Queen Elizabeth and Christian Monarchy, Part II: Restoration of the Christian Ideal

In its essentials, the coronation rite is a thousand years old and similar rites were used in all of Western Christendom. The British are the only ones left that still use it. All the other European monarchies simply inaugurate their monarchs, they do not crown them.

From The Europeanconservative

By Peter Day-Milne

One reason why we forget that the ideal of monarchy expressed in the British coronation rite was once the ideal of all Europe. The ideal has survived no-where else.

In my previous article, I identified several connected ideals expressed within the British coronation rite, and have suggested that it was those same ideals that Princess Elizabeth pledged to uphold in her 21st-birthday speech. Together, they form a distinctive vision of Christian monarchy. According to this vision, the monarch has a holy status and an anointed power, yet this power is to be exercised under the form of grace-seeking Christian service, by the consent of the people. Furthermore, it is a limited power—the monarch has no authority to teach faith and morals, and remains subject to the Church’s rebuke if he strays from them. What made the Queen so loved, I claim, was her realisation of these ancient constitutional ideals.

Here a further point needs to be added. These were not just the ancient ideals of monarchy in Britain; they were the ideals of continental Christendom too. By an accident of the history of scholarship, this truth is too little appreciated. Serious English-language study of the British coronation was revived, after a long dormancy, in the years before the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, which was the first British coronation for 64 years. But the field of research was monopolised by Anglo-Catholics, especially those of the Henry Bradshaw Society, who were always keen to emphasise the “English genius” of the coronation, ignoring the fact that many of the British rite’s texts and ceremonies are identical to, or very similar to, continental ones of similar antiquity, not least those for the coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor.

There is another reason why we forget that the ideal of monarchy expressed in the British coronation rite was once the ideal of all Europe. The ideal has survived nowhere else. In France, for example, several circumstances encouraged an excessive deference to the king. Even in the 15th century, one prominent French commentator, George Chastellain, felt able to liken the coronation entrance procession of Louis XI to the birth of Christ. The French coronation was sometimes depicted as a sacrament, not a mere sacramental. Such attitudes slowly destabilised the mediaeval synthesis of Church and state, until French kings had the power to introduce such openly anti-Christian innovations as the maîtresse-en-titre. 

Meanwhile, in the Reformed countries, such as Scotland, the loss of any agreed-upon conception of the Church and her authority fostered the supposedly Bible-based absolutism of James VI. These ideas, together with economic and social changes, ultimately produced absolute monarchs like Charles I and Louis XIV. But absolutism was a distortion of Christendom’s ideal of monarchy: proponents of it retained the Christian idea of the monarch’s sacrality, but not the idea that his was to be a rule of quasi-spousal service by consent. Nor, ultimately, was absolutism practicable: absolutist sovereigns’ reigns everywhere made a republican, or at least a de-sacralizing, reaction almost inevitable. 

The history of Denmark clearly illustrates this process. Before the Reformation, the Danish coronation was similar in tone to England’s, and during it (as in England at the time) the king prostrated himself at the altar. In 1537, at the first Lutheran-run coronation, the prostrations were omitted: already the king’s servanthood and limitations were less clearly expressed now that he was commanding a blessing from his own Church. From 1660 the Danish monarchy became absolute and hereditary. As the Kongeloven (King’s law) of 1665 was to decree (trans. Ernst Ekman 1957):

The absolute hereditary king of Denmark and Norway shall hereafter be, and by all subjects be held and honoured as, the greatest and highest head on earth, above all humans laws and knowing no other head or judge above him, either or in spiritual or secular matters, except God alone.

From 1660 there was no coronation ceremony. Instead, each new king placed the Danish crown upon his own head as soon as he acceded to the throne. He then later went to church not to be crowned, but merely for his anointing. The symbolism was clear: the king no longer went to the Church, as to a separate power, to seek the confirmation of his rule; he merely condescended to be blessed by her. In reaction to this heady accumulation of anointed self-crowning power in the person of the king, the modern Danish constitution of 1849 removed all religious ceremonial from the rites of kingly accession. Absolutism had made the very notion of sacred power offensive, and so the Danish king was henceforth to be proclaimed in an entirely desacralized way.

Most Western countries are still living with the consequences of similar processes. In today’s West, hard power remains everywhere desacralized. Heads of state, such as Presidents  Biden and Macron, are bound by no sacral bonds, only by secular oaths. (In the United States, it is only by convention that the president places his hand on a Bible to take his oath. Indeed, the ceremony that makes him president was called an ‘inauguration’ by the Founding Fathers—a term borrowed from the installation of pagan Roman seers). Moreover, most such leaders cultivate an informal and egalitarian image: Biden, for example, presents himself as “Uncle Joe.” 

On the other hand, today’s secular Western leaders disclaim sacrality, nevertheless they continue to claim absolute authority over their citizens, and thus prove themselves to be the true heirs of Europe’s absolute monarchs. Indeed today, presidents such as Joe Biden have more power over the details of citizens’ lives than absolute monarchs ever did, as provided by electronic record keeping and huge bureaucracies. They also arrogate to themselves a spiritual power to teach and even to enforce new forms of faith and morals; it is, after all, increasingly difficult for anyone to survive in Western public sectors who will not embrace the ‘woke’ creed. Moreover, separate spiritual authorities no longer resist such arrogations. As if to symbolise this, Joe Biden has persecuted nuns who refuse to fund artificial contraception in their healthcare schemes, thus opening himself not merely to excommunication but even to anathema—and continues to receive communion in Washington. 

Yet the reaction to the Queen’s death shows that both desacralization and absolutism have ultimately failed to satisfy us. Few today want an absolute idolised ‘Sun King’ like Louis XIV—a monarch who claims to be God’s plenipotentiary representative within his realm, identical with the state, and above popular or ecclesial rebuke. But many people long for the mystery of monarchy alongside popular and moral accountability. Without realising it, they long for the mediaeval ideal, whereby the ruler is bound to the people by sacred bonds of Christian service, through the blessing of the independent spiritual authority. They long for the ancient Christian ideal that Queen Elizabeth re-enlivened and embodied. This is why they love her. Many commentators have said that the post-war consensus has ended with the Queen, as if she was the sole remaining sustainer of late modernism. But in truth the Queen always belonged to an earlier age, and that is what made her so distinctive. Even in death she led us beyond the fatuous modern period, as hundreds of thousands filed past her coffin in spontaneous pilgrimage, tacitly honouring the Spirit that worked in her.

What can this tell us about the place of monarchies in a renewed Europe? First of all, we can sound two notes of caution. It should be clear by now that there can be no abstract formula for creating a successful monarchical system. Britain’s system is grounded in traditional rights, conventions, and expectations that were formed over the centuries and which cannot be understood except as flowing from the mediaeval synthesis of Church and state, and indeed from grace. Second, continental conservatives must be careful not to regard Louis XIV-style absolutism as a genuine Catholic, Christian, or conservative model of governance—it was on the contrary a disastrous innovation that produced a destructive reaction.

There are, however, ways in which we can slowly promote Christendom’s ideal of monarchy within European republics. Firstly, and most importantly, we can support its central premise: that the civil ruler’s power is limited because it is purely temporal. Concretely, we can do this by supporting churches, religious communities, and legal charities that are resisting Western states’ usurpation of spiritual power, and their attempts to enforce public conformity to their doctrines. We can also support religious leaders when they have the courage to exercise spiritual authority over the rulers who belong to their faith: for example, Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco, who barred the virulently pro-abortion Nancy Pelosi from communion. Lastly, we ourselves can also hold our rulers to high moral standards, remembering, if we are Christian, that grace is the greatest asset a ruler can have.

The Queen was a product of a thousand years of European Christian heritage, tinted with a distinctively British colour. Continental conservatives will not be able to produce her like in their own countries by making inorganic restorations of monarchies according to any sweeping theories or general templates. But by doing the above we can slowly help restore the mediaeval balance of powers, and so help to move beyond the various forms of absolutism that have dominated Europe for five hundred years. Then, we might see some other holy sovereigns arise from a restored Europe.