The moment in a coronation you won't see on TV

Queen Victoria was anointed at her Coronation on the head and the hands, but she drew the line at the breast. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that this invalidated the ceremony. Our own Queen, in Westminster Abbey in 1953, was divested of all her finery, and vested with an anointing gown (now kept, seemingly soiled with used oil, in the Royal Collection). She was touched with oil in all three places.

You won’t see that bit on footage of the first televised coronation. Knights of the Garter hid the Queen from view with a canopy. Actually, I think in origin the canopy was to mark the holiness of the action, just as a canopy may cover an altar. Nor, from the film footage, would you know that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh received Holy Communion, though the Coronation takes place within that service.

So the crowning of the monarch is a melange of Christian liturgy (of the established Church governed by the head of state) and what I like to think of as mystical wishful-thinking.

Catherine Pepinster, in this fascinating, thorough and timely book, likens the coronation to a sacrament as defined in Catholics’ old Penny Catechism as an “outward sign of inward grace”. Missing is the essential element of a sacrament, that it was “ordained by Jesus Christ”. Not strictly a sacrament, then, but a state ceremony that consciously looks back to Solomon (Zadok the Priest, and all that, as set by Handel, but first used in an English coronation in AD 973).

I’ve been worried for some time about the prospect of a “melting-pot” coronation, as the author calls it. You can imagine how tawdry, grating and devalued something made up would be, like the opening of the 2012 London Olympic Games, with its theme of the nation resembling at best the National Health Service. Will they wheel a great big bed into the Abbey for diverse guests of all faiths and none to bounce about upon? I hope not.

Pepinster, who was editor of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, for 13 years, puts the coronation in its historical context from a definitely Catholic perspective, underpinned by a densely factual chapter on the Reformation. She shines particularly in the task of sketching the faith of the Queen, about which, as she rightly remarks, the stacks of royal biographies make “barely a mention”.

It’s almost as though they weren’t listening. When the Queen was 21, still Princess Elizabeth, she broadcast from Cape Town, saying: “I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” She added: “God help me to make good my vow.”

Ben Pimlott, in his book The Queen, judged this a “nun-like” promise; he thought the broadcast had been written by Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles. Pepinster sharply picked up from Tom Utley (once of this paper, and the son of the great leader-writer Peter Utley) that the scriptwriter had been his grandfather Dermot Morrah, a Catholic intellectual to whom the language of higher spiritual considerations was not foreign. But nor was it to the Queen.

The Queen has undoubtedly kept her right to the title Defender of the Faith (bizarrely retained by Henry VIII after being awarded it by Pope Leo X for writing against Luther, and still found on our coins).

But what of the next king, Charles? Didn’t he speak of being the “Defender of Faith” (removing the definite article)?

So he did, in 1994, in a television conversation with Jonathan Dimbleby, distinguishing between futile rivalry between one or another “interpretation of the Faith” and the defence of “the whole concept of faith”. Pepinster helpfully adds biographical background to this apparently vacuous statement, which at best entertains the notion of a “perennial philosophy” as some Sufis do. As a child, Prince Charles had in the Duke of Edinburgh a father deeply interested in belief, particularly in Orthodoxy, to which his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, held, appearing at the Coronation in the ghostly garb of a nun.

Charles was repelled by provision for religion at Gordonstoun. “You should see where we have to go to church,” he wrote of the hall otherwise used for films and gymnastics. He had to find his own way. At Trinity, Cambridge, he, like others, was carried away by the radical sermons of Harry Williams, dean of the college chapel. There Charles made a friend of Richard Chartres, later Bishop of London, who christened Prince William.

For the Millennium (which the Queen emphasised as the birthday of Jesus Christ, not a jolly at the Dome linking hands reluctantly with Tony Blair for Auld Lang Syne), Charles built at Highgrove a cruciform shrine called the Sanctuary, with icons but no electricity. He loved historic churches too, which he visited quietly with the architectural conservationist Billa Harrod (1911-2005).

He fell for the spiel of remarkable men he met on his way, notably the South African mystic Sir Laurens van der Post (1906-96), in some ways a fraud, taking eight of his books on honeymoon, to Diana’s annoyance. He trusted in Bishop Peter Ball, who was later convicted of indecent assault. He respected Islam, but later realised and publicised the extent of persecution of Christians in Islamic countries. He weathered the mess of not being allowed to marry Camilla in church.

So he was lucky to keep his membership of the Church of England alive. On his accession (when we’ll learn his name as king – Charles, or perhaps George, probably not Archie), he will, so Pepinster’s sources are sure, take oaths as a “faithful Protestant”. And at the Coronation, in sight of the memorial cartouche for John Betjeman, with its representation of the Book of Common Prayer, we may get diverse contributions, but there is a lively hope it will centre on Holy Communion, which the king and queen consort will receive, perhaps while the cameras turn elsewhere.

Defenders of the Faith is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £21.99. To order a copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books