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Synopsis: Anglicanism, from the time of King Henry VIII until well into the 18th century, was defined in part by a cult of monarchy; for much of that time, it was believed that the anointed monarch had the ability to miraculously cure certain diseases. One of these monarchs, King Charles I, who was martyred on 30 January 1649, later became the first commemorated Anglican saint. Yet his feast day, like our royalist heritage, has been forgotten. If Anglicanism is to find a way forward, it must come to terms with its past, and creatively reinscribe it into both its present and future. In what follows, I delineate some of what the cult of monarchy consisted of, and what of it is worth retaining.



II. Reviving: Between Past and Future Present

Before turning to the task of what King Charles the Martyr can mean today, we must briefly look at what monarchy itself meant during and after the Reformation. When King Henry VIII was declared by Parliament as the “supreme head” of the Church of England, this was as much a theological matter as it was a matter of political theory; it made the king an undeniably ecclesial figure, and it set in motion the development of other theologically exalted understandings of monarchy. The most influential of these was perhaps that of King James I who, in his popular work Basilicon Doron (1599), bluntly stated that the king was “a little GOD” who sat upon God’s own throne. Since antiquity, monarchy had been vested with a high level of sacrality, and this continued in the post-Reformation Church of England, which both maintained and developed devotional patterns that had arisen in the medieval period. For example, it was believed that the king alone was capable of curing the disease known as scrofula, also known as the King’s Evil; those that were sick with this were brought before the king, who then laid his hands on the person. Given King Henry VIII’s designation as “supreme head” and King James I’s self-understanding as “a little GOD”, the monarchical practice of miraculously healing those sick with the King’s Evil was attended to as neither superstition nor mere popular devotion, but as an already expected and necessarily maintained facet of the Church of England’s heritage and continued witness.

Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I each continued to participate in this ancient ritual. Elizabeth I, dressed in royal blue (and thereby fusing the cult of monarchy with the cult of the Virgin Mary), annually held such services on Holy Thursday, during which she prayed for those who were sick. James I perpetuated this practice but also developed the ritual further, giving blessed coins called “Angels” to those whom he prayed for. Both before and during the Civil Wars, Charles I did as his father had done. While in captivity, his miraculous curing of non-Anglicans was known to oftentimes convert those same persons to the Royalist cause, and the “Angels” that he distributed were sometimes attributed with the power to ward off the King’s Evil; after his martyrdom in 1649, rags with the king’s dried blood on them were taken to the sick, who were sometimes miraculously cured of their sickness. Such royalist devotional practices did much to perpetuate Anglicanism’s existence during the darkest days of the Commonwealth.

As Andrew T. Lacey points out in The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (2003), the state sponsorship of the January 30 feast day was terminated in 1859, even though it was well known by members of Parliament at the time that services for King Charles the Martyr continued to be widely held in parishes throughout the country. This led to the king becoming, at best, a liminal figure in Anglican identity, whose importance was most fervently maintained by the Society of King Charles the Martyr (formed in 1894 and still in existence today). There have, of course, been hundreds if not thousands of saints that have been forgotten over the course of the Church’s history, and one could argue that his lack of presence in Anglican consciousness today simply points to the corrosive tides of time. The revival of Anglican interest in saints culminated in the late-1950s with Resolutions 77 – 80 of Lambeth 1958, which encouraged and set guidelines for the commemoration of saints; this had an effect upon the various calendars of the Communion, although not always upon distinctly Anglican memory. Paul Ricoeur’s statement that, “To remember is to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory”, originally made in History, Memory, Forgetting (2004), points to two important facets of the present task: on the one hand, some of us have a memory but, on the other hand, not least because of the lack of knowledge on point (which is worse than forgetting, for as Augustine points out in Confessions, even in forgetting we remember that we have forgotten), in “remembering” King Charles the Martyr we should consider that we are not entirely sure of what we are looking for. Royalism is dead. We cannot return to the past, and we can only revive something of it within the new context of the present; this re-contextualized revival of the past in the present is what I will refer to below as reinscription.

But can one actually revive the memory – let alone the cult – of King Charles the Martyr so as to reinscribe it? There has never been a site of pilgrimage which allowed the king to occupy a trans-temporal space for public and private devotion. More importantly, although relics were used during the time of the Commonwealth, Lacey notes that these were not popular due to any belief in the intercessory power of the king as a saint, but due to the theopolitical beliefs about the king as God’s Anointed. Although the Anglo-Catholic revival of the late-19th and early-20th centuries did much to reinscribe more historic patterns of Christian devotion upon the minds, hearts, and imaginations of Anglicans in England and abroad – not least through the restoration of places such as The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham – such devotional practices bore less the scent of then-modern “popery”, far more the scent of medieval Western Catholicism, and nothing whatsoever of 17th century Royalism. Until the material space for such pilgrimage is hewn out of the rocks of a future present, it may be that a revival of the king’s cult will depend upon theological toil that branches out in liturgical celebration, rather than upon Royalist devotional patterns and their medieval precedents.

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