Divine right and the death of kings

The execution of Charles I marks the origin of modern monarchy

Three hundred and fifty years ago in Whitehall, in London, on a make-shift scaffold outside the Banqueting House – Inigo Jones’ then newly-built extension to the Royal Palace – the executioner’s axe fell on King Charles I’s neck. There’s a memorial service planned, but the royal family will not attend, not even the Prince of Wales, the future Charles III. Our new model royals, in the face of criticism of their role in national life, are playing down the history of the institution they inhabit, wary of republicans and monarchists alike.

Monarchs are increasingly rare nowadays, and regicide is rarer. In Ethiopia, though, the trial is taking place of members of former regime responsible for the murder of Emperor Haile Selassie I, who was killed on government orders in 1975. This trial offers a glimpse of what monarchy once meant, and the power it retains in the political imagination.

The monarch as scapegoat and quasi-divinity

But first, some anthropological background. The idea of the monarch as a victim – a scapegoat who dies for the sake of the body politic – is the central idea in Sir James Frazer’s oft-invoked but seldom-read classic of armchair anthropology, The Golden Bough. The twelve volumes of The Golden Bough tell the story, found in both African and Asian traditions, of the ritual sacrifice of a divine king, one who is ostensibly all-powerful, yet who finally becomes a sacrificial victim. In the Western tradition this mythic archetype informs the story of Christ’s crucifixion. And the analogy between the crucifixion and Charles I’s execution was explicitly embraced by royalist apologists in the seventeenth century. In Charles I’s case the manner of his death made a martyr of a king who, by all accounts, while he was alive, was egregiously devious and manipulative. But on the scaffold, he acquired a stature and a mythic resonance that he had not had in life. In this sense Charles I’s death did not empower republicans: paradoxically, it perpetuated the power of the monarchical idea.

The trial of the Derg in Ethiopia

In our democratised and secularised world, the death of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia provides a lone example of regicide in the present day. In 1975, following a military coup in Ethiopia by a group of officers known as the Derg, the aged Haile Selassie was murdered in his bed. Two decades later, after another change of regime, those accused of responsibility for his death were put on trial. In 1995 I attended the committal proceedings in Addis Ababa – a long-delayed beginning to a trial that is still going on, five years later.

The leaders of the Derg are on trial for a wide range of other crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. The new rulers of the country, though they are keen to arraign their predecessors on as many charges as possible, are anti-monarchist, and anxious not to resurrect the memory of imperial rule. They are fearful of the potent symbolism that monarchy can still command, the symbolism that, in British history, made Charles I more powerful in death than he was in life. Thus they have refused permission for a state reburial of Haile Selassie’s remains, to preclude the possibility that such an event would become a focus for popular discontent. Currently, the Emperor’s exhumed body still lies in the crypt of the church behind his palace. (The coffin is tiny: he was barely five feet tall, even smaller than Charles I.)

Still, when it came to the trial of the Derg, the Emperor’s name led the roll-call of victims. The reading of the charges on the opening day of the trial was the first time his name had been mentioned in official pronouncements in Ethiopia for twenty years. There were those in the courtroom who had been waiting a long time to hear it. I was seated next to one of them, Teshome Gabre-Mariam, who had been Attorney-General under Haile Selassie and, after his death, spent seven years as a prisoner in the cellars of the palace where the Emperor met his end. We listened that day in Addis Ababa as the judge read the charges from a scarlet leather-bound book, using the emperor’s full title and motto, ‘His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, King of Kings, the Lion of Judah Shall Prevail, was murdered in a cruel and disgraceful manner, suffocated in his bedchamber . . .’

As the judge spoke these words there was a general intake of breath. The interpreter in his glass booth stopped and coughed. The ceiling seemed ready to fall. Later, outside the courtroom, the former Attorney-General exploded.

‘Murder the Emperor!’ he said. ‘A man of eighty-four. What was the point? Those people have no honour.’

No honour. This, I imagine, was also how seventeenth-century royalists in Britain felt, or affected to feel, about the regicides. Those who condemned the king to death were, in their view, men without honour. The royalists represented the execution as a monstrous crime against nature. As with Charles I, the manner of the Ethiopian Emperor’s death – and the brutality of those who succeeded him – obscured the many injustices that had occurred under his rule.

The end of divine right and the origin of constitutional monarchy

In England, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the regicides – some, at least, of those who signed the death warrant – were themselves executed. But the restoration did not turn back the tide of constitutional change. After the hiatus of the Commonwealth – and an attempt by Charles’s son, James II, to reintroduce absolutism – a new political era began in Britain with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II was ousted and William of Orange ascended to the throne.

The death of Charles I marked a turning point in the idea of kingship: not the end of monarchical rule, but the end of the doctrine of divine right. It marked the beginning of the evolution of constitutional monarchy that, in Britain, continues to the present day. Charles I’s execution and the failed experiment in republicanism that followed helped preserve the institution in a new form, making possible the era of modern monarchy, where the mystical aspects of kingship and queenship are constrained and reduced by the institutions of secular government.

Globally, kings and queens and emperors have long been in retreat. There is little chance of constitutional monarchy being restored in Ethiopia today, any more than there is in, say, France. In both countries revolutions swept the idea of monarchy away with the ancien regime. Absolute monarchs like Haile Selassie are an endangered species. Outside North Africa and the Middle East, mystical authority is confined to the kings and emperors of a few Asian polities – Thailand, Nepal, Bhutan and Japan. It is unlikely that any of these colourful but anachronistic figures will ever face assassination or execution as Haile Selassie did.

But that is what happened in Ethiopia. And in the courtroom in Addis Ababa, in the vivid absence of the long-dead Emperor, there was an echo of the antique, quasi-divine power of monarchy, and the concomitant idea of sacrifice, of a king who must die, that Sir James Frazer documented in The Golden Bough a century before.

It’s a symbolic power that can attach itself to other kinds of leader – to elected officials as well as hereditary monarchs, to those who aspire actively to the hereditary principle and the permanence of monarchy. And there are signs that this idea is alive in the minds of powerful political dynasties in other countries. The mystique of kingship seems never to be entirely extinguished, either by executions or by constitutions. In the courtroom in Addis Ababa it reasserted itself for a moment. And this week in Whitehall, despite official indifference on the part of the royal family (and most other people), some of this mystique will linger in the minds of monarchists, the remaining devotees of the cult of kingship, as they remember Charles I on the scaffold, three and half centuries ago. ✭