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.

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Culture

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Wildness

18 July 2025

5 min read

This is why we must go down to the sea

Stepping off the shore restores more than our sanity

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A sunset over an island casts golden light on the sea and a beach.

An Argyll beach.

Nick Jones.

It’s that time of year again. Much of Britain has been enjoying (or possibly enduring) a heatwave, the summer holidays are approaching, and our thoughts naturally turn toward an escape from our ordinary, often urban, landlocked, lives. And for many of us that escape will be to the sea. It’s true, we really do like to be beside the seaside. As a nation our souls seem to suffer from an annual experience like that described in John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever as we head coastwards muttering ‘I must go down to the sea again...’

We want to holiday by the sea – as the market for second homes in places like Cornwall will confirm. We also want to live permanently by the sea, or at the very least by the water. Some experts estimate that properties by the water have an average increased value of around 48 per cent. Water sells. It does so perhaps because proximity to it provides something of a mental escape from the overwhelming rigidity and linearity of our predominantly urban environments.

Iain MacGilchrist has argued that our modern lives suffer from the triumph of the left-brain hemisphere’s attention to the world. This is a focussed attention that is all about controlling and getting. It leads to the creation of a self-contained and ordered world with little attention to context. And so little attention to the natural, complex, fluid reality of creation. MacGilchrist goes on to correlate the rise in a variety of mental illnesses characterised by what he calls ‘right hemisphere deficits’ with industrialisation and the development of our culture of modernity.

In his book Blue Mind Wallace Nichols explores the evidence for the positive effect of water on the brain. He highlights how a proximity to water can heal, restore, give us a sense of connection and promote calm. He argues that water can shift our minds into what he calls ‘drift’, the kind of mental attention which generates calm. Being with, on, better still in water, is undoubtedly good for us. No wonder we are drawn to it.

Yet at the same time water, and particularly the sea, has been a source of terror. A no-go area ‘where there be dragons’, OK, lobsters for sure, probably sharks, and whales like Moby Dick. The sea remains one of the last places of mystery, an unfathomed, unfathomable place of endless dark water. We know more about the far reaches of the universe than we do about the truly deep ocean. Mythical creatures of the deep, whether Nessie, or one of various giant specimens hauled unsuspectingly from the ocean, continue to populate the diminishing space of our wonder and fear of the unknown.

So whilst elucidating the psychological benefits of water is certainly helpful, it’s all a bit…tame. Is it just another way of humans turning the wild and numinous into something we now think we understand? Something we can now control and apply in our lives for our own benefit and comfort? Have we demystified the sea? Reducing its mysteries to little more than a balm for our troubled modern minds? A lure for our attention and our debt in an overheated housing market?

In the Christian tradition the sea is a place of profound paradox. Creation begins with God’s Spirit hovering over the water. However, the Hebrew scriptures also present the sea as a place of God’s absence. The sea is the place of monsters and mystery, and death. It’s also the place of perhaps the most famous whale in all literature. The whale that swallows the hapless Jonah. Jonah’s story expresses the deep paradox of the sea as a place of death and yet also a place of divine encounter. It is in the depths of the sea, and the digestive system of the whale, that Jonah’s epiphany takes place and his journey starts anew.

Stories of Jesus also deal with this paradox of wildness and encounter in the chaos of the sea. In the story of the calming of the storm the wild threat of the sea is not rendered as simply something to be avoided. Jesus is not a fixer making all daily dangers obsolete. Rather the story says that it is precisely in such moments of wildness, fury and terror that his powerful presence can be encountered.

To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life.

It’s for these reasons perhaps that, John Good, a friend of mine, has formed a Christian community that’s based around encounter with the sea. Located as it is in an area almost surrounded by the sea, it started as a social enterprise helping people access the water who otherwise lacked the equipment or resource to do so. Pretty soon it became clear that this was transformational for people. Enabling families otherwise excluded from a life-giving resource to enjoy it as much as anyone else was powerful. One person referred to the experience by saying that on that day the sea had been ‘her saviour.’ Ocean Church began with a gathering on three large, tethered paddleboards some metres offshore. They now run retreats and pilgrimages on the sea, practice centering prayer (a form of Christian meditation or contemplative prayer) on the sea and continue to explore what it means to meet God on the water.

We yearn for the sea, and the water, for more than a balm for the mind. The sea remains that place, in our mechanised, technological world with its constant lure of control and mastery, where an immersion in dangerous mystery can still be experienced. To step off the shore and into the sea is to enter the possibility of the death and (paradoxically) the real possibility of deeper life. To be held buoyant by the sea and look to the horizon is to get it touch with our finitude in the context of the vastness of the seas. It is to engage with our utter dependency on the creation which we inhabit and to connect with the presence that holds that creation together.

To step into the sea is even therefore a step of faith. A step in the direction of our own vulnerability. A brave step away from the world in which our technology, our algorithms, our machines and our skyscrapers dupe us into a faith in our own control, our own supremacy. A step into the depths. ‘Deep calls to deep’ says the psalmist as ‘all your waves and breakers have swept over me.’ As many of us step into the sea this summer it may certainly be a step toward a restored sanity, but it might also be a step toward a restored soul.

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