamor Asamuod. So we are gathered here today to talk about the 1625 Parliament.

But before everyone got to go to the year's greatest social extravaganza, there was

another event to get out of the way while Charles waited for the rites to be sent and the

statutory 40 days to pass before Parliament could convene, namely to get himself crowned

anointed and blessed. A ceremony much delayed by plague, and actually he never did carry

out the traditional procession through London, worried that such exposure to the people of

London and their assembled diseases might mean the event would eventually terminate at

somewhere more purly than the Abbey at Westminster. Now look, there are a couple of wrinkles

about Charles's coronation on 2nd February 1626 that I should bring to your attention.

Firstly, you would obviously expect the Queen to be crowned to boot, silly not to,

but we are still in the kind of adolescent phase of Henrietta Maria's tour of life duty.

So she tried to get one of her Catholic confesses to officiate at this coronation,

like that was ever going to happen. And when she was turned down, she then refused to be in

any way involved in a ceremony conducted under the Protestant Right. Not only would she never

be crowned herself at all, she refused to even attend Charles's coronation behind a screened

off area that had been prepared for her thoroughly dressed with anti-Protestant spray to make sure

she wasn't infected. Charles was deeply offended by the affair and the frosty air of February thickened

between the young people frostily. The other notable things were firstly that the prelet

officiating was not the one who had originally been planned to do so, because that had been the

Lord keeper and bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, and his face no longer fitted around court.

Charles's choice as a replacement sent yet another shiver through the spines of Calvinists everywhere.

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