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.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

Work

4 February 2025

4 min read

Severance: the ins and outs of seeking oblivion

We can't contain trauma to just one sphere of our lives.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

In a retro-future styled office, workers stand or sit around a pod of desks.

Apple TV.

How far would you go to stop yourself doing late-night emails? Or what would you be willing to do to escape those painful memories? Severance, returning for its second season on AppleTV+, explores an extreme solution to both.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon who have had their memories severed: when outside of work they do not remember what they do at work and when at work they do not know anything about their lives outside. The work-self, referred to as an 'innie', enters the elevator at 5pm and immediately finds themselves back in the elevator at 9am the next day. They feel rested without any memory of the rest. Their "outie" blinks at 9am and then it is 5pm.

Adam Scott's protagonist, Mark, joined Lumon Industries as a severed employee working in "Macrodata Refinement" (MDR) as a result of losing his wife. In an episode early in the second season, one character recounts Mark telling them that he applied for the role because it felt like he was "choking on her ghost." Being severed offers Mark hours each working day where a version of him can work oblivious to this grief.

Of course, Mark's employer is up to something sinister, though exactly what remains unclear even to the innies. Lumon is at times terrifying, at times goofy and always unsettling. Innies are mistreated but cannot communicate with their outie beyond what Lumon allows. Even in these conditions, the small MDR team, each with no more than a couple of years' worth of memories, find purpose in their relationships with one another and in seeking to understand their bosses' designs.

Severance has attracted a lot of attention and reflection. Writing for the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs concludes that the show points us to our impossible longing for a boundaried life. The Northeastern University academic Tomas Elliot proposes that Severance can be read as an inversion of The Matrix: employees knowingly placing themselves in a state of naivety. Jacobs and Elliot both read the show as pointing to the paradoxical nature of modern work as both the cause of discontentment and the place many look to for a sense of purpose and fulfilment.

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other.

At the heart of many of the questions that Severance raises is the relationship between work and identity. Most of us live with a sense that who we are is found in our relationships. Work means something because it is one of the places we are most powerfully shaped by and shape relationships with colleagues, competitors, consumers and everyone else. Work becomes destructive when it cultivates destructive relationships in the workplace or when it displaces other forms of community and sources of identity.

The process of severance protects outies from the formative power of workplace relationships: their strains and their joys. No doubt we could each imagine benefits to this. However, it leaves Mark's outie paralysed by grief because he has denied himself a key source of relationships through which he could begin to heal, integrating that grief into a new sense of self.

Just as Mark's innie is protected by the outie's grief, the outie is protected from discovering who he could be without his wife. As the series progresses, it becomes less clear whether Mark's motivation is the fear of grief's crushing burden or the fear that one day the burden may ease.

In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa writes:

Time and again, human beings come to discover that they can become "different people" in different contexts. And under the highly dynamic conditions of late modernity, the task of finding out who we really are collides… with repeatedly having to "reinvent" and creatively redefine ourselves. That said reinvention also should be "completely authentic" is surely one of the more pointed paradoxes of the present age.

As Rosa notes, the dynamism of contemporary market forces produces a dynamism in our sense of identity, which can be experienced as instability. One response to this instability—and all the other humiliations and challenges of living at this time—is to look for ways of separating "work" and "life", to carve out a space where I can be free from constant performance and reinvention. And yet, as Severance shows us, whatever part of ourselves we designate as "life" or "outie", it cannot be free from pain and sometimes we will escape to, rather than from, "work".

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other. Some things must be resisted and some must simply be lived with. Both can only be done together. Ultimately, both can only be done if we are held in and defined by a relationship secure through any failure or loss. Seeking such a relationship is a life's work, for both innies and outies.

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