Court pomp and circumstance

THE attendance of Papal Representatives, seated in their own special box safely erected outside Westminster Abbey, on which Gerard Noel remarks in
Charterhouse Chronicle (Catholic Herald, 28 May), is a little-known feature of recent Coronations.
In 1935, the then British 'Minister to the Holy See held a Reception in honour of the Silver Jubilee of King George V.
In proposing His Majesties health, the Cardinal Secretary of State surprised the other guests by remarking that he himself had been present, outside the Abbey, as one of the Papal Representatives at the King's Coronation in 1910.
This would have been four years before formal diplomatic relations were first established by the appointment of a British Minister to the Vatican.
Cardinal Pacelli was later elected Pope as Pius XII, in which august capacity he later sent those representatives whom Mr Noel so vividly remembers seeing at the 1953 Coronation, Adrian Turner Muswell Hill, London