Explainer

Culture

Royalty

27 April 2023

4 min read

How faith helped the monarchy flex

Understanding how the British monarchy has evolved, means understanding its foundation in faith. Ian Bradley explains.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

an etching shows William and Mary is a classical scene, priests stand to their right while dogs chew bones at their feet.

A broadsheet illustration celebrates William and Mary, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Lambeth Palace Library.

Christian monarchy has played a central part in the history of the British Isles, promoting the rule of order, justice and mercy in conformity with the values of the kingdom of God and cementing a close alliance between the institutions of crown and church.

Both these aspects are well illustrated in the life and deeds of the first English king to convert to Christianity. Aethelbert, who ruled Kent from 587 to 616, seems to have come to faith through a combination of the influence of his wife, Bertha, the daughter of a Frankish Christian king, and the preaching of St Augustine, who arrived in Thanet in 597, having been sent from Rome by Pope Gregory. According to one account, 10,000 of Aethelbert’s subjects followed him in converting and underwent a mass baptism. Among his first actions as a Christian king were to issue the first set of laws in the English language and to grant land to Augustine on which to build an Abbey, which later became Canterbury Cathedral.

Reign responsibly

Exemplified by such figures as Arthur and Alfred, Christian kingship brought new titles as well as new responsibilities for Britain’s rulers. The first to be appropriated was that of ruling through the grace of God, or Deo Gratia, the idea that is still expressed on every coin of the realm through the abbreviation DG. The late eighth-century Anglo-Saxon king Offa described himself as ‘by the divine controlling grace king of the Mercians’. From the mid-tenth century, several English kings also began styling themselves Christ’s Vicar or deputy. Edgar, Alfred’s great grandson who ruled from 957 to 975, so described himself when founding a new monastery at Winchester in 966. Some years later Ethelred II stated that ‘the king must be regarded not only as the head of the church but also as a vicar of Christ among Christian folk’.

Cult kings

The Middle Ages saw the flowering of the cult of Christian monarchy as both splendid and servant-like, pious and chivalrous, full of knightly virtue, gung-ho triumphalism and miraculous powers, as exemplified in the widespread belief that the king’s touch could cure those suffering from scrofula. While Medieval monarchs cultivated magnificent splendour, they also espoused the theme of the servant-king and acknowledged their utter dependence on God’s grace. Both these elements were reflected in the civic triumphs staged around Epiphany or Advent for the entrance of monarchs into the cities of their realms with the king being portrayed as the type of Christ and the queen as the bearer of heavenly glory. Deliberately modelled on Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, they served as a reminder of the journey to be undertaken by all souls, including royal ones, towards death and the throne of heaven.

Moderate monarchy

The crown played a crucial part in the English Reformation which was initiated by Henry VIII with the help of his loyal lieutenant Thomas Cranmer. Together they created what was effectively a nationalised state church of a moderately Protestant hue with the monarch at its head, bishops and a conservative liturgy in English. Subsequent sovereigns made their influence felt on the emerging Church of England, with Edward VI steering it in a more Protestant direction and playing a key role in the preparation of the first English Prayer Book of 1549, and Elizabeth steadying it to produce the Anglican via media which has remained one of its distinguishing characteristics to this day.

The monarch's headship of the Church of England was a key part of the Reformation settlement. It was established in the 1534 Supremacy Act which declared King Henry VIII 'the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England' with full authority to intervene in its affairs. Elizabeth I modified the monarch’s title from ‘Supreme Head’ to 'Supreme Governor', which it has remained ever since. Alongside it goes the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’, represented on coins as F.D., originally given to Henry VIII by the Pope in 1521 for his defence of the traditional sacraments of the Catholic Church against the novel teaching of Martin Luther. Although revoked after the Reformation, it has continued to be used by and about all monarchs since, although its meaning has never been precisely defined.

Media monarchy

Stuart monarchs tended to push Christian monarchy in a more absolutist direction, being enamoured of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, although they also did much to forward Christianity in their realms. James VI of Scotland and I of England made a particularly valuable contribution in his patronage of the version of the Bible which still bears his name and is also known as the Authorised Version. He was adamant that it should not be a narrow reflection of a single theological position but rather an irenicon, or instrument of peace, breadth and moderation in the new United Kingdom over which he reigned.

Modified monarchy

The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, when James II was deposed because of his Catholicism and perceived absolutism and William of Orange invited by Parliament to occupy the vacant throne, effectively signalled the triumph of a covenant theory of monarchy over that of divine right. The constitutional settlement that followed it rested on a concept of limited monarchy and was based on an essentially secular concept of social and civil contract. However, neither the Reformation notion of the godly prince ruling the godly commonwealth nor the close connections between Crown and Church were swept away. Indeed, they were strengthened, with the role of the United Kingdom monarch as protector of Protestantism being expressed in the accession and coronation oaths still taken today.

Modern monarchy

Christian monarchy developed in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain to focus much more on philanthropy, civic duty and spiritual leadership demonstrated through attendance at religious services and public exhortation. The close relationship between the crown and the churches, and especially the Church of England, has remained strong while being extended in recent decades to other faith groups as the monarch has increasingly taken on the role of ‘Defender of Faith’. Television has made the monarch’s Christmas Day broadcast a significant national moment of spiritual reflection.

Column

Community

Culture

Football

Sport

26 March 2025

4 min read

I’ll miss football’s disappearing cathedrals

Sharing the same physical space as those that go before is a spiritual act.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A CGI image of a son and dad holding hands on the concourse of a modern stadium.

The 'new' Old Trafford.

MUFC.

On the way back from a gig a few weeks ago, my dad asked me a question. “Are there any artists that you’d be so up for seeing that you’d pay anything for a ticket?”

Paul McCartney? Julian Lage? Stevie Wonder?

That’s about it really. Notwithstanding the fact that I’m running out of internal organs to sell to afford gig tickets nowadays, it struck me that a lot of the people I’d pay anything to see are now all dead. Some of them died long before I was born: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon (as part of The Beatles), John Bonham (as part of Led Zeppelin). And then there are the bands who split up before I was born, especially Waters-Gilmour-Wright-Mason era Pink Floyd and Gabriel-Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins era of Genesis.

But there are a few artists I wish I’d had the chance to see in the fleeting moments we were alive at the same time. David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Neil Peart (of Rush), Jeff Buckley (although as a 4-year-old when he died, he probably would have been lost on me back them.)

I was thinking about this question again while watching the Merseyside football derby in February. It was a proper Merseyside derby. By this, I meant that it ended up with fans on the pitch, fights, two players being sent off, and both Liverpool’s manager and assistant manager being sent off too. A proper Merseyside derby.

It was also the last ever Merseyside derby to be held at Goodison Park. And that made me profoundly sad.

I’ve driven past Goodison a fair bit. You catch site of it looming over Stanley Park as you walk up to Anfield. But I’ve never actually been to a match at Goodison. And now I never will. Goodison will soon join a growing list of football grounds that no longer exist: Highbury, Maine Road, White Hart Lane, The Dell, the Boleyn Ground. All gone.

Along with Goodison, another stadium has been added to the scrap pile in recent days. You may have heard of it: Old Trafford.

Yes, Manchester United – who last month announced 200 redundancies at the club, having previously made 250 members of staff redundant last year – have made the decision to spend £2bn on leaving the historic and iconic, if crumbling, Old Trafford stadium to move to a new 100,000-seat stadium. Turns out I only have a few more years to go to Old Trafford before it becomes another page in my book of regrets.

Highbury. Maine Road. White Hart Lane. The Dell. The Boleyn Ground. Goodison. Old Trafford. These are football’s cathedrals, and they are disappearing.

And all of this reminds me about the kind of debates that pop up whenever a church building – whether active or defunct – is used for a purpose that some Christians find disrespectful or blasphemous. Church buildings are often contested spaces; what goes on within them is policed in a way that simply isn’t the case for many other public spaces. Should they host heavy metal gigs? Should disused churches be converted into housing, as this slightly bizarre article seems to revel in.

When I used to live in Nottingham, there was a bar in the centre of town located inside an old church. It’s a gorgeous old building and it has largely survived the conversion into a bar. It is, it must be said, a lovely place for a drink. But it’s difficult not to feel at least a tinge of sadness that, where that place once reverberated with the sound of praise and worship, it now echoes with the thrum of drinks orders and club music. It feels haunted with the presence of God.

Look, things change, I know that. I’m not so nostalgic as to think that everything needs to stay as it was when I was a child. But it’s hard not to wonder about the histories that are being lost, and the stories that are being forgotten, when we demolish or repurpose our church buildings, or our football stadia.

There is a reason why we preserve our history, and our cultural heritage. Sharing the same physical space as those that go before us is a supremely spiritual act. We visit castle ruins, old churches, and war-torn battlefields because they connect us to those that went before. We enter the stories of those people and realise that perhaps they aren’t so different from our own stories.

Come May, the Gwladys Street End at Goodison will have sung its last song. In the near future, Old Trafford’s Stretford End will fall silent, too. Liverpool’s owners FSG have come in for a lot of criticism since taking over in 2010. But, along with appointing Jürgen Klopp, their decision to renovate rather than move away from Anfield will surely go down in history as an unqualified success. It is a place that reeks of history, of stories past. And those stories shape and underwrite the club’s stories in the present.

Again: things change, I get that. But whether it’s the church’s buildings or football stadia, we lose these spaces – and the stories born within them – at great cost to ourselves.

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