The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
THE SCREEN
The Anointing Screen was brought to its place in three panels a little awkwardly and fixed up like something round a bed in a hospital ward. Yet this rather lovely object provided plenty to examine while the King was anointed behind it.
It was deployed as a replacement for the canopy carried by Knights of the Garter under which Elizabeth II was anointed in 1953. The purpose of that canopy was not to hide matters although, since the Queen was anointed on the forehead, hands and breast, that was a convenience. Queen Victoria had simply refused to be anointed on the breast.
The ceremonial canopy originated as an expression of honour, above an altar, for example, or a throne. In the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace a canopy shelters the Chairs of Estate. A portable canopy would be held over a king walking in procession; with reference to that, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets begins with the somewhat puzzling line: ‘Were’t aught to me I bore the canopy.’
It is just about possible to say that the Anointing Screen performed a similar function, even though the motive for its use was concealment. Holy things often are concealed out of reverence. Altars in parish churches were concealed behind Gothic screens, even when those screens were made see-through.
In Westminster Abbey, a screen behind the High Altar blocks off the holy shrine of St Edward the Confessor, and a screen before the Quire blocks sight of the holy chancel from anyone in the nave.
The new Anointing Screen, embroidered at the Royal School of Needlework, was designed by Aidan Hart, taking his cue from a stained-glass window at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, given by the 12 Great Livery Companies for Queen Eizabeth’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.
The screen shows a tree with 56 leaves labelled with the names of Commonwealth countries. On the trunk is the King’s cypher. At the crown of the tree stands the haloed white dove of the Holy Spirit; angels trump each side.
Beneath all, a banderole declares: ‘All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’
This is the best-known sentence from the account by the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich of her visions, in Revelations of Divine Love. Like so much in coronation ceremonial it moved things into another dimension relating to the world to come.