Professor Kenneth Fincham, University of Kent
In his first and surefooted address to the nation as king, the day after Elizabeth II’s death, Charles III chose to draw attention to the monarchy’s ‘particular relationship and responsibility towards the Church of England, the Church in which my own faith is so deeply rooted’. On his accession, Charles III became Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. That latter title already has a Carolean pre-history. In 1994, the then Prince Charles suggested that he would be more a ‘Defender of the Faiths’ than ‘the Faith’, keen to embrace all religious traditions and ‘the pattern of the divine, which I think is in all of us’, which caused a storm of protest. Twenty-one years later, in 2015, the prince rowed back from this position, stating that he’d always thought that ‘at the same time being Defender of the Faith, you can also be protector of faiths’. This was an adoption of Elizabeth II’s own formula, expressed at a speech at Lambeth Palace in 2012, that ‘the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country’. So what next for our new Defender of the Faith? Already there are siren voices warning the King to proceed cautiously: thus a long-serving chaplain to the late Queen has urged the new King to recognise that the monarchy he has inherited ‘reflects competitive partisanship in both its history and language, as well as the [coronation] oaths that define it’. How Charles III chooses to understand his role as Defender of the Faith may become clear at his coronation, if not before.
His twenty-two immediate predecessors, stretching back over nearly five hundred years to Henry VIII, have interpreted their responsibilities as Defenders of the Faith in strikingly different ways, a reflection of changing contexts, authority and beliefs. Here I will take one example, the new King’s namesake, Charles II, monarch from 1660 to 1685. Charles II is best known as an inveterate womaniser, from whose bastard children half the English aristocracy can claim descent. The king had wide intellectual interests, but on many accounts possessed only a shallow understanding of religion. The fact that he joined the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed has led some to suppose that he would have converted years before, but for the political necessity of being seen to be a loyal member of the Church of England, on which the security of his throne in large measure depended. But the evidence admits a rather different reading. His private religious beliefs remain hidden from us, but his public actions demonstrate that Charles II held strong religious convictions which he pursued with some vigour, as a Defender of the Faith, sometimes acting in unprecedented ways which alarmed many of his episcopalian or Anglican supporters. I will concentrate here in 1660-3, the critical early years of his reign.
Charles was offered the throne in 1660 after the collapse of the puritan revolution of the 1640s-50s, and he returned to England after 14 years in exile. Rather like his ancestor Henry VII, the king’s primary objective was to avoid going on his travels again, and the settlement of religion was a primary means to achieve that goal. Rather startingly, the king proved to be both a staunch episcopalian and an advocate for religious toleration; not an obvious nor common combination in this period. During the search for ‘comprehension’, in other words a more broadly-based Church of England to include moderate Presbyterians, it was Charles who refused to bend to key Presbyterian demands that bishops would share their authority with senior clergy, and that presbyterian ministers would not have to face re-ordination by a bishop. These two decisions – episcopal jurisdiction of the keys and the necessity for episcopal ordination – were to shape the Church of England for centuries thereafter. The king was also an admirer of the Book of Common Prayer, and when faced with demands from presbyterian critics for revision of its content, he made it clear that only small-scale adjustments were necessary. This lukewarm attitude to liturgical reform allowed leading episcopalians such as Bishop Sheldon to frustrate the presbyterian demands for significant change at the Savoy Conference in 1661, and, for all its 600 or so minor alterations, the 1662 Prayer Book was much the same as its Elizabethan predecessor. Here the king was working the episcopalian majority in Parliament and the country. Where he fell out with MPs was over his desire for toleration of those outside the established Church – Quakers, Independents, Baptists but also, most provocatively, Roman Catholics. A newly-discovered draft declaration of November 1661 indicates that Charles hoped to work with Parliament to lift sanguinary laws against Catholics and to receive powers to dispense peaceful dissenters, including Catholics, from statutory penalties for not attending Church. Charles returned to some of these concerns a year later, when his Declaration of Indulgence of 1662-3 was rejected by Parliament. Many MPs took the view that Charles’ proposals would undermine rather than defend the Anglican faith. The king only abandoned his tolerationist agenda in 1673, after repeated failures to ‘indulge’ his dissenting subjects. He might have achieved more had he concentrated on toleration for just his protestant subjects, since his determination to champion Catholics stirred up fears of popery, which was a defining mark of protestant culture in this period. In short, Charles II proved to be a dynamic and unsettling Defender of the Faith, who was ultimately frustrated in his attempts to reach out to wider communities of faith. The possible parallels with our new Defender of the Faith are intriguing.