Modernizing the Monarchy
The Queen is dead. She was the longest-reigning monarch in British history.
The transition to a new age encourages commentators to reflect on the role of the monarchy. One journalist suggests that now would be a good time to replace the national anthem. Another goes further, arguing that “the accession of a new sovereign” is an ideal time to rethink not just the anthem, but the powers a monarch might exercise in a modern democracy. An American commentator goes further still, looking back on the death of the Queen as the moment when “the crown had lost its usefulness in the constitutional system of England.”
But these writers were not reacting to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 2022; they were reacting to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Their comments, however, are echoed by similar concerns today. “[T]he monarchy can’t just ‘carry on’ after Elizabeth II,” argued Tom Clark in Prospect, anticipating the Queen’s death in April 2021. “After such a long reign…. It is time parliament looked at the institution of monarchy,” wrote Martin Brown in a letter to The Guardian in December 2022. Commentators outside Britain have also used the Queen’s death to re-evaluate the monarchy. “The ascension of King Charles III has predictably revived the question of Canada’s ties with the monarchy,” wrote Mario Polèse in Policy Options in December 2022.
Both sets of reactions, separated by 121 years, demonstrate an important fact: critically rethinking the monarchy is nothing new. Indeed, there have been calls to change Britain’s monarchy—or to abolish it entirely—throughout Elizabeth II’s reign as well as in the reigns of monarchs past. Commentators may not have been able to speak so brazenly about changing the monarchy as they can today, but there are still examples of rethinking the monarchy throughout British history (if you know where to look).
For decades, there have been reports that Charles wants to “modernize” the monarchy, perhaps “slimming it down” as Queen Margrethe of Denmark has recently done. There is, however, another monarch that King Charles should consider—one who has enabled writers to think critically about the monarchy for centuries: the legendary King Arthur.
The historical evidence for Arthur is thin and inconclusive. What is certain is that people have been telling stories about him for at least 900 years, and that many of these stories contain commentary on what a monarch should be. Take, for example, medieval Welsh biographies of saints. King Arthur appears in some of these, often depicted in a negative way—spoilt, petty, and lustful—setting him up to be subdued by a saint in order to demonstrate the power of the Church over secular rule. When Arthur demands that St. Cadoc give up a fugitive in his care, the saint agrees to pay Arthur 300 cows instead. But when Arthur’s men take ownership of the cows, the men turn into bundles of fern. Arthur, humbled, asks for forgiveness. The message in this story, and many other hagiographies from this period, is that the monarch must respect the Church; that the King is no match for the power of God.
Some medieval French romances contain even harsher portrayals of Arthur and his kingship. In Yder, Arthur is cast as the villain who tries to kill the heroic protagonist; in the Lai du Cor, he angrily tries to stab his wife; in Le Vallet a la cote Mautaillie, he rudely laughs at a young knight because of the poor quality of his clothing. In these texts, Arthur is a model for what not to do as monarch.
It’s nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century stories about Arthur that are most likely to help Charles modernize the monarchy. After all, he is unlikely to get into an argument with a saint or try to stab the Queen Consort (we hope). The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote about Arthur as a modern monarch in his cycle of narrative poems, Idylls of the King. His Arthur is not the mediæval warrior and adulterer written about by Sir Thomas Malory. Instead, he is a statesman, uniting the country at the beginning of his reign, and then either supervising the Round Table or sitting as judge “to help the wrong’d / Thro all the realm.” Tennyson showed that Arthur could be reinvented to fit a new era, representing justice and political ability over martial prowess.
Idylls of the King contains a useful model for what an ideal modern monarch should be, but it has its limitations. For a start, not everyone agreed that Tennyson’s Arthur was a good model to follow: critics such as A.C. Swinburne and Edward Bulwer-Lytton felt this version of Arthur was too passive to be considered a great man or leader. Even if you do want to follow in his footsteps, the bar is set rather high: Arthur is “god-like” and encapsulates “ideal manhood closed in real man.” How can Charles, or any monarch, hope to live up to that standard?
The American poet E.A. Robinson, writing in the 1910s and 20s, depicts Arthur and kingship in a far more negative and critical way than Tennyson. Robinson’s Arthur is a man mentally broken by his wife’s adultery who “starve[s] the state” because he is too depressed to rule. Parallels are also drawn between Arthur’s war against Lancelot and the then-raging First World War, when Arthur is compared to an irresponsible general (“the King’s move” causes another “magnificent waste of nameless pawns”). Arthur’s failure as king leads several characters to question the point of having a king at all. “What are kings? / And how much longer are there to be kings?” asks Lancelot. A possible answer is given by Merlin, who says that he made Arthur king “to be a mirror wherein men / May see themselves, and pause.” Robinson expanded this thought in a letter, saying that he used “Arthur and his empire as an object lesson to prove to coming generations that nothing can stand on rotten foundations.” In other words, the value of Arthur’s reign is that it enables a society to recognize its own defects reflected in a prominent public figure, who acts as a warning for us to change direction and build better social structures in the future.
Robinson’s Arthur could serve as a warning to Charles as well: to keep personal feuds and negative emotions out of the job of ruling a country. However, unless Charles’s plan to modernize the monarchy is to scrap it, he will not want to follow Robinson’s ideas to their conclusions.
There is a writer who combines some of the idealism of Tennyson’s Arthur with some of the faults of Robinson’s, presenting a version of monarchy that enables Arthur to seem realistically human whilst also being a good leader. T.H. White wrote his epic four-novel omnibus The Once and Future King in the lead up to, and during, the Second World War.
White set the first novel in the series, The Sword in the Stone, in Arthur’s childhood: a period not explored by previous writers, before Arthur becomes king or even knows that he has royal blood. The sequels then follow Arthur as king, up to his final battle against Mordred. By first establishing the character as an unremarkable child, White strips away much of the symbolic gloss of monarchy, highlighting the human personality behind it. He still portrays the gravitas that comes with monarchy—for Arthur’s knights in Book 3, seeing him is “like seeing the idea of Royalty”—but Arthur is also described at the end of Book 4 as just “a plain man who had done his best.” It is an approach we encounter in other recent Arthurian interpreters such as Rosemary Sutcliff (Sword at Sunset)—whose Arthur is a well-meaning but unrefined warrior—and even Guy Ritchie (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), whose authoritative king never loses his Cockney accent or skills as a working-class carpenter (he builds the Round Table himself by hand).
Finally, other recent Arthurian retellings remove the monarchy from the story while retaining a sense of regal call to leadership. In Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would be King, the Arthur figure is an ordinary schoolboy called Alex; in Tracy Deonn’s novel Legendborn, the Arthur figure is a Southern Black girl named Bree. In both cases, the characters are successors to Arthur—Alex wields Excalibur and Bree eventually leads the knights of Camelot—but through their own talents and hard work, rather than birth-right alone. Charles is unlikely to become a warrior or a carpenter (must less a schoolchild), but he might still take a similar approach to monarchy, emphasizing his human nature in the context of solemn, symbolic roles, such as attending State Openings of Parliament bedecked in gown and crown.
King Charles will need to modernize the monarchy if he wants it to keep going. Otherwise, the answer to E.A. Robinson’s questions “What are kings? / And how much longer are there to be kings?” will be “unnecessary relics from a previous age” and “not long at all.” The continuation of the monarchy is not a certainty either in Arthurian retellings or in modern Britain, but past writers have shown that it is possible to update Arthur for new audiences without sacrificing his essential kingship. If that is possible for Arthur, then it should be possible for Charles and the British monarchy, too.
Gabriel Schenk teaches English Literature online at Signum University. He completed his DPhil in Arthurian literature at the University of Oxford. Before that, his studies included a year at the University Pittsburgh.