What a monarch’s meeting teaches about politics and permanence

A monarch meeting a prime minister is a symbol of a deeper truth in a fleeting world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A frail old lady, the late Queen, rises from a sofa to shake hands with an approaching woman.

The longest serving monarch meets the shortest serving prime minister.

The Royal Family.

Just about the last constitutional act of our late Queen was to give an audience to Liz Truss, the (temporary as it turned out) Prime Minister and to ask her to form a government. The pictures of a frail but smiling monarch, weakened, but still doing her job, couldn’t help but evoke a mix of admiration and affection, especially when we look back and consider that this was just two days before she died.

But those pictures raised some questions. A Prime Minister, and a political party that forms a government, is normally chosen by the people. Queen Elizabeth was not. Neither is King Charles. She was, and he now is, our monarch by virtue of birth, something that can seem scandalous to republicans, and even to many who liked the Queen, or admire the King as decent people, but have their doubts about the monarchy. To our democratic instincts, it feels, at least to some, distinctly odd, a relic of a hierarchical past, a hangover from a less enlightened age.

But perhaps something more significant was hidden in that act. The idea of a constitutional monarch – a figure whose position is out of our hands, as it were – formally asking a politician to form a government - acts as a reminder to us that the will of the people is not the last word, or even the first word. It tells us that, important as democracy is (‘the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, as Winston Churchill famously put it), there is an order, an authority that stands above and beyond the will of the people. When it has worked well, the monarchy, a source of rule above that of people and parliament, has always been a symbol and pointer to a divine authority that can work through, but essentially stands above all human government.

Because, of course, ’the will of the people’, and governments that claim to enact the will of the people, sometimes get things badly wrong. History, even that of democracies, is littered with tales of nations that have elected bad governments, or regimes that went on to enact a rule of terror in the name of ‘the people’, or where a majority has oppressed minorities. Republics of various kinds have ended up as oppressive and authoritarian. Even Hitler was elected in the first place.

That a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability.

Of course, there are good monarchs and bad ones. For most of our lives, those of us who live in the UK are fortunate to have had a very good monarch in Queen Elizabeth, and we hope and pray Charles will prove to be one too. Bad monarchs, whose personal failings and moral selfishness betray the office they hold, blur the picture. They tell a different story, that authority is in itself abusive, oppressive and not to be trusted. But at its best, the continuous institution of the monarchy has served as an anchor for us, pointing away from itself to an unchanging divine presence in the course of history. The fact that a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability, to a moral law they did not invent, a law that tempers justice with mercy, that our lives are subject to a deeper and more lasting reality than the shifting sands of politics or times and that there is an even higher loyalty than that which we may have felt to our late Queen, or to our democratic political system.

At the coronation, King Charles will be presented with an orb – a symbol of the world with a cross perched on top of it. It is a sign that ultimate power in this world belongs not to the King, or even the people, but to God. It is a reminder to the King, and to us, that he (and we) are accountable to an authority that stands beyond our own desires, or even the general will of the people. It is an authority represented by a cross – the symbol of love and self-sacrifice for the good of our neighbour, or even our enemy. It is one of those valuable reminders that stops any ruler from starting to think he can become a despot.

As our constitutional system has evolved, it is the custom that Monarchs don’t get involved in the nitty-gritty of politics and it’s vital that they don’t. That is left, quite properly, to the crucial hard work of democratically elected government and politicians, who have to get on with the important but messy business of governing, working out what to do about the cost of living crisis, how to respond to conflict in Ukraine, or how to respond to those fleeing to our shores from war-torn or poverty-stricken parts of the world.

The monarchy is a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence

Over past decades, Queen Elizabeth kept to this custom. She avoided expressing opinions on particular political issues and disputes because that wasn’t her role. Her role was to be a reminder that there is an order of things beyond the temporal, a moral structure to the world that is just given, not created by us, a structure that tells us that compassion, truthfulness, integrity, justice and honesty matter in all the calculations and compromises of political decision making.

The Queen’s death removed something steady and sure from our lives, as most of us have never known another monarch. Her death shook our sense of permanence, as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it at her funeral. Many of the vox pops we heard during the period of mourning pointed to that longing for permanence, the sense she gave of something enduring and reliable. Yet she was a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence.

As King Charles is crowned, he becomes a pointer to the unshakeable and steady presence that surrounds us, upholds us and all things - the God that Christians see revealed in Jesus Christ. Queen Elizabeth understood that and showed it in her own faith – the one aspect of her personal life that she was quite open about. And there are signs that King Charles understands that too. Faith in that God is meant to be the foundation of a monarch’s rule. It can also provide a sure foundation for our individual and less public lives too, a sense of permanence in the changes and chances of this fleeting and unstable world.

Article

America

Comment

24 November 2023

6 min read

The significance of legacy and what it can really stir

Concluding an American journey in the footsteps of his hero, Ian Hamlin ponders how legacy arises.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

Martin Luther King reaches from the pulpit of a church while he preaches.

MLK preaching at Riverside Church, New York.

The Gotham Center for New York History.

Travelling around recently, considering the impact of the US Civil Rights Movement as part of my sabbatical trip across four States, I’ve been struck by the immediacy of it. It really doesn’t seem very far away, or long ago. Part of that, of course, is its ongoing resonance, but there are also some personal factors. Martin Luther King was just four days younger than my mother, who’s still alive, and I was born in the week leading up to ‘Bloody Sunday’, and the Selma – Montgomery march. Although not strictly true, this feels like a history of my own time.

That sense has, I think, been amplified by some other recent significant dates. Earlier this summer was the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington, the subway in Atlanta is still awash with anniversary posters. Beyond that, of course, just days later, we remembered a similar six decades since the Klu Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed; Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, three 14-year-olds, and one 11-year-old girl. A commemorative service was held in the church, just weeks ago.

History had changed, its arc had indeed bent towards justice. Yet such gestures, profound though they may be, rarely tell the whole story.

Less dramatically, yet still poignantly, 2nd November saw the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan signing the bill into law, which created Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday in America, on the 3rd Monday of January each year.

Now very much part of the fabric of national life, the holiday represents, as much as anything, the formal adoption of Dr King as a fully-fledged American hero, part of the great story of the Republic, and the ultimate acceptance of this black man by his country.

Symbols like that matter, such a legacy is significant indeed. It was on Martin Luther King Day 2013, that Barak Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States, for the second time, a black man, who spoke, that day, of a dream fulfilled, as he made his oath of office on King’s bible. History had changed, its arc had indeed bent towards justice. Yet such gestures, profound though they may be, rarely tell the whole story.

Should we be satisfied with the unity that comes from an altogether flatter story, even if it tends towards ‘Disneyfication’, or ought we insist upon messy truth... ?

The holiday wasn’t celebrated until January 1986, Reagan himself wasn’t particularly keen on it, it passed only after something of a battle in Congress where, famously, Senator Jesse Helms led a 16-day filibuster, where he claimed King was a subversive radical, dangerous traitor and communist agitator, And, it wasn’t until 2000 that it was acknowledged in all 50 states.

Such details, if known and remembered, serve to confuse the notion of legacy, to muddy the waters and call into question its real heart. Because the easiest histories are the most straightforward, travelling in a straight line from A to B, from problem to solution, tragedy to victory, despair to hope. They mould into the very fabric of the Nation that the key idea, that the good guys won in the end, like they always do, and the Republic sails inexorably on towards even brighter lights to come.

The question of legacy, when it comes to Dr King, as with many others, is vital for sure, but far more complex than that, and contested too. Should we be satisfied with the unity that comes from an altogether flatter story, even if it tends towards ‘Disneyfication’, or ought we insist upon messy truth, with its inherent conflict and challenge, recalled back then, and still present now?

Martin Luther King was far from a hero at the time of his death, quite the contrary, he was well on his way to becoming a pariah. No longer welcome in the Whitehouse, he had fallen foul of Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, and his consistent enemies in the FBI now seemed to hold sway there. His relative ‘successes’ with the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965, genuine and monumental as they were, had only served to demonstrate that a lot of the true causes of segregation, north and south, were less amenable to easy legislative removal, and were actually rooted in economics. As he turned his eye increasingly towards housing in particular and poverty in general, as well as what he called ‘the war question’, he largely lost his platform.

On 4th April 1967, at Riverside Church, New York, he gave what many consider to be his greatest and most eloquent speech ever, but few recall it. Distilling his Christian calling, his civil rights history and sense of present-day necessity, ‘the fierce urgency of now’ as he described it, he began by noting, “surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent …” He went on, after giving a detailed dissection of American history and policy in Asia, to declare that “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” Before continuing to list out what he called ‘a true revolution of values.’ None of this was designed to win him an appreciative audience in an increasingly materialistic America, and it didn’t. King’s approval ratings, according to polls, were firmly in the negative, and falling. The idea then, that someday soon, the whole nation would come together annually to honour him, was laughable.

Just occasionally though, even in the killing, something is stirred that brings out a legacy more powerful than could ever have been imagined, even more so than national commemorative days.

Of course, death changes things, particularly, premature, violent death. It shocks and inevitably provokes both sympathy, and reassessment. It has us wonder, whether we should’ve listened more carefully, when we had the chance. On this site a few days ago, speaking of the current situation in the Middle East, Graham Tomlin longed for leaders of old who were prepared to break the cycle of violence in the name of peace. My mind turned, inevitably, to Martin Luther King, saying that ‘We will meet your physical force with soul force’. Adding, ‘Do what you will, threaten our children, and we will still love you …we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, in winning the victory we will not only win our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience, that we will win you in the process.”

Such talk rarely, gets you national holidays, named in your honour. It more often gets you killed. Just occasionally though, even in the killing, something is stirred that brings out a legacy more powerful than could ever have been imagined, even more so than national commemorative days.

Legacy speaks of the power of passing on, in the words of Jay Z, turned into a popular pin badge, ‘Rosa sat, so Martin could walk, so Barak could run, so we might fly …’ These cascading consequences of commitment, truthfully sketched out here, and which could’ve gone back further, at least to Maisie Till’s courage in sharing the death of her son, which was said to have inspired Rosa Parks. And, certainly they could also be projected forward. To a multitude of actions, large and small, destined to add to that ongoing legacy of justice. These are, in many instances', the continually ‘rolling waters’ of prophetic imagination that King loved to picture.

In his mind, there is no doubt they find their ultimate source and inspiration in a day set aside to remember, not his though, but Easter Day, when resurrection hope forever shook the world. If, on the 3rd Monday of January each year, some thought might be given to that truth, he could be forgiven a quiet, knowing smile.