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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26 May 2025

4 min read

Why we should mourn the death of the semi-colon

In our busy, frenetic lives, we need that small pause more than ever.

Paul Bradbury

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

A woman stands across a busy roads, looking up from her phone in a sad way.

Su San Lee on Unsplash.

In the morning news; a headline about the decline of a species. Thankfully not a rare rhino or butterfly this time. It’s a punctuation mark. The semi-colon is an increasingly endangered creature. According to recent research it has declined in use by 50 per cent in the past two decades. This on top of a 70 per cent slide in usage between 1800 and 2000. Further research suggests that 67 per cent of students rarely use it and over 50 per cent wouldn’t know how to anyway.

I’m kind of indifferent on the merits or otherwise of the semi-colon. But I at least appreciate the option. So, its value feels worth defending. Who knows what unintended consequences in the ecology of language might occur if we lost it all together?

The semi-colon was invented in the 15th century by a scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder (whose name might have benefited from a semicolon itself). A hybrid between a comma and a colon, the semi-colon invites a pause; it’s a moment to breathe. And it opens enough space to reflect on what might be being said between what went before and what comes after. It signals a kind of meaning in the gap. It creates a hint of resonance beyond the plain meaning of the words of a sentence.

Despite its enthusiastic use by the likes of no less than Jane Austen and Charles Dickens it has certainly come in for some stick over the years. Kurt Vonnegut famously said of semi-colons ‘all they do is show you’ve been to college.’ Who knew two marks on a page could signal such elitism? The semi-colon says, ‘you're trying too hard’. Or it might just say, ‘why did you do that?’, since so many people fail to understand what it represents. Novelist John Irvine reckoned readers ‘think the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma’.

So what is killing off the semi-colon? Well, if the statistics above are to be believed it could be as simple as a decreasing understanding on how to use it. Though of course there are feedback loops here. We learn grammar and punctuation as much by reading as by being taught. Others point the finger at the breathless world of social media. As more and more of our communication is constrained by space and time, the semi-colon’s quiet request for a pause for consideration is being largely ignored.

We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments .

If this is the case then the semi-colon is another species within a kind of mass extinction which is the result of the great acceleration of our age, alongside the coffee break, lunch break, walk round the block and long stare out of the window. These are simply things that we don’t have time for anymore; we wonder if they had any value in the first place. The semi-colon is largely being replaced by the dash. Which is pretty ironic when you think about it.

Perhaps concern over the loss of this little mark is in an awareness that it’s a kind of canary in the gold mine of our culture of acceleration. The loss of the semi-colon is a sign of the loss of something far more significant: the rhythms and cadences of our lives that afford pause, reflection; that open up the kind of spaces where creativity; meaning; imagination; spirituality happen.

The semi-colon reminds me, strangely, of the Hebrew psalms. The monastic tradition includes regular communal singing (or saying) of the psalms. Typically, these poems, which formed such a key part of Hebrew worship, work on the basis of what is known as parallelism. Essentially each thought in a psalm is composed as a sentence in two lines. The two halves of these sentences are parallel, in the sense that they both make statements about the same thing. Sometimes these statements say the same thing differently. Sometimes one half of the sentence builds on another. There are endless creative ways in which the psalmists use this simple device.

When psalms are used in prayer or worship parallelism is often observed by introducing a pause at the end of the first half of the sentence. It's an odd tradition if you are not used to it. An established monastic community naturally feels the length of pause together. Visitors to a service in a monastery often end up coming in early.

Yet, with time you begin to realise these pauses are a wonderful thing. The pauses create a rhythm and time signature that invites reflection. The pause says ‘take your time, there’s a lot of meaning here in all these similes and metaphors, what might they mean to you?’ Perhaps even ‘what, in this moment to breathe, might God be saying to you?’

There’s a feeling for so many of us that life is starting to feel a bit like the final chapter of James Joyces’ Ulysses: devoid of punctuation. We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments. And we need to learn how to use them. We need practices that make space for the undervalued attributes of reflection, daydreaming, prayer. In that sense saying the psalms may be a practice worth giving time to.

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