Here you can see illustrations of the coronation of King George IV, who was crowned in 1821. What confuses me is the fact that lots of the people in the ceremony are dressed in what looks like Jacobean dress, i.e. from the early 1600s. They have very large lace ruff collars, and also seem to be wearing doublets and trunk hose or slops - outfits that were popular in England two hundred years earlier, but would have been completely anachronistic in the early 19th century.
Why are they dressed like this? Does anyone know how late the British royalty and nobles wore these outfits for ceremonies?
The article suggests that it was his idea, “George IV greatly enjoyed planning a ceremony. His Coronation would be his grandest. The new king selected costumes for all the participants that were inspired by Tudor styles.”
Heh. Loved the part about how the estranged Queen “was prevented from entering Westminster Abbey on the occasion of the Coronation by prize fighters dressed as pages.” Gotta love a royal scandal!
Why not? It’s not exactly unusual that such ceremonies should use what were intended as ‘traditional’ or ‘historical’ dress (even if the actual designs are brand new).
But, in the case of George IV’s coronation, there were a couple of other factors involved as well. This was, after all, the first major European coronation since that of Napoleon. It also wasn’t clear whether either the Bourbons or the Habsburgs would revive/adapt/invent their equivalent ceremonies in future. George IV’s coronation was therefore a chance to outdo Napoleon, but to do so by stressing that the British did not have to do so from scratch. The aim was to to be aggressively nostalgic.
Which fitted in neatly with the choice of Jacobethan costumes. There was already the idea that this, the age of Shakespeare, of Elizabeth I, of Drake and Raleigh, was somehow more quintessentially English than any other period.
Then there was the fact that George just loved dressing up. What better excuse for fancy dress?
Not that most of the costumes were remotely authentic. Many of them were heavily influenced by the outfits worn by Garter knights under their robes. That design pre-dated George IV, but did not date back to the early seventeenth century. And that was the one outfit which continued in use afterwards, as the Garter knights continued to wear them until into the twentieth century, with them last being worn by the four Garter knights who carried the canopy for the anointing in 1953.
The other designs were never used again. Mainly because William IV made a point of having a coronation that was conspicuously less lavish than his brother’s had been. Most of the men then reverted back to wearing military uniforms or court dress under their robes.
But there is one other piece of clothing - the original, not just the design - that remains in use. The imperial mantle made for George IV has since been worn by several of his successors, including the present Queen in 1953. But that had simply followed the genuinely traditional design.
George IV loved to dress up. His 1822 visit to Edinburgh cemented the Scottish national identity. Walter Scott had persuaded the king that he was rightfully a Jacobite, and hence was eligible to wear highland dress for the visit. Clan chiefs were called in to provide honour guards for the king, and many took this as an opportunity to show off the strength of their clan. All this caused a run on Edinburgh kilt makers, as every gentleman in the city attempted to obtain a kilt (and find a hint of highland ancestry). The result being Scotland’s present national dress.
I did think about mentioning Scott. But he actually complicates matters. Scott had as profound an influence as anyone in this period on the popular romanticisation of the English past. And George IV’s coronation was a big part of that broader process.
But in 1821 Scott’s greatest influence on ideas about English history was yet to come. Most of his works to date had been on Scottish subjects and most of the novels had been set in the eighteenth century. Except that his output was starting to shift. Indeed, his most recent novel, published just seven months before the coronation, was Kenilworth, his first set in Tudor England. I rather doubt this directly influenced George IV. But they were both buying into the same set of cultural assumptions, even if Scott was doing so at a rather more sophisticated level.
There is a further irony. The Highland costumes Scott popularised for the 1822 visit were as bogus as those for the coronation the previous year. In both cases, that was possible because of the state of research on historical dress. Since the mid-eighteenth century British antiquarians had actually been particularly interested in historical dress and that interest had fed into history painting and theatrical design. However, that research was still developing. Popular ideas about how people in the past had dressed were even more distorted in the early nineteenth century than they are today. But it was Scott’s immense success as a novelist and as an antiquarian which did as much as anything to encourage further research.
That was another reason why the 1821 coronation designs were not reused. Within a generation they looked not anachronistic but hopelessly inaccurate.
There was a lot of bogus antiquarianism around that time. Scott’s novels created a fashion for fake mediaevalism amongst the upper classes with plenty of money to spend on fads and a good deal of reproduction arms and armour (often passed off as genuine) were created to meet the demand. Some of this stuff now looks respectably old enough to deceive the casual buyer without any knowledge.
The Eglinton Tournament of 1839 was perhaps the culmination of this trend, although it was most notorious for the bad weather which ruined the first day, and to the possibility of which no thought seems to have been given.
Once the Jacobites ceased to be a credible threat to the body politic, their cause could be romanticised.
Some might call it bogus antiquarianism; others might just consider it a creative romanticism of the past, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I happen to like the costumes and I wish they still used them!