There’s been quite a lot of discussion over the last couple of years – since the death of Queen Elizabeth II – about kings and kingship; but not much of that seems to me to be in a Christian context.
This a pity, because there are a lot of references to Jesus as a king, in our hymns, in our liturgies and of course, the Kingdom of God is ubiquitous in the New Testament, so I thought I might make a little bit of a start, to encourage people who know what they are talking about to say something.
Now obviously, in modern English, "King" is gendered; but that’s an issue far more general than just this, and I’ve written another rant on that, so we’ll ignore it here.
So let me begin.
The word "King" embodies for us, stuck in a cold wet archipelago off the northwest coast of France, two quite distinct traditions – two quite distinct understandings: Jesus as an Old Testament, Jewish king, and Jesus as a British, that is, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon king. We must take them separately.
When you read the Old Testament accounts of the various kings, there is one story, fairly early on, which establishes almost everything about Jewish kings: David and Bathsheba. And Uriah the Hittite, though he doesn’t get mentioned so often.
It’s cruel story, an unforgettable story, but the cruelty can easily make us overlook one important detail: in any other kingship of the time, it wouldn’t even be a story; of course the king can do what he likes; he wants to have sex, with a woman or anyone or anything else, he just takes them; if he wants to kill someone, he just kills them. What’s the story?
But David knows and acknowledges he is guilty. And as king, he can only be guilty if he is answerable to God.
And not just in a metaphysical sense, not just after death; David is answerable to Nathan, God’s prophet, here and now.
Even after the Kingdoms divide, this principle still holds: most obviously in the story of Naboth’s Vineyard – in Israel, not Judah – where Jezebel completely fails to understand that Ahab still holds himself as responsible to God; when Ahab fails to negotiate a deal with Naboth, Jezebel simply arranges Naboth’s public execution. Why not – Ahab’s king, isn’t he? Bad for Naboth, admittedly, but the story does not end well for Jezebel either.
And once this is understood, we realise that the very beginning of the kingship in Israel is rooted in this: the king was to replace Samuel’s sons, who were acting like kings but with no respect for God and his Law; so God appointed Saul – anointed Saul – as King, so that he would respect God and his Law.
In the Jewish tradition, therefore, the basis of kingship was that it was answerable to God. The king could not simply do what he liked with what he ruled; he was God’s steward, God’s manager, God’s servant. And a servant answers to their master.
This applies also to words derived from ‘king’, like ‘rule’
For example, when God is feeling a bit peeved because Adam and Eve ate the wrong fruit, Eve is told that her husband "will rule over you"; this did not mean that he could do what he liked with her, that she was just his property; it meant that he was responsible for her, answerable to God for how he treated her and if he treated her badly, that was not acceptable to God – or to God’s people.
And the mediaeval church took this to heart: for example, attendance at Mass was compulsory for Christians, male, female, married, unmarried, but women and men sat separately; thus every woman had an hour or so a week when she could talk to other women without her man overhearing her – not much perhaps, but at least it meant nothing could finally be hidden if the woman chose to reveal it: it empowered the woman just a little, and very often just enough.
Again, when God told Adam to rule over the animals and plants, he didn’t mean that Adam could simply exploit the natural world for his own profit and pleasure; on the contrary, he meant that Adam would be its manager, answerable to God for how he treated it, protected it, developed it. Indeed, this stewardship of nature became a Christian characteristic, at least in the areas where there were few Jews. The Church in northern Europe, for instance, was able to restrict hunting to useful animals, at times when their loss would have little impact on numbers. This was a specifically Christian thing, and everyone knew it.
For example, in England around 1300ish someone wrote a poem called "Gawain and the Green Knight". In it, Gawain is on a quest, and lodges in – he thinks – the castle of a Christian lord.
The first day of his stay, the lord goes hunting, and kills a stag: that’s fine, it’s male, in season, and meat, hide, bones and antlers would all be used.
The second day of his stay, the lord goes hunting, and kills a boar: that’s fine, it’s male, in season, and meat, hide, bones and tusks would all be used.
But the third day of his stay, the lord goes hunting, and kills a fox. That is not fine. A fox’s meat is vile, the hide is useless, there is no justification for hunting it, it’s just wanton exploitation – and this is one of three signs that alert Gawain: he realises that the castle is a pagan one, with only a veneer of Christianity
It lasted long after the Reformation: Thomas Bewick in the 1700’s wrote a massive and very important work on the birds of Britain. In it he rants, at length, about the evil influence of the Church that insists on protecting the animals and birds from exploitation, thereby depriving people of their natural (according to Bewick) human right:
To Kill
And he writes it like that, on its own line, in small capitals. Just in case you miss it.
You will not be surprised to learn that Thomas Bewick was not a Christian.
This is all good; but why? What was a king for?
The king was there to keep the nation safe.
The king keeps his people safe – safe to farm, safe to trade, to raise children, to plant vineyards and olive trees – and safe from each other! So the king leads the army against the external enemies of the state, so that the people are safe from the invader’s sword. But also – and even more important – he keeps the people safe from each other. The king rules with justice, and especially the king ensures the weak, the poor, the widow, the orphan, all the defenceless people at the bottom of the heap, that even they – no, that’s wrong: especially they – are treated justly by the powerful.
The Old Testament is filled with references to a king’s duty; I’ll just choose one, probably the shortest, probably the bluntest:
If a king judges the poor with fairness,
his throne will be established for ever
You can’t get much clearer than that.
So the Jewish king judged his people, especially the weak, and defended his people against their enemies.
The Jewish King brought salvation to his people.
But the Jewish King answered to God for everything he did; for the measure of justice that the king deals out, by that measure they will be judged by God.
It is a very strange thing, but there is far less difference between a Celtic king and an Anglo-Saxon king than might be expected – than is often claimed nowadays.
Even stranger, the two together are sharply different from kings on the continent – and in much the same way that Jewish kings differed from those of neighbouring nations.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There is a convenient summary of what a king is, originally from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but broadly accepted everywhere in these isles:
Rex est Fons Justitiae, Fons Honoris, et Fons Salutis
The king is the source of justice, the source of honour, the source of safety.
Justice and safety – a Jewish king would recognise that straight away! Though the "honour" is maybe a bit of a surprise.
Anyway, I’ll take them in turn, beginning with Justice. And in Celtic tradition, Justice means Law.
Therefore the Celtic tradition was – and is – very clear: the king is the source of justice, therefore the king is the source of law. So the traditional Welsh law code is attributed to a king: the great Hywel Da, Hywel The Good. However it was put together, by druids, remembrancers, monks, it wasn’t law until the king said it was.
And again, when Adomnan tried to do something about the atrocities that civilians suffered at the hands of warring armies, he called a conference, to which kings came. And one king in particular, the king of a little area of Ireland, but also king of kings: the High King of All Ireland: Loingsech King of Tara.
And once Loingsech said it was Law, then the Law Of Innocents was law throughout Ireland, not just the island itself, but also throughout its colonies in Britain: it was binding on all.
Or should have been; yes, I know it was nothing like as effective immediately as Adomnan had hoped – but we wouldn’t be asking about civilian deaths in modern warzones if Adomnan hadn’t tried, and if Loingsech hadn’t agreed. The King made Law, the Law made Justice, and lesser kings were bound by greater kings – calling Jesus High King, therefore Loingsech’s king, isn’t just high-flown verbiage: it matters.
And the idea that a king’s rule is not absolute, that a king is responsible to a higher king, that too would be familiar to a Jewish king.
Here in Logres the Anglo-Saxon tradition was very similar, even though it came from an ancient Germanic tradition: Justice needed Law, and the King made Law. And even now, it is when our King Charles says "Le Roy le veult" that an Act becomes Law.
And likewise safety. In fact, and sadly, it was safety that eventually became the main duty of a King – and even more sadly, usually at our neighbours’ expense. But the rather more sensible origins are still easy to see in so many stories – true, legendary and mythical – from both sides of Finn McCool’s Problem.
I’ll just take one: George And The Dragon. You know the story. But notice how the story evolves: at first George kills the Dragon, but in later versions he captures the dragon and brings it back. Yes, this probably comes from Greek sources, but the idea is right: there is a king whose kingdom is being ravaged by a dragon; the king hires George to fix it; George does so and brings the dragon back as proof. The heroism is all George, but the initiative is the king’s.
And this is typical. Safety – the safety of the realm – is the duty of the king, not the hero.
And we still have a relic of this, and a very important one: our armed forces swear allegiance to the Crown – not to the country, and therefore not to the Prime Minister, or Parliament, or anything else that could trump our freedoms.
On the other shore we have the great hero Cu Chulainn – hero, never king. He goes out there defending the kings, but he is never king himself; the various kings employ him, but although in many ways he is greater than any king, nonetheless, king he is not.
Su the king is Fons Salutis, the source of safety, and Fons Justitiae, the source of justice – equated with law in the mediaeval mind – but what about Fons Honoris – source of honour? This seems odd to us – aren’t other people the source of honour? Isn’t honour something the people either acknowledge through an "honours" system, or else award a medal for?
Which takes us back to the beginning of this section: why is it that Celtic and Anglo-Saxon kingship are so similar, while Continental kingship is so different?
The answer is Roman Law.
Almost the whole continent ran on Roman Law – as codified by Justinian the great law codifier of Constantinople. Only a few remote peninsulas and rain-soaked offshore islands avoided this, running their own ancient systems – yes, heavily modified and modernised, but not Roman.
There are a few vital and fundamental differences, but for our purposes only one matters: for all its Christian veneer, in Roman Law kings were emperors, and in Roman Law the Emperor was a god. Not appointed by God, but a god in himself – and he (very very rarely she) was Emperor because he was a god.
But we, on our forgotten mudpatches that even Charlemagne couldn’t be bothered with, we held to the older belief: that the Kingdom chose the king – indeed the king was the Kingdom. That was why Cu Chulainn was never king: not that he couldn’t’ve taken kingship by force, but that simply would not have counted. Cu Chulainn was never king because no kingdom chose him.
In the Celtic realms, the processes by which the various kingdoms made their choice are very unclear. Certainly it changed markedly from kingdom to kingdom, and also with the passage of years. In every case, though, the process was clear at the time in that particular kingdom.
On the other hand, the Anglo-Saxons were much more organised. A council of the "wise" – the Witan – met together and chose the new king, theoretically from anyone, in real life from the previous king’s sons or close relatives. (Theoretically too once the cyningriciu of Englaland had become Christian a woman could be chosen, but this only happened once, as far as we know, and even that is disputed.) So literally and visibly the kingdom chose the king.
Obviously the Normans would have none of this, at least once William the Bastard’s succession had been rubber-stamped, but they too were ultimately of Germanic, Norse, stock, so the idea of the kingdom choosing the king was always sleeping in the back of the collective mind. Consequently, when the Stuarts tried to impose the Continental idea of the Divine Right Of Kings – which was just emperor-worship dressed in a pseudochristian costume – Parliament claimed the right to depose them: the right, not just the power. Similarly, nearly a century later Parliament claimed the right to elect William of Orange as king. The right. The Witan had not been forgotten, and there was a strong attempt to claim that Parliament had inherited the power from the Witan, via the City of London – historically, er, dubious, but they tried. But these pedantries didn’t finally matter: it was Parliament, the Kingdom, that chose the King, and historical details – well, nobody really cared.
In fact, it’s still true. Antiroyalists keep claiming that "they didn’t elect the King" but actually they did: Parliament chose our present monarch, and they could have chosen differently. The process lacks the desirable clarity of a more open election, but Parliament has: firstly, claimed the right to elect a king; secondly, decided on a set of rules which enable the new king to be chosen and put in place without unnecessary fuss; thirdly, appointed commissioners to check that Charles Windsor was the person who fitted those rules; and lastly, elected him king. But Parliament can change this process whenever they wish: uniquely among Acts of Parliament, they do not need the king’s approval.
So for us, the Kingdom is the King, and the King is the Kingdom.
So Jesus is the King, and we are the Kingdom; and so we choose Jesus. No "unconditional election" where Jesus chooses us, like a Stuart monarch; no "irresistibility of the Spirit" that enslaves us to an Emperor; no, a King chosen by the Kingdom, who is the source of our honour, the source of our justice, the source of our salvation, and who is answerable to God for every single soul – and for me.
God Save The King!