Explainer

Culture

Royalty

26 April 2023

4 min read

Why we make kings

As the new King's coronation approaches, Ian Bradley explores the deep roots of kingship as an answer to anarchy and disorder.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A medieval illustration of King David being anointed by Samuel

Samuel anoints David king. An early 14th century illumination from the Vaux Psalter.

Lambeth Palace Library.

At the most solemn moment of King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May, the Westminster Abbey choir will sing Handel’s thrilling setting of words from the first chapter of the first Book of Kings:

Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king.

It provides a reminder that the anointing of the monarch with holy oil is carried out in direct imitation of a practice described in the Bible in connection with the inauguration of the kings of ancient Israel.

This is not the only link which the coronation will make with stories found in the Bible. Legend has it that the Stone of Destiny, on which Charles will be seated when he is crowned, started life as the pillow on which Jacob slept when he had a dream of the ladder leading up to heaven as described in Genesis. Jacob set the stone up as a pillar to commemorate the place where God had talked to him. Later stories identify it as the pillar beside which Abimelech was crowned king of Israel and King Josiah made his covenant with the Lord to keep his commandments and statutes.

The theme of monarchy looms large in the collection of books making up the Hebrew Bible which tells of God’s dealing with the chosen people of Israel and forms the Christian Old Testament. The word ‘king’ occurs 565 times and ‘kingdom’ 163 times. Six of the so-called historical books have the monarchy as their main subject matter, including the aptly named first and second books of Kings. The life of one particular king, David, occupies more space than that of any other figure, including the great patriarchs, Abraham and Moses.

By popular request

Kingship is presented in the early books of the Old Testament as both the popularly requested and the divinely appointed answer to the anarchy and disorder prevailing under the judges who ruled the people of Israel for the first two hundred and fifty years or so after their arrival in the promised land of Canaan around 1250 BCE. The Book of Judges emphasizes the corruption and lawlessness under this form of government, noting: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: everyone did what was right in his eyes.’

The inauguration of the Israelite monarchy, which took place around 1020 BCE, is described in the Book of Samuel. A crucial role is played by Samuel, the last of the great judges who becomes the first king-maker and presides over the coronations of both Saul and David, the first two Israelite kings. Samuel is portrayed as prophet, seer and intermediary between Yahweh/God and the people, to whom the elders of Israel come asking for ‘a king to govern us like all the nations’. Samuel puts this request to Yahweh who is initially reluctant to accede to it and tells him to spell out to the people the dangers of kingship in terms of the accretion of private wealth and military might. These warnings are ignored, however, and the people continue to insist that they must have a king ‘to govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’. When Samuel reports this to God, he is told, ‘Hearken to their voice and make them a king’.

On king making

If there is a certain initial unease in God’s mind about the desirability of kingship, the institution is subsequently given divine blessing, with the king been seen as God’s chosen one – Messiah in Hebrew, or Christos in Greek. There is a sense of partnership between Yahweh and the chosen people of Israel in the making of kings. The emphasis is on a three way covenant between God, king and people. This concept of covenant is one of the most distinctive and central features of Israelite kingship, as is the idea that the monarch mediates and represents divine rule and stands for justice, fairness and truth.

During and after the long period of exile that followed the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of Israel in 597 BCE, Jews increasingly pinned their hopes on the future coming of a new Messiah, a king from the house of David, raised up by God to deliver Jerusalem from where he would reign, restoring and re-uniting Israel and bringing about a new world order of justice and righteousness, as looked forward to and promised in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets.

The theme of kingship, so fully explored in the Old Testament, continues to figure prominently in the New Testament, although its central focus is on the kingdom of God, inaugurated and proclaimed by Jesus, with its dethroning of the rich and powerful and exaltation of the humble and meek. All four of the Gospel writers use royal titles and monarchical allusions in their descriptions of Jesus. He is identified as the anointed king, the Messiah or Christos, leading his followers to be known as Christians. From his birth in Bethlehem in the house and family of King David, and his baptism where he is identified by God as his beloved Son, to his trial and crucifixion for being ‘King of the Jews’, the royal theme runs as a clear thread through his life and death.

Jesus himself redefines the concept of kingship. This is signalled most dramatically by his choice of a donkey on which to make his entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. He deliberately opts for an animal associated with humility, humiliation even, rather than a proud charger or stallion more fitting for a king on a triumphal progress. In washing his disciples’ feet on the first Maundy Thursday, he further shows that he is, in Graham Kendrick’s memorable words The Servant King displaying meekness as well as majesty. When Pontius Pilate repeatedly asks him whether he is indeed the King of the Jews, he gives the cryptic answer 'You have said so'. Jesus never repudiates the idea of kingship but gives it a wholly new meaning of humble servanthood which has been the inspiration for Christian monarchy ever since.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Romance

8 September 2025

5 min read

The summer we turned romantic

Belly, the other Taylor, and the defiant desire to get married

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

The cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty pose on a wedding set.

Netflix.

A new communal rhythm has been unearthed over the hazy summer months, a fresh ritual has made its home among us. Every Wednesday, twenty-five million people are tuning into Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. This show, an adaptation of Jenny Han’s novel of the same name, tells the story of ‘Belly’ – a young-ish girl who spends her summers staying with family friends at their beach house in the fictional yet notably Hamptons-esque town of Cousins Beach.

It has all the ingredients of a wistful watch:

A summer that we can vicariously bask in – tick.

An absurdly chic beach house – tick.

Two love interests who happen to be brothers and also happen to be tremendously easy on the eye – tick and tick.

It’s time for me to lay my cards on the table, if it wasn’t already obvious, I am one of those 25 million people tuning in.

Every darn Wednesday.

I find the pull that this (OK, I’m going to say it… don’t hate me…) undeniably silly show has on us fascinating. I’m acutely aware that it’s been crafted to hit all the right notes, it is a masterclass in escapism. The show’s writers’ room probably had a tick-list of binge-ability traits plastered on the wall, the writers adhering to each one thoroughly. But there’s also something about our insatiable appetite for romance that shouldn’t be dismissed with an eyeroll. We are romantically-inclined beings, to a notable degree. And, what’s more, we feast on the presumption that romantic love is something that happens to us - some kind of cosmic inevitability, sitting just beyond our control, making fools of our will.

In his essay, ‘Love and Need’, Thomas Merton wrote ‘the expression ‘to fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself – a mixture of fear, awe, fascination and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable yet not fully reliable’. While C.S. Lewis similarly speaks of its ‘strength, sweetness, terror and high port.’

Thus, our obsession with romantic love takes a hammer to one of our most ingrained lies: that we want, above all else, to be in control. To be the most powerful force in any room. Immovable. Unshakable. It’s hard to keep up the façade that we want to be steady on our feet when we’re endlessly nurturing the idea of being swept off them.

I could, as I have done before, suggest that this is an inherently spiritual matter. It’s a symptom of not believing in God, but craving him nonetheless.

But, alas, my attention has wandered elsewhere.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is currently running through its third series – so, we’re familiar with the love-triangle at this point, the internet has already decided which brother they’re routing for, we’re chomping down our third helping of Belly’s story. And so, what is the extra ingredient added to this third and final series? What’s keeping us on our toes? What’s ensuring that the stakes stay high enough to captivate 25 million of us? Well, interestingly, it’s the prospect of marriage.

Belly getting engaged to one of the brothers truly upped the ante. At the tender age of 21, the show’s supporting characters are less than elated at Belly’s engagement, with whole episodes dedicated to her mother’s desperate - can’t you just live together?! – pleas. Marriage is too huge. Too weighty. Too significant. Nevertheless, Belly and her fiancé defiantly plan a wedding, determined to dedicate themselves to each other in the most consequential way they know how.

And that interests me. the role that marriage still plays in our collective imagination interests me.

This is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

All of the data suggests that we are falling rapidly out of love with the very concept of marriage. In 2022, the UK’s Office for National Statistics told us that – for the first time ever – less than 50 per cent of people in the UK (above the age of 16) were married. And, of course, the minority who are married famously have a fifty-fifty percent chance of staying that way. You could make a robust argument that our society is pretty disenchanted with the whole institution.

And yet, we seem to keep suspending that disenchantment. The Summer I Turned Pretty’s popularity is exhibit A. Exhibit B is Taylor Swift’s obscenely newsworthy engagement announcement. This August, she posted a collection of photos of her and her new fiancé, Travis Kelce, quaintly captioned ‘your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married’. Her words alluding to her songwriting and Kelce’s football career. Journalist, Helen Lewis, notes the ‘defiant conventionality’ of it all. A defiant conventionality that is also woven into Belly’s rebellion – her audacity to rebel against her parents’ wishes and… get married.

It's all just left me wondering, as old-fashioned as it sounds – is there anything more romantic than marriage? Is it ever fully dis-enchant-able? I guess I’m just struck by how it’s still something we do, you know? We are meaning-making creatures, and this is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

We bind ourselves to someone else; perhaps defying our survival instincts in the process (it’s certainly the case that unmarried women live longer). It’s costly, it’s hard, it has a certain prodigality about it. Henna Cundill thoughtfully studies marriage as a ‘much slower kind of martyrdom, a decision made not once but daily, in a society where such decisions are frequently undone’. We lay our lives down for something that is bigger than us. It’s a weird human idea, if you think about it. So odd, in fact, that I’m confident in my inkling that it isn’t a human idea at all. It’s dripping with sacrality.

This really has been the summer we turned romantic. Well, 25 million of us, at least.

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