III.—The Crowns of England

Extract

At only one period in English history was it thought that the country had no further use for crowns, and that brief seventeenth-century heresy led to an act which has since been deplored for nearly three hundred years—the destruction of the Regalia. The significance of this destruction is worth emphasizing at the outset, as it meant a real break in the history of the development of the crowns themselves. A general popular belief is that, up to this time, all the sovereigns from William the Conqueror onwards had been crowned with the crown of St. Edward the Confessor, and all those after the Rebellion used the new St. Edward's Crown made at the Restoration. But the matter is hardly as simple as that. Not only do we find references to, and pictures of, various other crowns, but the coronation crown in some descriptions sounds very unlike a Saxon diadem, and we find, besides, that the present St. Edward's Crown has by no means been used at every coronation since it was made.