Duty and Service

An Essay on the Monarchy Today

by

The Rev’d Fr. Michael Shier, SSC

At her Golden Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II ruffled a few feathers by inviting the Hells Angels to lead her Procession. She may be head of a downwardly mobile society, but she doesn’t forget first principles. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony, use ceremony to show that in our different ways we all belong to the whole.’ Thus she, who is not above the law, shows that no one is outside the law. No one is an outlaw. Tinker, Tailor, Monarch, Biker, we all differ but we only differ in degree.

My parishioners in East London used to say, “We do not want to be Middle Class, we are different, we are Working Class and proud of it! And yet, with no sense of contradiction, they hung huge Union Jacks from their blocks of flats during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. My Canadian socialist friends were appalled! They had flown the Atlantic to express righteous indignation at the class war. But the class war was nowhere to be seen. The fact is that the sense of belonging to the whole, for which the Monarch stands, runs right through society. Indeed it is because what she stands for matters so much that she has to be so careful not to put a foot wrong.

Things like the Church and the Monarchy, and even Governments, only go on existing if they really stand for something. Psychologists and politicians and advertising men know this perfectly well. Even commercial sales depend not simply on what a product can do, but also what it can be made to stand for.

The Monarch stands for the whole. Her motto is “Dieu et mon Droit’. For years I thought this meant “God and my Right”. until Dr. Trueman Dicken pointed out to me that it is not modern but medieval French. “Droit” means “duty”. “Dieu et mon Droit” he said means “God and my Duty.” It is all about service.

At last it all made sense. Everyone serves the whole, even the Monarch, who serves both the people and God. “Ruling is a service, and those who serve God rule - a basic concept of Christendom - beautifully summed up in the Latin original of the second collect for the day at mattins, which also happens to be the motto of St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire - Cui servire, regnare est: - Whom to serve is to rule. Cranmer’s lovely, but misleading, translation, ‘whose service is perfect freedom’ was surely influenced by Luther’s supposition that ruling and service are mutually exclusive and even incompatible - a supposition that has bedevilled Protestantism ever since.

Luther observed that the Papacy of his day was neither serving nor ruling properly. Its rule could not be called a service. He therefore distinguished (without intending to separate) the institutional church from the invisible church. There can’t be any human ruler of the spiritual church since it is invisible, and you can’t rule what you can’t see. Its only ruler is Christ in heaven. The temporal, institutional church can be ruled, since it is a temporal thing; but it must be ruled by the temporal power, the ‘powers that be’. If you take this line, it follows there can be no such thing as a spiritual jurisdiction which can be claimed by the Pope or the clergy. The enormous error of the Papacy, said Luther, is that it has tried to conform itself to the wrong form of Christ: to Christ the ruler in heaven, instead of to Christ on earth in the form of a servant. It has turned Christianity upside down, and it is in this sense that the pope is AntiChrist!

Well, if this is true - if ruling and serving are incompatible, if the church can only serve and not rule, if the Pope cannot rule because he is the servant of the servants of God, then you surrender human society entirely to power - that is to the realm of unredeemed human nature! Luther’s logic led straight to the benevolent despot, and eventually to the acceptance by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, despite the protests of Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer, of Nazi totalitarianism.

Exit the ancient liberties of the clergy which in the Middle Ages at least left the church with enough spiritual authority to stand up to the secular arm.

And enter the compliant Cranmer who wrote to Edward VI: “You are the supreme ruler on earth of this English and Irish church, under whom, as under Moses, a place may be left in which I have some part of the Spirit and a great care and administration of many committed to me.” This exaggeration of Royal Supremacy led finally to the clipping of its wings in the Great Rebellion. Nevertheless, the Monarchy has survived it all to continue to set forth for us the basic Christian concept of ruling and serving.

I am among you as one that serveth, said the Lord. The compatibility of rule and service is clearly there in the Gospels. And it is clearly there in St. Dunstan’s order of Coronation, where the King promises three things. (1) protection and peace to the Church, (2) the repression of rapacity and all iniquity, and (3) the tempering of justice with mercy ‘in order that to me and you a clement and merciful God may vouchsafe His pardon.’ The first thing about a monarch is that he has duties towards his people. So much so that without this oath and promise it was right for the Church to refuse to make him king.

No oath, no consecration. No consecration, no king. And at the consecration itself, the prayer that the king be given the Spirit of wisdom and wise government. The collect for the Queen in the Communion service was traditionally used as one of the consecratory prayers before the anointing.....’that she, knowing whose minister she is.....and that we.....knowing whose authority she hath.’ If we are subjects, she is a subject too. The Monarch is not above the law. This surely is why the institution persists. We all belong to the clearly defined whole. King and people are reminded that power is subject to law and that ‘the brightest ornaments of sovereignty, in whose hands soever it may lie, are piety, courage, honour, justice, mercy and peace.’

By these standards Queen Elizabeth II positively shines. She stands for what has always been true. Henry VIII looks to be the rogue. And yet his kingdom needed to be secured and the Church needed reform. But the Council of Trent and reform from the centre were not to come till 1546. Henry could not wait. He secured the monarchy be reforming the church. Some of it was clumsy and cynical. Henry VIII had behind him the example of Wolsey and all the power of the Righteous prince and Father of his people. And he used it! In fact, it was a massive achievement in a tumultuous period and a massive achievement in which much was gained and much lost.

How then does our own Sovereign stand with the Church? She is a Christian sovereign. She is a communicant. She is a layman within the church, not a secular person outside the church. And within the church she is the supreme governor of the church.

Supreme Governor! If the title itself seems an exaggeration you have to remember it was a response to the papacy itself to universal sovereignty. The show must go on. There was no question at the Reformation of abolishing the substance of papal jurisdiction. There was no question of devising a new scheme of government for a new church! The whole substance of papal jurisdiction was transformed bodily to the king-in-council. The work still had to be done. Supreme governor or supreme head has more rationale than we sometimes think. Healthily modified by the fact that the monarch has always had a semi-priestly aura. Yes, the monarch was anointed. And a priest is anointed. But the monarch’s anointing is only semi-priestly because, as is well known, King Edgar, Richard Coeur de Lion and Henry II were anointed twice. Captivity or national disaster showed Royal anointing to be less than indelible.

But what does semi-priestly mean in practice? It referred to the king’s mediating function between clergy and people. Henry VIII, for instance, while refusing to be ‘told’ anything, nevertheless accorded some precedence to Convocation. Convocation had a large hand in the ‘Ten Articles’ whose original title was ‘Articles about Religion set out by the Convocation, and published by the King’s authority.’ And ‘The Institution of a Christian Man’ was the work of a commission appointed by the King consisting of all the Bishops, eight Archdeacons and seventeen other Doctors of divinity. The Institution, in particular, is an eirenic document with the true metal ring of the Book of Common Prayer, free from that vagueness and compromise which has beset us ever since!

The monarch as mediator. The Queen in Parliament as mediator. Does this still hold? Yes, I think it does. Our Queen may not define doctrine, but she does stand for fairness. Quietly, she serves by ruling, and rules by serving. In 1993 my Member of Parliament sent me a document printed by Her majesty’s stationary office, ordered to be printed by both the House of Lord’s and the House of Commons, in which are set out the financial provisions for those priests whose conscience made it necessary to resign over the uncatholic ordination of women to the priesthood, which thereby enabled me to respond to Bishop Crawley’s distress signal asking me to be the rector in Vancouver.

The fact is that the Queen in Parliament, not being above the law, presides over a system that is fair. What she stands for matters. She has made an honest woman of the Church of England and hopefully can continue to do so. Would that she could do the same for the Anglican Church of Canada! But this is just the point. Our effectiveness lies as much in what we stand for as in what we do. And when you are up against the wall and can do nothing, what you stand for is what really matters. Either way, our Sovereign represents us all. Like her mother - duty First!