The bearers of the British monarch’s coat-of-arms are the lion and the unicorn, the centuries-old heraldic symbols of the Crowns of England and Scotland, respectively. But they are also the beasts chosen to represent King David’s oppressors (“the lion’s mouth ... and the horns of the unicorns”) in the Psalm mandated in the pre-Conciliar Roman Rite for the Introit on Palm Sunday. Was it, therefore, by divine Providence, human design, or mere chance that Queen Elizabeth II chose Palm Sunday for her Coronavirus address—one of only four extraordinary addresses in a 68-year reign—to Britain and the Commonwealth?
A paradox arises. The only people likely to notice the symbolic overlap are Britain’s Catholic minority (who, incidentally, this last Annunciation Day renewed Richard II’s 1395 dedication of England to Mary as her “dowry”), and, particularly, the even smaller minority of “traditionalists” among them who pray the so-called “extraordinary form” of the 1570 Tridentine Mass rather than the vernacular liturgy of Vatican II (which, in translating Jerome’s Latin, sadly dropped all reference to “unicorns”).
Certainly, Catholics’ relationship to the British monarchy is, to say the least,“complex”. On one hand, Elizabeth II, a descendant of the pious Richard II above, occupies the Throne of an even more ancient and, indeed, sainted royal ancestor: St Edward the Confessor, last Anglo-Saxon king of England. (Indeed, Britain’s crown is the Crown of St Edward.) On the other, however, Catholics haven’t forgotten Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries nor the Catholics martyred…
