When Henry VIII decided to solve his dynastic succession problem by sacking the Pope, he had to put aside the somewhat inconvenient fact that his people had been Catholic for at least a thousand years; 1,300 if you go back to St Alban.
The price paid for his quest for a legitimate male heir was the destruction of the Catholic Church in this land – with the Crown appropriating about £500 million worth of land and goods in the nationalisation or dissolution of the monasteries – and its replacement with a more confusing coalition of spiritualities that became Anglicanism.
Henry would not and could not have known about the devastating religious conflict and centuries of Catholic persecution his actions would unleash. Perhaps amongst the most distinctive elements of what he bequeathed was the ongoing responsibility down the generations of replacing the Pope as Supreme Governor of the state Church for, if not ad infinitum, then at least 15 generations. Henry VIII is Prince William’s great uncle 14 times removed.
Charles Hardman, a highly respected journalist and author, has been writing about the British monarchy and commentating for the BBC with what has been described as unparalleled access. A recent review in a national broadsheet of Hardman’s just published biography of King Charles III assessed the author’s capabilities as a Royal commentator in the following terms: “For a quarter of a century, he has earned the respect of the Royal family and their household by telling the truth, exercising discretion, avoiding sensationalism and acquiring a deep understanding of the institution and its history.”
So when Hardman chooses to reveal intimacies it is because they are likely to have some serious significance in the way the Royal Family relates to the country. His recent book made public the hesitations and anxieties that Prince William has about inheriting not so much the burden of Kingship – he is prepared for that – but the responsibility of being “Defender of a Faith”: a faith that he appears to hold far less strongly than his father, if at all. The implications of this reach 8.0 on the constitutional Richter scale.
It is to Prince William’s credit that his conscience has been pricked and he is engaging with the issue. But we don’t know exactly how worried William is. If he doesn’t know it already, someone (probably in a suit) will quietly sidle up to him and tell him that it’s a non-negotiable part of the whole crown package. Why non-negotiable? Because, despite the fact that people like to debate the disestablishment of the Church of England and the principle of a State church, it would take an army of lawyers ten years to go back through the spaghetti junction of 500 years of legislation to unpick the status of church and monarchy where they lie like legalistic Siamese twins at the heart of Protestant constitutional history.
What would be simpler and more manageable would be a referendum on becoming a republic and then abolishing the monarchy, and making the C of E independent. But that clearly is not something that any of the Windsor’s could want or countenance.
At one level William may not have grasped that there is a difference between what he, as a private personal individual, believes and the public role that he adopts as defined by the constitution. If he were a committed atheist then, yes, the tension between his private values and his public persona might be stretched beyond breaking point. But if he were to be only cautiously agnostic, the fact that the monarch has no executive responsibility but only ceremonial choreography might allow him to bridge the gap.
But what if it didn’t and he couldn’t bridge that gap? Wouldn’t he then be faced with the prospect of having to step aside as the heir to the throne and allowing the next in line to play the role that he felt had asked too much of his personal integrity? Would he be willing to sacrifice his royal identity for his conscience? Only he knows the answers to those questions.
Paradoxically, the weakness of the C of E being a non-confessional church with low membership hurdles becomes a strength for religious devotion and identity in general, which might make matters easier for the way in which William judges what his integrity demands of his kingly role as “Defender of the Faith”.
At her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Queen Elizabeth II expressed this idea very well: “The concept of our Established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”
Defender of the Protestant faith then becomes, by contextual extension, defender of the principle of faith, which is of course, the view that William’s father, the King, takes. And yet, a hard-headed examination of this principle shows some awkward gaps in the practice, especially when society and culture are changing so rapidly. The fact that the monarchy’s responsibilities are largely cosmetic and ceremonial will tend to only work well when the cultural weather is balmy; less well if storm clouds gather.
Christians are becoming persona non grata in their own country. Jews are feeling increasingly unsafe in a rapidly changing context where the increasing numbers and militancy of Muslims makes sharing the common public square a much more uncomfortable exercise. Progressive secularism at one end, and an ever more muscular Islam at the other, are placing both Jews and Christians under pressure.
If the role of the King as Supreme Governor of the State church and “Defender of the Faith” is to be an effective guarantor of the freedom of religious identity and expression for Christians and Jews, it is less clear how that does or would work in modern Britain. What has the King done for the Batley school teacher driven into hiding two years ago after showing pupils in his RE lesson a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, or for Catholics arrested for standing on the pavement not far enough away from an abortion centre and “thought crime” on suspicion of praying?
It was certainly the case that in the culture that Elizabeth II presided over as monarch that the existence of the established Church helped support the normality of religion and the hospitality around the way in which it was exercised in a society with pluriform values. But that is all changing rapidly.
Whatever difficulties the Catholic Church faces in the relationship between its 1.4 billion members and the Pope, the office of the papacy is exponentially stronger and more robust that any flaws or idiosyncrasies that the holder of the office at the time might have. That is partly because the symbolism and the executive power of the office are seamlessly united.
The role, however, of Supreme Governor of the Protestant Church bequeathed to his relatives and descendants by Henry VIII – a role that is high on symbolism but since the 1688 “Glorious Revolution” empty of executive responsibility – cannot easily ride out the twin pressures of an agnostic king and a the militant competition of wokery and Islam. And a vacillating philosophically agnostic monarch lacking conviction or ideological muscle may help create a vacuum at the centre of national life.
It may be that what Charles Hardman has picked up in William’s hesitation is not the dynamic of a personal discomfort about the gap between image and reality, rather a far more astute instinct about the danger of a vacuum of faith at the centre of the British State. But the present gentle and civilised monarchical balancing act that underpins the land’s different cultures may find that it lacks sufficient coherence if required to contain the stresses produced by more aggressive ideologies.
As such, the struggle for the soul of the country and the character of the public square may only have just begun. William should should eye his imminent inheritance with a sane and well-reasoned trepidation.
Photo: The Royal Standard of the United Kingdom alongside the Union Jack flag flying outside Buckingham Palace, London. (Photo credit: rarrarorro; iStock by Getty Images.)
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