The following sermon was given by the Reverend Jonathan Collis, Honorary Assistant Chaplain at Selwyn College, and Rector of St Botolph’s Church, Cambridge, at Evensong at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, on 14th March 2026, to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II:
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In a month’s time we mark the centenary of the birth of our late Queen, and on this occasion of the Cambridge Monarchists’ dinner, which I note with approval seems to have been the subject of a coup by members of Selwyn, we have the chance to reflect a little on whether the Christian tradition has anything to say about monarchy in general, the British monarchy in particular, and our late Queen and her example to us of a profoundly Christian monarch.
The first thing to say is that the tradition we find ourselves the inheritors of has never been uncritical. The Old Testament has a long discussion about how the Israelites will regret getting rid of the Judges, who have been ruling over them by virtue of their charisma, in favour of kings like the other nations, who are described as exploitative and likely to take advantage of their position. Notwithstanding this, once the monarchy was established under King Saul, King David and King Solomon, it caught the imagination of the people of Israel even if, after exiles and dispersion, it became hard and then impossible to maintain as a political institution. In the new Christian church, which of course suffered under the Roman emperors, some way had to be found of dealing creatively with power – and, eventually after three centuries, it bore fruit in making the emperor himself a Christian.
And since then the debate has been as to whether a state can be Christian, given it has to do violent things such as locking people up and having an army, and while in England and elsewhere in Europe the state and the church have had a close link nonetheless these ties have become weaker in all western nations over the past two hundred years. But, all that being said, on top of the crown that our Queen wore is a cross, to remind her that she was subject to the king of kings and lord of lords, and that her power, symbolic as it was, was subject to a higher authority. This is profoundly unfashionable – I hardly even dare air it – but it is an important point.
It would not, I think, be too far-fetched to say that in the sort of educated, right-thinking modern circles which I suspect are little represented here but are nonetheless a powerful force in our society the monarchy is a bit of a embarrassment – archaic, quaint, with a thirst for public money and wedded to an outdated view of life and British society. More than apathetic acceptance of the monarchy is regarded as at best teetering on the edge of simple-minded jingoism. Even the virtues that have been particularly associated with our late Queen and her father George VI are so deeply unfashionable they hardly dare speak their name – duty, loyalty, reserve, understatement, tradition.
The fact that these unfashionable virtues have been also associated with Christianity and especially the Church of England is not coincidental. The Crown and the Church, the throne and altar, have been linked in these islands for fifteen centuries, and our late Queen was, as many if by no means all of her predecessors had been, a deeply committed Christian. The idea that the head of state is a Christian not merely as a private confession of faith but as a token of the nation’s ultimate submission to God is at the heart of the various settlements of state and religion over the past five hundred years, and continues to exercise constitutional lawyers and Guardian leader writers to this day.
And in this personification of government lies one of the scandalous things about the whole enterprise. It is one matter to swear allegiance to the flag, or to one’s country, or to the revolution, or to abstract principles such as liberty, equality and fraternity, all notoriously open to definition and redefinition; it is quite another to do so to a person of flesh and blood. It all seems rather messy and the holder of the office quite unfit upon close examination to bear such a burden. Small wonder it is more popular to talk of one’s duties to the community, or to society, or even to the state rather than to God or the King. This collective loss of nerve in identifying with the whole royal project can be traced back to the seventeenth century at least, as Charles I would testify. In addition, in more recent times disputing the divine right of kings has been replaced by more contemporary arguments.
As Kingsley Amis once put it: ‘With the growth of science and democracy, people begin to realise that monarchy is a survival, surrounded by superstitions which must be outgrown along with haunted houses, being thirteen at table, and the disastrous effects of walking under ladders. An ideological battle is then joined in which the ruling class, whose position depends on retaining the existing social structure, use all the resources of propaganda to persuade the uneducated and the half-educated that in some mysterious way the monarchy is still sacrosanct and essential to the safety of the realm.’
Amis wrote at the beginning of the 1960s, at the beginning of the end of the age of respect and deference that had taken root under Queen Victoria, replacing the rumbustious and pungent disrespect exemplified by Regency cartoonists such as Gillray and Rowlandson. Victoria, whose long reign saw Britain change almost unimaginably, set the tone for the dignity and distance that through the trials of two world wars, and revolution and attendant horrors in Europe, sustained British constitutional forms and ancient institutions. When across the Channel governments came and went in France, militarism reigned in Germany, and Bolshevism devastated Russia, the worthy if generally dull run of monarchs from Victoria to the present day appeared preferable to most people most of the time.
The Church of England, as one might expect, has basked in reflected splendour. Charles I was plausibly a martyr not just for his own political ineptness but also for the principles of the Church of England, and especially for the threefold ministry of bishops priests and deacons. Small wonder the clergy, schooled in the many prayers of the Church of England for the monarch to be found in the Book of Common Prayer, and tied into the system of royal patronage and ecclesiastical control, were generally enthusiastic for maintaining the status quo. Queen Victoria obliged by her churchgoing, and by her exemplary domestic life. ‘How very different from the home life of our own dear queen’ a Victorian sighed patronisingly upon learning of the goings on at the court of Cleopatra.
The reinvention of the monarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under the influence of the Church, allayed the nonconformist conscience, and gave the Anglican conservatives popular support in resisting constitutional change. Even Roman Catholics, to whom we owe our thanks for their hospitality in allowing us to use this college chapel, who had had ever since the end of the Stuarts an ambiguous relationship with Protestant monarchy, were reconciled to political stability and the continuance of the bulwark of the Church of England against the infidelity and atheism such as was evident in Republican France or Bismarck’s Germany.
But chill winds have blown and continue to blow through all traditional institutions since Kingsley Amis’s words. The 1990’s in particular saw the coincidence of an accelerating general decline in respect for the established institutions of the nation, attacked from the left on the usual grounds of privilege, and then from the Thatcherite right, on the grounds of inefficiency and unaccountability. Self-indulgent, or, more charitably and perhaps more accurately, individualistic attitudes and behaviour, have had a devastating effect on activities and institutions that have generally relied upon some sort of sacrifice in the name of a greater good – for reckoning of a greater good becomes impossible without at least some sense that meaning is not merely self-derived, but comes in some measure from outside, from above.
One such arena is, of course, marriage. The transformation of attitudes towards this primary institution is beyond the scope of this sermon, but one may get something of the flavour of the change by looking at the activities of the children of the Queen. The whole Diana phenomenon, the affairs and the scandals, reported on gleefully by the popular press, brought the celebrity culture of hedonism and transience into the one family that has an iconic significance on a national level. And yet, and yet, our late Queen, whose centenary we mark, maintained a commitment to duty that was unto death. It was and is a duty, moreover, that is not chosen by self, nor by democratic processes, but by birth and by coronation, by, in other words, by God.
In this sense the monarch is symbolic to the nation of the principles of justice, which are given and which alone grant moral legitimacy. A popular mandate can, in principle, be found for anything, no matter how evil, and it can only be seen as salutary for popularly elected representatives to be subject to a head of state who symbolises the givenness of justice precisely by not being chosen, directly or indirectly, by the people, and who at her coronation receives the symbols of authority not from below, but from above, from God himself through the hands of his Church.
So today is an opportunity to give thanks to God; for our late Queen’s lifetime of service to her country and to the Commonwealth, for our political stability and for the many blessings that that has brought us, and to pray for our King’s welfare and that of his family. God save the King.