Fallen royals vs. the eternal reign of King Jesus

The removal of former Prince Andrew’s royal titles and privileges has been the story of the week, and I suspect by the time you’re reading this we won’t have heard the last of it—even if “Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor” proves to be a much more inconvenient number of characters to put on the front of a tabloid than “Prince Andrew”.

The story certainly appeals to our thirst for black-and-white tales of justice: an apparently arrogant and unrepentant wrongdoer has been cut down to size and stripped of his titles.

Or has he? There seems to be an element of doubt. On Saturday 1 November, the I Newspaper reported that independent MP Rachael Maskell “believes an act of Parliament could still be necessary to ‘completely remove the titles’ from Mountbatten-Windsor. She said there is ‘ambiguity’ over whether Mountbatten-Windsor’s titles have been ‘removed’” (“MP Presses for act to formally remove titles”). He also remains eighth in line for the throne—a reality that the Prime Minister has so far signalled he will not move to undo.

So, wait… is it simply the case that a prince ceases to be a prince when we collectively decide to stop calling him one?

We’ve un-kinged kings we believed to be wrong‘uns before, of course—mainly by removing their heads (see Charles I in 1649). In Revolutionary France, King Louis XVI spent a brief spell in captivity as the de-kinged commoner “Louis Capet”—but in the end that state of affairs proved untenable and Louis lost his head too. In the pre-modern and early-modern mindset, the only way to definitively un-king a king was to kill him. That, I hasten to add, is not the course of action I’m advocating for in this instance. My point is just that royalty wasn't something that you could resign from. It wasn't a mere social fiction that the populace colluded to assent to. It wasn't just words and titles. It was Royal blood that ran in your veins: the divine right of kings.

The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde concurs that the stripping of Andrew’s titles presents a philosophical problem for the royals: “When there isn’t a royal family any more, analysts will look back and see the unprecedented enforced commoner-ing of Andrew as a key moment. … Once they started suggesting that people could be fired from Earth’s most committed non-meritocracy – unroyalled, as it were – then they played around fatally with the idea of royalty itself. … Every crisis will draw significant numbers of people out who would ask why you couldn’t cut off whoever was displeasing them in that moment. And why not? You got rid of one: the precedent is set.”

Kingship according to Scripture

The way the Bible talks about kingship is, of course, of an entirely different order than our modern version. Although there are plenty of disgraced and dethroned royals in the Old Testament too—beginning with Israel’s very first king, Saul.

In the prophets God speaks repeatedly of his intention to bring down the arrogant and the oppressor. He assures us that those who misuse their power—such as to prey on others as Epstein and his circle did—commit a grievous offence and will reap what they sow.

The author of 1-2 Kings went to the trouble of including the (mostly cautionary) tales of 43 monarchs to drive the point home. Much like our modern royal family, the problems for Israel and Judah’s rulers and their people ultimately came from within, not without.

The solution comes from without, too: “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain” (Psalm 2v6). There is no un-kinging King Jesus. How could you? He's the monarch who has already come back from his own execution. But there is no corrupting King Jesus, either—and so it’s good news that His reign is no social fiction. Nor is the status He gives us as a royal priesthood. Neither reality depends on the collective human opinion of the moment but on the unchanging Word of God. In that, we rejoice.