by John Higgs
Twenty-first-century monarchy is a very different beast to the royalty of old. To highlight just how much it has changed, it is worth remembering what we originally expected from royalty.
Although it is not widely reported, there are two monarchs in Britain. The best known is Queen Elizabeth II, who lives in Buckingham Palace. The other is King Arthur Pendragon, who can usually be found in a static caravan parked somewhere near Stonehenge.
Arthur and Elizabeth are very different people. Arthur has been arrested considerably more often than Elizabeth, for a start. He is also more likely to sleep in a ditch, drink cider until he pukes and set fire to people for a laugh. Yet both Arthur and Elizabeth are both recognized as monarchs in contemporary Britain, and they serve in roles that combine both secular and spiritual aspects. Elizabeth is recognized as Queen and Defender of the Faith in British law, and gained that title due to her dynastic background. Arthur is recognized as a King because his followers don’t know anyone who would make a better king.
Arthur was born John Timothy Rothwell in a working class English family in 1954. He served in the 1st Hampshire Regiment and, after returning to civilian life, flitted through a number of dead end jobs before turning away from regular life and becoming the leader of a gang of bikers. It was around this time that he became convinced that his true name was not John Rothwell, but Arthur Uther Pendragon, and that he was the reincarnation of the mythical Once and Future King.
Believing you are the reincarnation of someone who probably never even existed is bad enough. It is worse if, like Arthur, you are sane enough to know that. He was under no illusions as to just how mad the whole thing was, or how much ridicule he would face if he publicly announced who he believed himself to be.
His situation was an existential nightmare because the person he believed himself to be was the noble King Arthur. If he believed in his heart of hearts that he was the reincarnation of a historical figure such as Robespierre, da Vinci or Tolstoy, then he could at least have kept quiet about it. Yet he believed himself to be King Arthur, so he had to act as Arthur would have acted, and Arthur was dedicated to truth, honour and justice. Thinking you are King Arthur means you cannot lie or hide, because that’s not what Arthur would do. Our Arthur had no choice but to get out of bed each morning, knowing the ridiculousness of the situation, and behave as Arthur would have behaved. That is, by anyone’s standards, an unfortunate state of affairs.
Arthur Pendragon, as he had no choice but to legally change his name by deed poll to, wasn’t sure exactly what it was that King Arthur should be doing, in the unlikely event that he returned in the late twentieth century. His first task, he eventually decided, was to locate the sword Excalibur. If he really was King Arthur, then it stood to reason that he should possess Excalibur.
His search for his sword, initially, did not go particularly well.
And then he saw it. After somehow getting lost in his hometown, he found himself staring in the window of an armourer’s shop in Farnborough. It was the sort of shop that made replica arms for historical re-enactment societies. Arthur was adamant that he was looking for a real sword and not a pretend one, so this was not the sort of place that he would have thought to look. Yet the moment he saw it he knew it was the one. Dazed, he entered the shop and informed the shopkeeper that he believed that the sword in his window was Excalibur. The shopkeeper said that yes, he already knew that. The sword had been made for the 1981 John Boorman movie Excalibur.
It was also not for sale. The shopkeeper had made a promise that he would never allow the sword to be sold, unless King Arthur himself returned to claim it. Arthur explained that he was in fact King Arthur, and he was able to prove it because he happened to have his passport with him. Somewhat thrown by this turn of events, the shopkeeper had no choice but to let the sword go. In this unlikely manner, Arthur and Excalibur were reunited.
Once the King had his sword, there was no stopping him.
At the time the U.K. government had, for reasons best known to themselves, placed an exclusion zone around the ancient Neolithic monument of Stonehenge. This came into force every summer solstice, the date that the monument was aligned to commemorate. For as long as anyone could remember, the British people had flocked to these stones on that date every year, in order to celebrate the longest day. In the 1980s, however, the monument was surrounded by police, and anyone attempting to visit it was turned away. As attempts to stop people having a good time go, it was a surprisingly expensive and unnecessary enterprise.
Britain is officially a Christian country, of course, but it is generally understood that this is only a front to avoid worrying the neighbours. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history would be hard pushed to argue that the behaviour of the British was Christian. The British people are far more inclined to go out and dance in fields all night than they are to head to church on a Sunday. As Arthur saw it, Stonehenge was a link to the deep past and a temple that had been open to all who had lived on those islands over the previous five thousand years. It is the real spiritual centre of Britain, in other words, and a government-imposed exclusion zone around it was an attack on the very heart of the nation. This, clearly, was the sort of thing King Arthur would put a stop to. He got to work.
The task Arthur dedicated himself to during the 1990s was of ensuring free, open access to Stonehenge on the solstice, for everybody. He was one man taking on a well-funded, not entirely rational state, and the only asset he had at his disposal was his body. All he could do was use that body to deny the exclusion zone by deliberately crossing it, at which point he would be promptly arrested. So this is what he did. And after being arrested and released, he did it again. This happened many times.
People began to take notice. It was hard not to, really, for it is not every day that a man claiming to be the Once and Future King of mythology goes toe-to-toe with the U.K. government. And once people began to pay attention, it was hard not to take sides. The British people being what they were, they sided with the eccentric underdog making a deep irrational call to the roots of the British psyche. So Arthur gained supporters, and some of those supporters became followers. Arthur became the leader of the Loyal Arthurian Warband, a druidical order that specialized in non-violent direct action. Druid organizations around the country began recognizing him and granting him honorary titles. Academics started to study him, and the media began to circle. When he publicly came out as King Arthur, he had feared ridicule. Now he was a genuine spiritual and political leader.
He was still ridiculed a bit, of course, but then what spiritual or political leader isn’t?
In the eyes of a number of members of the Loyal Arthurian Warband, Arthur is genuinely seen as a king, but it is not compulsory to recognize that title. Arthur officially uses the title of “titular head” of the organization, or “tithead” for short. He does not ask anyone to validate his title. Yet people recognize it anyway, not because of who he is but because of what he does. Those who wish to become a knight of the Warband do so by going under his sword and swearing an oath to truth, justice and honour. But the oath is not sworn to Arthur, it is instead a personal vow that the new knight makes to themselves.
It is noticeable that when people meet him for the first time, Arthur does not raise himself over them or act ennobled. Indeed, he is far more likely to humble himself, become blind drunk, and need to be carried home. It is only in the cold light of day, when he gets back to work, that any aspect of nobility may become apparent. Before Arthur set about liberating Stonehenge he renounced money, stopped working and refused to claim any state benefits. He can only eat and drink if people value him enough to feed him. His stout frame is, therefore, a source of some pride. Together with his long white hair and beard, it is hard to deny that this ex-soldier and biker has come to look an awful lot like a king.
After a struggle that lasted nearly a decade, played out in the jails of Wiltshire, the pages of the media and the European Court of Human Rights, Arthur and his fellow
campaigners were successful. Every year, at both the winter and the summer solstice, there is now free overnight access to Stonehenge for the tens of thousands of people who are drawn there. Arthur is easy to find amongst the revellers, thanks to his white robes, sword and general kingly demeanour. Any visitor to Britain in late June that is comfortable with truth, honour and justice should consider visiting the monument at dawn of the longest day, and going under Excalibur themselves.
King Arthur’s story is clearly very different to the story of Queen Elizabeth II, so it serves as a useful reminder of just how much our current concept of monarchy has evolved. Arthur is king in the Iron Age sense, a warrior and a rabble-rouser who leads from the front and is recognized as king because he is the best person for the job. His role is to arbitrate, plan and carry out actions, be they political, military or spiritual. Elizabeth’s responsibilities and skills are entirely different to Arthur’s. She exists to embody and symbolize something that is separate to her, and which she has no power to influence or control. If Arthur is like a pirate captain, then Elizabeth is like the ship’s figurehead.
In a modern democratic state, there is no room for a monarch in the style of Arthur. His responsibilities have been taken up by a range of institutions which provide a level of expertise and accountability above that found in a single drunk man wrestling with questions about his own sanity. The only aspect of the original role of monarch which is still considered to be worth retaining is the irrational symbolic side, and this is the reason why royalty still exists in the twenty-first century. This is the concept of monarchy that springs from magical thinking and our neurological evolution, not the leader or the wielder of power.
Both republicans and royalists alike generally agree that Queen Elizabeth II is personally pretty good at embodying the symbolic aspect of monarchy. Not everyone has the ability to represent a thousand years of unbroken continuity in quite such a dependable, quiet and reliable way. Her upbringing has prepared her for the role well. None of that is in question. But it is important to remember that her role is not that of a monarch in the traditional sense. Unlike Arthur, her life is one of reactive duty rather than proactive adventure. The old models of monarchy do not describe her, so new ones are needed.
And what model is more accurate than that of a household pet?
6. The Collapse of Monarchy in the Christian Era
Somehow the British monarchy survived this major change in the definition of monarchy. This is in itself quite unusual. Most of the other European royalty did not fare so well.
As we’ve already noted, the position of king or queen was, in part, a symbolic representation of the kingdom itself. Divinity was originally either associated with the ruler themselves, such as Egyptian pharaohs who were believed to be the offspring of the sun god Ra, or it was the domain of the highest ranking priest or shaman. That high priest would work closely with the king, bringing a connection to divinity within the walls of the royal court. This system worked fine in the pagan world, but the arrival of Christianity complicated matters.
Christ was more than King of the Jews. His religion was not limited to people from a specific tribe or geographical region. He was the spiritual focus for anyone who wanted him, and his congregation was larger than the subjects of any one king. The spread of Christianity meant that divinity moved away from the ruler’s grasp. Their head priest was now part of something far bigger than any particular kingdom.
The problem became more acute with the rise of the Roman Church and the power of the Pope. This put the king’s high priest in something of an awkward position. That priest had to serve two masters. He had to use a lot of diplomacy in the presence of his king to hide the fact that, of those two bosses, it was the Bishop of Rome that was really the top dog.
This left the king with two options. The easiest response was to just live with it, and this is what most European monarchs chose to do. The Pope could be a good friend and his declarations could grant legitimacy to wars or conquests which might otherwise appear unjustifiable and profoundly unchristian. True, the complicated politics of European relations in pre-Enlightenment Europe meant that staying friendly with the Pope was sometimes easier said than done. King Philip II of Spain, for example, is remembered as a staunch defender of the Catholic faith and a major ally of Rome’s in the struggle against Protestantism, but even he felt he had to declare war against the Pope on one occasion. Generally speaking, though, staying in the Pope’s good books was the simplest and wisest option.
That was not the route chosen by King Henry VIII of England. Henry had initially been a loyal ally of the Pope in the fight against heresy, and Pope Leo X granted him the title of Defender of the Faith in 1521. This title was awarded in gratitude for a book Henry wrote called Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which argued that the Pope ruled supreme and that the Protestant ideas of Martin Luther were as dumb as it gets.
Henry didn’t have any religious issues with Roman Catholicism. He practised a form of worship that was essentially Catholic for his entire life. His problem was with the placement of power. Specifically, he didn’t like the fact that a form of power in his kingdom lay with someone other than himself. He certainly didn’t like the fact that this external power refused to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was related to both Spanish royalty and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, which made it unwise to mess her around. Pope Clement VII’s decision to not grant that divorce was based on the rationale that upsetting Catherine’s wider family was worse than denying Henry’s desire to produce legitimate heirs from younger and saucier women.
Henry’s response was to split with Rome and declare himself the head of the Church of England. The Pope excommunicated him, of course, and revoked the title of Defender of the Faith. Henry kept using the title regardless, and indeed it has been passed down to all British monarchs to this day. He understood that if you were the undisputed head of both the political and religious hierarchies of your country, you could get away with using any title you damn well felt like. He also understood that he could help himself to the church’s monasteries and land while he was at it. Reclaiming the nation’s sense of divinity from Rome was, it transpired, a lucrative enterprise. Henry decreed that the monarch could now be formally addressed as “majesty,” which was the type of outrageous suggestion you can’t really get away with when you are essentially the Pope’s bitch.
The return of divine authority to the royal family had a noticeable impact on their legitimacy in the eyes of the British people. This was apparent in the differing public opinions of the reigns of Henry’s children. His eldest daughter, Mary I, wished to reconcile with Rome and married the Catholic Philip II of Spain. She was christened “Bloody Mary” by the public. Her staunchly Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, by contrast, was given the adoring nickname of “Gloriana,” a term first coined by the poet Edmund Spenser but which soon spread to the wider public. In the Elizabethan golden age of Shakespeare, exploration and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Virgin Queen had a greater hold over the hearts of the British people than the Virgin Mary. If nothing else, the Virgin Queen would at least ride past and wave to them every now and again.
Henry’s break from Rome was the result of a desire to return lost symbolic power to the monarchy, rather than a principled act of conscience triggered by profound religious misgivings. But for those who did have deeply held spiritual problems with Rome, the fact that England had rejected Catholicism was extremely appealing. There began a turbulent few centuries, in which the question of exactly how God wanted people to worship produced uncountable schisms, hangings and human bonfires.
The Church of England ultimately accepted much of the “new learning” from Lutheran northern Europe. The experience of religion for the British people went from being a matter of the senses, where illiterate congregations were presented with images, incense and music, to something more intellectual and literal, as the Bible was translated into English and m
ade available in every parish. The increasingly educated faithful were now able to see exactly what the Good Book had to say for itself, and how it differed from controversial religious doctrines in such matters as purgatory or transubstantiation. This naturally generated a great deal of enthusiasm and argument. The result was the rise of the Puritan and Calvinist traditions, who took the view that the Church of England needed to go much further in their reformation of religious practice. They detected the whiff of discredited Catholic doctrines in many aspects of the church service, and they were adamant that their preferred flavour of stern, joyless worship was the very thing that God wanted to see.
This was a new development. The monarchy may have regained their role as the spiritual focus of the nation, but the rise in education and literacy meant their subjects were increasingly finding fault with the way they went about it. There was little the monarch could do about this, as there were by now so many different opinions on exactly what God wanted from Christian worship that there was no hope of keeping everyone happy. All the monarch could do was try for the broadest compromise and hope for the best. They may have been able to reclaim authority from the Pope, but their level of authority could not compete with that of the Bible itself.
7. A Tale of Two Beheadings: Part 1 – England
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the stage was set for a confrontation. The monarch at the time was Charles I, from the Scottish house of Stewart, who was suspected by many in the Calvinist reform tradition of being just a bit too Catholic for their liking. Charles was also a firm believer in a doctrine known as the divine right of kings, which argued that the monarch ruled because God willed it so, and hence everything he did was unarguable, just and God-approved. In the more extreme Protestant circles this view was not widely shared. They were pretty sure that Charles’ actions, such as marrying a Catholic and failing to come to the aid of Protestant forces in the European Thirty Years War, showed that Charles and God were not even on speaking terms.