Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/795

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REGALIA


713


REGALIA


the King of England to take possession of the revenues of all vacant dioceses. That the pope did not recog- nize the right is manifest from the fact that .Alexander III condemned article 12 of the Council of Clarendon (116-1), which provided that the king was to receive, as of seigniorial right (sicut dorninicos), all the income (omnes reditus et exittis) of a vacant archbishopric, bishopric, abbacy, or priory in his dominion (Mansi, XXI, 1195). In 1176 Henry II promised the papal legate never to exercise the right of regaUa beyond one year. With the exception of a few short periods, the right continued to be exercised by the English kings until the Reformation. Even at present the Enghsh Crown exercises it over the temporalities of vacant (Anghcan) dioceses.

In Germany Henry V (1106-25), Conrad III (113S- 52), and Frederic I (115.5-S9) are known as the first to have claimed it. Frederic I exercised it in its ut- most rigour and styles it "an ancient right of kings and emperors" (Lacomblet, " Urkundenbuch fiir die Geschichte des Niederrheins", I, 2SS). King Phihp of Suabia reluctantly renounced it, together with the jus spolii, to Innocent III in 1203 (Mon. Germ.: Const., II, 9). Otho IV did the same in 1209 (ibid., 37). King Frederic II renounced it to Innocent III, first at Eger, on 12 July, 1213 (ibid., 58, 60), then in the Privilege of Wtirzburg, in J\Iay, 1216 (ibid., 68), and again to Honorius III, at Hagenau, in September, 1219 (ibid., 78). In 1238 he began to exercise it anew (ibid., 285), but only during the actual vacancy of dioceses, not for a whole year, as he had done pre- viously. After the death of Frederic II the claims of the German Emperors to this right gradually ceased. At present the revenues of vacant dioceses in Prussia go to the succeeding bishop; in Bavaria, to the cathedral church; in Austria, to the "Rehgions- fond".

In France we find the first mention of it during the reign of Louis VII, when, in 1143, St. Bernard of Clairvaux complains, in a letter to the Bishop of Palestrina, that in the Church of Paris the king had extended the droit de regale over a whole year (ep. 224, P. L., CLXXXII, 392). Pope Boniface VIII, in his famous Bull, "Ausculta fill", of 5 December, 1301, urged Philip the P'air to renounce it, but with- out avail. In France the right did not belong ex- clusively to the king: it was also exercised by the Dukes of Xormandy, Bretagne, and Burgimdy, and by the Counts of Champagne and Anjou. Entirely exempt from it were the ecclesiastical provinces of Bordeau.x, Auch, Xarbonne, Aries, Aix, Embrun, and Vienne. The Second Council of Lyons (1274) for- bade anyone, under pain of excommunication, to extend the jus regaliw over any diocese which was at that time exempt from it (Mansi, XXIV, 90), and in 1499 Louis XII gave strict orders to his officials not to exercise it over exempt dioceses. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the restriction of the Council of Lj-ons began to be disregarded, and on 24 April, 160S, the Parliament decided that the king had the droit de regale over all the dioceses of France; but Henrj' IV did not carry this parliamentarj' decision into effect. On 10 February, 1G73, Louis XIV issued a declaration, extending the droit de regale over all France. The Parliament was pleased, and most bishops yielded without serious protest, only Pavilion, of Alet, and Caulet, of Pamiers, both Jansenists, resisting. These at first sought redress through their metropolitans, but when the latter took the king's side they appealed, in 1077, to Innocent XL In three successive Briefs the pope urged the king not to extend the right to flioceses that had previously been exempt. The General Assembly of the French clergy held at Paris in 1681-2 sided with the king, and, de- spite the protests of Innocent XI, .Alexander VIII, and Innocent XII, the right was maintained until the Revolution. Napoleon I attempted to restore it in


a decree dated 6 November, 1813, but his downfall in the following year frustrated his plan. In 1880 the Third Repubhc again asserted the right, overstepping even the hmits of its former application.

Du C.\NGE, Gtossarium, s. v. Regalia; Thom.\ssinus, Veius ae nova ecdesia disciptiJia circa beneficia. III, lib. II, liv; De M.vrca, De Concordia sacerdotii et imperii, lib. VIII (1704); Makoweb, Die Verfassung der Kirche von England (Berlin, 1894). 326 sq.; Phillip.s. Das Regalienrechl in Frankrcich (Halle. 1873): MlCH- ELET, Du droit de regale (Ligug^, 1900) ; Stutz, in RealencyclO' pddiefur prol. Theologie und Kirche, XVI (Leipzig, 1905), 536-44; Mention, Documents relatifs aux rapports du clerge avec la royaule de 16S£ d 1702, I (Paris, 1893), 18 sq. (.See also bibli- ographies to Innocent XI and Lotus XIV.)

Michael Ott.

Regalia. — According to the usage current in the British Isles the term regalia is almost always em- ployed to denote the insignia of royalty or "crown jewels". The objects more immediately included under the collective term as commonly used are the fol- lowing: the crown, the sceptre with the cross, the scep- tre with the dove, the orb, the swords, the ring, the spurs, also the vestments in which the sovereign is arrayed after the unction, to ^-it the colobium sindonis, the dalmatic, the armill, and the royal robe, or pall, as well as a few other miscellaneous objects connected with the coronation ceremony, such as the ampulla for the oil, with the spoon, "St. Edward's staff", etc. All of these descend from pre-Reformation days, and manj' of them are directly religious in origin. Indeed there was a tendency not only in England, but also in Germany, France, and elsewhere, to con- nect these insignia with some saintly and some- times legendary possessor of a former age, and to regard them strictly as relics. In point of fact all the English regalia were broken up and sold after the execution of Charles I, and the oldest of those now in existence had to be constructed anew at the Res- toration in 1661; but it had always been the cu.stom of old to regard them or most of them as connected with St. Edward the Confessor, to whose shrine in Westminster .\bbey, where the coronation takes place, they were regarded as belonging. Even now the royal crown which the archbishop places on the king's head is still spoken of in a marginal note to the coronation service as "St. Edward's Crown", while we find in a chronicle of the fourteenth century, the "Annales Paulini", a vehement protest made in connexion mth the coronation of King Edward II that the unworthy favourite Piers Gaveston should have been suffered to carry the "Crown of St. Edward" with his "polluted hands" {inquinatis manihus).

ISIost of the regalia enumerated above call for no special comment, but with regard to some few, the significance of which has been misrepresented by Anglican writers with a more or less controversial purpose, a few words are necessarj'. To begin with, it has been pretended that the vestures in which the king is arrayed are the vestments of a bishop, and indicate an intention to endow the monarch with an ecclesia,stical character. This contention forms part of a theory propounded by a prominent Anglican liturgist. Dr. Wickham Legg, that the king according to the medieval view was mixta persona (i. e., both layman and ecclesiastic) and therefore spiritualis jurisdietionis capax (a fit subject for spiritual juris- diction). The underljing and indeed the avowed purpose was to show that although it cannot be denied that the king is the official head of the Church of England, still there is nothing unbecoming in such a relation because the king is a minister of the Church and consecrated to this special office by the Church herself. But the various argimients by which this contention is supported, and notably that b;ised upon the .supposed ecclesia.stical character of the corona- tion vestments, are wholly fallacious. The colobium sindouix (alleged to be the equivalent of the alb) and the dalmatic, or supertunica, are simply the or-