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.

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Death & life

8 November 2023

4 min read

What they don’t tell you about when someone you love dies

Sharing her experience of her husband’s death, Yvonne Tulloch charts grief’s journey and shares signposts to help. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Yvonne Tulloch

Yvonne Tulloch is Founder and CEO of AtaLoss, helping bereaved people find support and wellbeing.

A group of grieving friends with their hands on each others backs.

The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash.

Turn on the news and death is all around us. Yet somehow, we think it will never happen to us. In one sense that’s good. We have a child-like innocence that protects us from the harsh realities of life.

A few years ago, as a church minister, I thought I knew about death. I’d been trained to take funerals and had supported families when a loved one had died. But it wasn’t until I was bereaved myself - when my husband died suddenly of a heart attack - that I realised how little even I knew.

Although busy, life had been good until then. My husband had a successful job, my own work was going well and our three children were flying the nest and finding their feet in university. Little did I know that in one, short phone call from a colleague, our lives would change forever.

Simon had been found dead in his hotel in Spain, and I was faced with telling each of the children and his mother, the worst news anyone could convey. Concerned about social media the news was embargoed until all family members knew, then I had to go to Spain to find, as well as identify the body, and bring him home. I had to work out our finances – no one knew what we had to live off – close accounts and put things in my name. I discovered our house wasn’t insured, nor our car for me to drive, that bank accounts were frozen, and that no organisation is geared up to help. Everyone insists on speaking to the account holder or seeing the actual death certificate before being willing to oblige. I had a funeral and thanksgiving to organise – two big occasions in just 3 weeks - and a mountain of admin to deal with, which would be difficult at any time.

Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

We’ve been a death-denying culture, I now realise, for many years. With death invariably happening in hospices or hospitals, we’ve pushed death away and pretended it doesn’t happen. Consequently, we’ve lost knowledge of bereavement and the art of support. We’ve tended only to think about preparing for funerals and then counselling if the person isn’t doing well. But what about all the other help that’s needed? Understanding and support is necessary in all manner of ways. Bereavement is one of the most stressful times of life, affecting everyone sooner or later and every part of their life. Grief is a journey of adjustment of who we are to a new existence – one that takes a long time and never comes at a convenient time.

At first most of us are shocked or emotionally numb; we run on adrenaline and we’re in survival mode. At the funeral others can think we’re doing well, and we can too. But it’s after, when the real sadness tends to hit, when the future must be faced and by then support has dropped away.

Many of us experience a roller coaster of changing reactions and responses which we don’t recognise as us or don’t associate with grief.

There are the physical reactions, for instance. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I was cold and I shook for months, I had a heavy ‘weight’ in my gut and was taken to hospital three times with suspected heart problems - our bodies are always in tune with our emotions.

And there are the psychological reactions. We can experience anxiety, anger and guilt; we can’t concentrate or remember, or function to do the most basic of tasks. I kept thinking I was seeing Simon and had a psychosis which made me feel separated from the world. We can think we’re going mad.

Grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing.

For me help came from two initiatives I was fortunate to find: Care for the Family’s Widowed Young Support and The Bereavement Journey course run by a church in London. In each of these I discovered others who had been bereaved, who understood what I was going through and who helped me to navigate the alien territory I found myself in. They also helped me to understand my spiritual responses which had been the biggest surprise. I had never doubted my Christian faith but with bereavement, that too was challenged, and God, who had always felt present, suddenly disappeared. I realize now that this is natural. Grieving is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning, and therefore some of whatever meaning we had before the person died, will deconstruct as we grieve.

Roll on a few years and I’m on the other side, running a charity helping people to understand that in our death-denying society bereavement impacts greatly, and that grief is a natural response to loss which we need to work through for our future wellbeing. Support is needed in various ways which we direct to through our signposting website ataloss.org. And I’m helping people myself through The Bereavement Journey course to find healing and hope, offering also spiritual support for the faith questioning I find most people have. Unfortunately, though, because we’ve neglected death, many haven’t been supported through a bereavement in the past and are carrying loss which is unresolved.