We three kings…

I want to talk today about three kings. I know for the supermarkets it’s been that time of year for a couple of months now,  but we’re not going to be  jumping the seasonal gun and pondering the not–actually–three not–actually–kings gold, frankincense and  myrrh lot. Different royalty.

Today, as the church year comes to an end, Christians around the world celebrate the feast of Christ the King.  Not that Christians invented kings. As an institution monarchy long predates Christianity; indeed long before the birth of Jesus, from Assyria to Babylon, from China to Egypt, from Persia to Rome, Kings and Emperors ruled the roost and ruled the world. God’s chosen people Israel, for so long stubbornly theocratic,  eventually decided they had to get in on the act from Saul the first to Herod the last. Kings were everywhere; any other way was unthinkable. And not just then but now. In one form or another Kingship is still the dominant mode of government in the world; even in democracies there’s usually one person sat at the top of the power pile; even if they’re not singing ‘I’m the king of the castle’ out loud, they’re probably thinking it. As long as anyone can remember and everywhere you care to look the world has bent the knee before a throne.

Has the coming of Christ the King changed any of that? When Christianity went from a small scared sect in a backwater of the world to the official religion of the Empire; when it became, as it still is,  the dominant religion around the world, were the crowned heads who now gathered under the banner of the cross any different to those who came before? What we could ask might Christian kingship be?

To help us in our quest,  we’re going to consider the lives of some real world kings and, to quote an old queen, and Kings of England too. Now, I know monarchy can be a divisive issue in this country, though rarely, it has to be said in the Church of England. Even if you don’t like to find Anglican origins in the sordid shenanigans of Henry VIII’s marital mayhem, you will still have to admit that when Augustine of Canterbury reluctantly set foot on these shores to bring the barbarians at the edge of the world the benefits of the true religion, he headed straight to the court of the Kentish king. The crown and the mitre have long been inextricably bound together in England. Still, even if we weren’t Anglicans  the most recent of the kings we’re going to be visiting today died just under four hundred years ago, so nobody needs be offended: this is ancient history.

That said, in case you are worried– as I would be if I didn’t know the Rector and was sat where you are– that this might turn into a a tubthumping by-jingo patriotism Britannia rules the waves fanfare, fear not. All three of our crowned heads this morning were– spoiler alert– according to the flag-waving world, complete and utter failures. 

So let’s start our saga over the estuary from Canterbury and  head to the sleepy Suffolk city of Bury, the last resting place of the bones of Edmund King of East Anglia. Edmund reigned for about fourteen years before his death on the 20th November 869. We know almost nothing about him or his reign: a few coins survive bearing his name minted during his time at the top; otherwise, we know zilch. Not, you would have thought the most promising of subjects for a nose around Christian kingship. Fortuitously,  it’s not Edmund’s life as a Christian monarch that interests us but his death. 

Edmund’s reign as far as we can tell, was, like many a king of that time, mostly spent fighting Vikings. The devastation the Norse invaders caused to Edmund’s kingdom is the principle reason we know so little about him. After putting up what seems to have been a pretty long fight, Edmund was captured by Viking raiders, and when he refused to renounce his Christianity was put to death: either by being spreadeagled or shot full of arrows depending how gruesome you like your tales. When Edmund’s followers came to recover his body – presumably when the Danes had got bored playing with it and gone off to harass someone else– they discovered the Vikings had finished their games by beheading the king and throwing his crowned cranium into the bushes, leaving the royal remains incomplete. Despite searching, the king’s followers could not find Edmund’s head. 

Happily the head had already been found— by a wolf according to the legend—  and rather than eat it, a few days later the lucky lupine reunited it with the body, whence Edmund miraculously became whole again. Still dead, but whole. Really. 

Eventually Edmund’s bones were laid to rest in the abbey church of the town that is now Bury St Edmunds; depending on which history you read they were either stolen by the French King Louis VIII in 1217 and taken to Toulouse, or they destroyed in 1539 at the behest of the English King we’ve already fleetingly met, old Henry the eighth.

The Vikings and the wolf are the show stealers there: Edmund is not exactly the star turn in the ‘how to be a good king’ pageant. As a King, Edmund was a failure: he lost his kingdom and his life. As a Christian, he is a saint: he suffered death rather than renounce his faith.  Edmund was one of the two patron saints of England until the period of the Hundred Years War when England decided that a more militarily successful patron was needed and Greek soldier George, became the nation’s new heavenly hero.

The other saint who prayed for England in front of the heavenly throne before George took over was also a king, Edward, the first King of England to die in the fateful year of 1066. St Edward’s tale is a much less exciting one than either Edmund or George: there are no battles with dragons, no gruesomely picturesque martyrdoms; no swashbuckling adventures with Vikings or wolves; unusually, Eddy died peacefully in his own bed. Edward did take his faith seriously though, hence the name posterity has given him ‘the Confessor’. He founded Westminster Abbey, he was generous to the poor- on one occasion taking a ring off his hand to give to a beggar (who amazingly later revealed himself to be St John sent to test him), and according to later hagiography Edward lived his life in a bliss of holy virginity, a highly implausible state it has to be said in an 11th century king. Pious, certainly then, but by the standards of his day Edward was not just a failure: he was a huge failure. He spent half his life on the run; he was ruthlessly bullied by his in-laws; he left this life childless— a disaster for a dynast as it meant he left his kingdom without a natural successor and ripe for the national disaster of the Norman conquest. If Edward were to appear on the Jeremy Kyle Show no doubt the audience would be holding up their hands and shouting Loser! By the thirteenth century, however, he had been formally canonised and whether by intent or neglect his is the only mediaeval saint’s shrine in England to have been left intact by the twin destructive waves of the Reformation and Cromwell’s Republic.

Finally, the king who was a failure not only as a king, but in a sense, as a saint as well, King Charles- the first (not the present)- king and martyr, the only new saint the Church of England declared in 300 years,  the one non-Biblical saint to make it into that least hagiographical of volumes,  the Book of Common Prayer until, ultimate failure, he was removed some time in the mid 19th century. Charles’ father, King James I– he of King James Bible fame– was described in his lifetime as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’; alas, history has decided Charles his son was simply the biggest fool. I’m not going to dwell on this monarch’s biography overmuch, I’m assuming we all know at least the outline of his disastrous reign, the Cavaliers and Roundheads Civil War and his trial and execution outside London’s Banqueting Hall in 1649. Less well known is the religious component to all this strife: not least that Charles was one of that most unlikely of believers, a zealous Anglican: fervent, fanatical even about the  Church of England, and it was this, just as much as his lack of political skill that led to his untimely end. A martyr for the Via Media Charles’ fall is a stark warning of what happens when you let puritans get the upper hand, one that continues to echo down to our own times.

So, there are our three Kings. 

In theory all the Kings of England have been Christian kings. Some Kings have had worse reigns and more pitiful ends. Some have lead equally or more holy lives. But these three are among the very few our religion has declared saints. What then can St Edmund, St Edward and Charles, King and Martyr tell us of our faith? Are we any further along in our epic quest for the essence of Christian kingship?

Patently they were not perfect, not anywhere approaching perfect, Charles particularly, but no Christian is or every will be; realising that is one of the fundamentals of our faith. 

All three kings clearly had one foot in the world of faith as well as the inevitable foot in the world of politics. 

All three tried and failed in the human world of kingship, the strong man arena where might is right and force reaps the rewards, but they succeeded– at great personal cost– in their faith. 

All three men ascended their thrones with the maximum benefits that power, riches and position can offer in this life; and yet they are venerated in the world of faith despite power, riches and position being almost insuperable handicaps in the needle’s eye of Christianity, where the mighty are cast from their thrones and  the rich sent empty away; where the weak shame the strong and the first are last and the last first; where the meek inherit the earth and the greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all.  

Thus, Edward recognised, in the manner of his life, and Edmund and Charles in their deaths, that despite their having exalted status in the eyes of the world, there was one higher still in whose presence all their earthly pretensions melted away: Christ their King.