Maundy, monarchy and pedilavium: how to make a Servant Sovereign
Having planned to write this piece for some months, in order
to coincide with Maundy Thursday, events have rather conspired against its
apparent timeliness. At a time when public religious services lie under an
unprecedented ban, this now seems an odd time to argue – as I am about to – for
a conspicuous increase in social contact in religious services, albeit
one in particular. But this mournful period too shall pass, and I hope that one
day the argument will be viewed in the light of normalcy.
Likewise, a piece predicated on recent moral failings on the part of big hitters in the British Royal Family seems suddenly passé as the media once again becomes awash with admiring columns about our Queen’s pitch-perfect calm in a storm. But one doesn’t need to delve too far back into the fickle media cycle to find an example of a royal putting his foot in it. I closed ranks around the Prince of Wales in his ailment as much as the next Twitter monarchist. But one might humbly ask HRH if that were not the sort of little tussle that could perhaps be avoided? That while one can awfully well understand the attraction of Balmoral when one is feeling under the weather, that one had nonetheless better stick to governmental medical advice and stay put when exhibiting covid-19 symptoms, not least when one is but a few years from becoming Head of State? Hadn’t one?
However, Prince Charles’ corona faux pas is probably not the scandal that will define the monarchy’s recent torrid period. Such ignominy will belong to the cringeworthy moral deafness of Prince Andrew, and the entitled sulking and eventual storming-off displayed by Mr and Mrs Markle. But, as much as it pains me to write it, the morning star of this extended PR car crash was the quite literal car crash caused by the Duke of Edinburgh’s nonagenarian wilfulness. More or less from then until the genius of the Queen’s address this week, we monarchists have been on the backfoot, barely keeping pace with the latest human frailty and its aftershocks; scarcely a chance to dust ourselves off from one rearguard action before being dragooned by circumstance into the next. Suddenly, even royals we’d never heard of were letting us down. When the divorce of Peter and Autumn Phillips was announced, a jaded associate asked me “If not even the Royals themselves are stalwart monarchists, who is?”
Of course, there are always bigger fish to fry (especially in Holy Week); defending the Crown will never be as important as fighting the corona. And the ease with which I can sit here as a private citizen and castigate my fellow humans for their inevitable fallibility before the cameras of the world is one privilege that I am quite ready to check. But my monarchism having come of age during what was for the most part a golden decade for the Firm, I’m not prepared to give it up without a fight.
The world watched fixated at the brilliance of royal pageantry in the form of the traditional formal beauty of William and Kate’s wedding, with a verdant freshness added by those trees; the all-out national hoorah of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, when even the weather performed its constitutional role of ensuring continuity and stiff-upper-lipped good humour; the star turn of Her Majesty in the hilarious London Olympics Opening Ceremony. Harry and Meghan’s wedding, with its gracefully weaved cultural syncretism, was a textbook example of royalty’s ability to welcome what were once outsiders into an ever-broadening tent (the later intersectional grievance-mongering of ‘the Sussex Squad’ notwithstanding).
But if it is through ceremony that we showcase monarchy at its best, can ceremony help inoculate it against its worst? More particularly, can ceremony be used to better inculcate the values of monarchy into our royals? The idea is not a new one. Throughout much of the medieval, Tudor and Stuart eras of England, on this day in the Church’s calendar, the monarch annually performed a ritual that by today’s standards is shockingly…humbling.
The deeply religious Edward II (1307-27) introduced the pedilavium to a Maundy service he attended at Rochester Cathedral. It’s exactly what it says on the Latin: pedi-: feet, lavare: to wash. And he didn’t duck the responsibility. Obeying the mandatum (from which derives the term ‘Maundy’) of Our Lord to “love one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34), the King of England bent before a number of his poorest subjects and poured water over their feet, as well as giving them alms – Maundy Money. This symbolic act of service by ruler to ruled would be repeated by monarchs with few exceptions almost until the dawn of the 18th century. Extra humility points go to Mary I for performing pedilavium to 41 people while “ever on her knees”, as well as donating 41 pence to each of them along with sundry gifts including one of her own gowns. Mary was forty-one years of age, and so was in keeping with the tradition thought to have started in 1363, when the fifty-year-old Edward III gave 50 pence each to fifty commoners.
Kings who dispensed with this show of servility have tended to get ideas above their lofty station, and not ended well. Charles I was a rare sight at Royal Maundy services, and after a strong start James II abandoned the pedilavium during his short reign and was the last to perform it.
Although Maundy Money survived well into the 1688 Settlement, it became less associated with the monarch and more with lower-ranking royals. A 20th century monarch would not personally hand it out until 1932 – George V – and then only once. While both his sons also participated, it is the incumbent monarch to whom, with her characteristic flair for inclusive optics and the power of convention, we truly owe the revival of this remarkable ritual, as the Rev’d Dr William Whyte notes. The Queen’s decision to make Royal Maundy a geographically as well as chronologically movable feast, taking place in a different British cathedral each year, has made it “part of the modern monarch’s armoury”. In her 68-year reign, she has missed the occasion just four times. This year, she has sent the (these days only emblematic) coins to the homes of the ninety-three recipients (chosen for their charitable works, not their poverty).
I am not for a moment suggesting our soon-to-be 94-year-old sovereign mark Maundy Thursday 2021 by getting on her knees over a washbowl of suds. The new life she has breathed into the custom of Maundy Money is just one example of the dedication and imagination she has brought to her reign, and thus of why we treasure her. There are reasons why the Bible Society celebrated her as ‘The Servant Queen’ for her 90th birthday.
But whenever the Coronation of her successor may be, the United Kingdom will be almost unrecognisable from the country that saw her crowned in 1953. Back then, a majority would agree with the statement that the monarch had been chosen by God. Now it’s a novelty to meet someone who believes there is a God to choose one, at least openly. The signs of deterioration in the moral mission of monarchy are already showing. The Duke of York, a post-marital Johnny-come-lately to the toxic cocktail party of misogyny and 1960s libertinism, with his tin-ear for anything that sounds relatable to the public, bears no visible appreciation of it whatsoever. With Meghan, there is a fool or knave question: either she didn’t understand what she was signing up for, or she did understand it and didn’t care for it. In any case, it’s quite clear from her move back to Hollywood that it wasn’t the publicity side of royalty that she didn’t take to, but the service element. Kate and Wills have been brilliant, though at times given in to a Meghan-esque temptation to get easy millennial applause by embracing fashionable causes (however only in one case has that truly worried me: Wills’ scorched-earth policy toward the House of Windsor’s priceless ivory carvings collection. Thankfully that was some years ago and Kate has probably talked some sense into him). Prince Charles has grown in stature over the past few years, though retains his lifelong capacity for occasional clanging errors of judgement. Only Princess Anne comes close to the Queen in her sterling record for engagements.
But would the reinstitution of pedilavium really help craft a new breed of servant royals? That’s what the medievals believed: Henry III’s children assisted him in the Royal Maundy service as an integral part of their training for royal life. We could follow the Queen's lead of rolling it out not just across the country but across the other 15 realms, dispatching a royal to each on rotation, while King Charles III attends to our island.
But don’t we live in a more cynical era? Didn’t our tolerance for the ancient and sincere die in the trenches of Flanders, and Monty Python write the eulogy? The reaction to the Queen’s Dame Vera reference suggests otherwise, and let’s not forget the pedilavium itself has recently been deployed with great impact by another media-friendly religious leader on a mission for renewal. "This is a symbol, it is a sign — washing your feet means I am at your service," Pope Francis told the young prison inmates whose feet he washed at his first Mass of the Lord’s Supper as Pope in 2013.
There is also a growing awareness of other civilisations drawing on their foundational stories to keep their rulers honest, often with far harsher results. One of Queen Elizabeth II’s more famous subjects, Prof. Jordan Peterson is fond of recounting the Mesopotamians’ annual drama-ceremony to their creation myth of the god Marduk, who confronted chaos in the form of a dragon-goddess Tiamat. The emperor would be brought before a high priest who would ritually beat him, and have him confess the ways in which he had failed to produce order from chaos in the footsteps of Marduk that year.
In other words, it could get a lost worse than foot-washing once a year. And yet it is our religion – the religion the monarch swears to defend – that is, as the Church historian Bruce L. Shelley put it, “the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its god.” I can’t think of a better way of preparing future generations of royals for a lifetime of duty and service than to learn from the original Servant King.
NB: all credit for Royal Maundy research goes to Brian Robinson, 'The Royal Maundy', (1977), and Virginia Cole, 'Ritual charity and royal children in thirteenth century England', (2002)
Likewise, a piece predicated on recent moral failings on the part of big hitters in the British Royal Family seems suddenly passé as the media once again becomes awash with admiring columns about our Queen’s pitch-perfect calm in a storm. But one doesn’t need to delve too far back into the fickle media cycle to find an example of a royal putting his foot in it. I closed ranks around the Prince of Wales in his ailment as much as the next Twitter monarchist. But one might humbly ask HRH if that were not the sort of little tussle that could perhaps be avoided? That while one can awfully well understand the attraction of Balmoral when one is feeling under the weather, that one had nonetheless better stick to governmental medical advice and stay put when exhibiting covid-19 symptoms, not least when one is but a few years from becoming Head of State? Hadn’t one?
However, Prince Charles’ corona faux pas is probably not the scandal that will define the monarchy’s recent torrid period. Such ignominy will belong to the cringeworthy moral deafness of Prince Andrew, and the entitled sulking and eventual storming-off displayed by Mr and Mrs Markle. But, as much as it pains me to write it, the morning star of this extended PR car crash was the quite literal car crash caused by the Duke of Edinburgh’s nonagenarian wilfulness. More or less from then until the genius of the Queen’s address this week, we monarchists have been on the backfoot, barely keeping pace with the latest human frailty and its aftershocks; scarcely a chance to dust ourselves off from one rearguard action before being dragooned by circumstance into the next. Suddenly, even royals we’d never heard of were letting us down. When the divorce of Peter and Autumn Phillips was announced, a jaded associate asked me “If not even the Royals themselves are stalwart monarchists, who is?”
Of course, there are always bigger fish to fry (especially in Holy Week); defending the Crown will never be as important as fighting the corona. And the ease with which I can sit here as a private citizen and castigate my fellow humans for their inevitable fallibility before the cameras of the world is one privilege that I am quite ready to check. But my monarchism having come of age during what was for the most part a golden decade for the Firm, I’m not prepared to give it up without a fight.
The world watched fixated at the brilliance of royal pageantry in the form of the traditional formal beauty of William and Kate’s wedding, with a verdant freshness added by those trees; the all-out national hoorah of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, when even the weather performed its constitutional role of ensuring continuity and stiff-upper-lipped good humour; the star turn of Her Majesty in the hilarious London Olympics Opening Ceremony. Harry and Meghan’s wedding, with its gracefully weaved cultural syncretism, was a textbook example of royalty’s ability to welcome what were once outsiders into an ever-broadening tent (the later intersectional grievance-mongering of ‘the Sussex Squad’ notwithstanding).
But if it is through ceremony that we showcase monarchy at its best, can ceremony help inoculate it against its worst? More particularly, can ceremony be used to better inculcate the values of monarchy into our royals? The idea is not a new one. Throughout much of the medieval, Tudor and Stuart eras of England, on this day in the Church’s calendar, the monarch annually performed a ritual that by today’s standards is shockingly…humbling.
The deeply religious Edward II (1307-27) introduced the pedilavium to a Maundy service he attended at Rochester Cathedral. It’s exactly what it says on the Latin: pedi-: feet, lavare: to wash. And he didn’t duck the responsibility. Obeying the mandatum (from which derives the term ‘Maundy’) of Our Lord to “love one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34), the King of England bent before a number of his poorest subjects and poured water over their feet, as well as giving them alms – Maundy Money. This symbolic act of service by ruler to ruled would be repeated by monarchs with few exceptions almost until the dawn of the 18th century. Extra humility points go to Mary I for performing pedilavium to 41 people while “ever on her knees”, as well as donating 41 pence to each of them along with sundry gifts including one of her own gowns. Mary was forty-one years of age, and so was in keeping with the tradition thought to have started in 1363, when the fifty-year-old Edward III gave 50 pence each to fifty commoners.
Kings who dispensed with this show of servility have tended to get ideas above their lofty station, and not ended well. Charles I was a rare sight at Royal Maundy services, and after a strong start James II abandoned the pedilavium during his short reign and was the last to perform it.
Although Maundy Money survived well into the 1688 Settlement, it became less associated with the monarch and more with lower-ranking royals. A 20th century monarch would not personally hand it out until 1932 – George V – and then only once. While both his sons also participated, it is the incumbent monarch to whom, with her characteristic flair for inclusive optics and the power of convention, we truly owe the revival of this remarkable ritual, as the Rev’d Dr William Whyte notes. The Queen’s decision to make Royal Maundy a geographically as well as chronologically movable feast, taking place in a different British cathedral each year, has made it “part of the modern monarch’s armoury”. In her 68-year reign, she has missed the occasion just four times. This year, she has sent the (these days only emblematic) coins to the homes of the ninety-three recipients (chosen for their charitable works, not their poverty).
I am not for a moment suggesting our soon-to-be 94-year-old sovereign mark Maundy Thursday 2021 by getting on her knees over a washbowl of suds. The new life she has breathed into the custom of Maundy Money is just one example of the dedication and imagination she has brought to her reign, and thus of why we treasure her. There are reasons why the Bible Society celebrated her as ‘The Servant Queen’ for her 90th birthday.
But whenever the Coronation of her successor may be, the United Kingdom will be almost unrecognisable from the country that saw her crowned in 1953. Back then, a majority would agree with the statement that the monarch had been chosen by God. Now it’s a novelty to meet someone who believes there is a God to choose one, at least openly. The signs of deterioration in the moral mission of monarchy are already showing. The Duke of York, a post-marital Johnny-come-lately to the toxic cocktail party of misogyny and 1960s libertinism, with his tin-ear for anything that sounds relatable to the public, bears no visible appreciation of it whatsoever. With Meghan, there is a fool or knave question: either she didn’t understand what she was signing up for, or she did understand it and didn’t care for it. In any case, it’s quite clear from her move back to Hollywood that it wasn’t the publicity side of royalty that she didn’t take to, but the service element. Kate and Wills have been brilliant, though at times given in to a Meghan-esque temptation to get easy millennial applause by embracing fashionable causes (however only in one case has that truly worried me: Wills’ scorched-earth policy toward the House of Windsor’s priceless ivory carvings collection. Thankfully that was some years ago and Kate has probably talked some sense into him). Prince Charles has grown in stature over the past few years, though retains his lifelong capacity for occasional clanging errors of judgement. Only Princess Anne comes close to the Queen in her sterling record for engagements.
But would the reinstitution of pedilavium really help craft a new breed of servant royals? That’s what the medievals believed: Henry III’s children assisted him in the Royal Maundy service as an integral part of their training for royal life. We could follow the Queen's lead of rolling it out not just across the country but across the other 15 realms, dispatching a royal to each on rotation, while King Charles III attends to our island.
But don’t we live in a more cynical era? Didn’t our tolerance for the ancient and sincere die in the trenches of Flanders, and Monty Python write the eulogy? The reaction to the Queen’s Dame Vera reference suggests otherwise, and let’s not forget the pedilavium itself has recently been deployed with great impact by another media-friendly religious leader on a mission for renewal. "This is a symbol, it is a sign — washing your feet means I am at your service," Pope Francis told the young prison inmates whose feet he washed at his first Mass of the Lord’s Supper as Pope in 2013.
There is also a growing awareness of other civilisations drawing on their foundational stories to keep their rulers honest, often with far harsher results. One of Queen Elizabeth II’s more famous subjects, Prof. Jordan Peterson is fond of recounting the Mesopotamians’ annual drama-ceremony to their creation myth of the god Marduk, who confronted chaos in the form of a dragon-goddess Tiamat. The emperor would be brought before a high priest who would ritually beat him, and have him confess the ways in which he had failed to produce order from chaos in the footsteps of Marduk that year.
In other words, it could get a lost worse than foot-washing once a year. And yet it is our religion – the religion the monarch swears to defend – that is, as the Church historian Bruce L. Shelley put it, “the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its god.” I can’t think of a better way of preparing future generations of royals for a lifetime of duty and service than to learn from the original Servant King.
NB: all credit for Royal Maundy research goes to Brian Robinson, 'The Royal Maundy', (1977), and Virginia Cole, 'Ritual charity and royal children in thirteenth century England', (2002)
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