Monarchy: The History of an Idea E-Book

Brenda Ralph Lewis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Brenda Ralph Lewis presents an informative overview of how kings and queens came about and of the many forces that have shaped the identity of monarchy and in many cases caused its downfall.

Leseprobe

MONARCHY

THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA

BRENDA RALPH LEWIS

First published in 2011

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Brenda Ralph Lewis, 2011

The right of Brenda Ralph Lewis, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7089 4

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7090 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Introduction

O

NE

Monarchy in the Ancient World

T

WO

Monarchy in Asia

T

HREE

Monarchy and the Church

F

OUR

Renaissance Monarchy

F

IVE

Absolute Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings

S

IX

1848, Year of Revolutions

S

EVEN

Monarchy in England

E

IGHT

Constitutional Monarchy

N

INE

Abolishing the Monarchy

T

EN

The World of Royal Celebrities

Notes

Bibliography

Introduction

Monarchies are few and far between in the twenty-first century. Only around a dozen of them remain, together with a few independent principalities and Arab sheikdoms. At one time, monarchy exercised a virtual monopoly of government. Now it appears to be an anachronism, persisting into a democratic world that has largely rejected everything it stands for: privilege and the rights of heredity, class superiority, the prerogatives of wealth, and the concept of monarchs as special, even divine, beings.

There is a fundamental difference between monarchy and its alternative, the republic, which today dominates the governance of the world. As a concept, the republic relies on philosophy and ideology, the use of intellect and reason to change the circumstances of life. Monarchy, on the other hand, appeals to something much deeper in the human psyche: the need to find safety in authority and reassurance in the exercise of that authority by those who can be trusted to preserve an established way of life.

In 1789, the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité said it all for the republic that emerged from the French Revolution. However, in the ancient world which first gave rise to monarchy, this philosophy, predicated on human rights and the dignity of the individual, was not something society could, as yet, afford. Superior strength and intelligence, force of personality and all the other qualities of leadership were much more important in perilous, primitive times when survival was always on the line and the world seemed full of angry gods and spirits bent on human destruction.

In these circumstances, the leaders who emerged were usually those who appeared to have contact with, and some influence over, the unseen forces that governed everyday life. Warriors, priests and others with this special ability became the first monarchs and on the way, their proximity to divine forces gave them a god-like aura. It was a short step from there to the concept of monarchs as divine in themselves.

This is an idea that persists today in traditional societies, such as those of Japan or Nepal, where religions – Shinto and Hinduism respectively – allow for the addition to existing pantheons of new, royal gods. However, this was not possible where monotheism precluded all other deities, as it did among the Jews of ancient Israel or, much later, the Christians of Europe. Israel had its kings, although the Bible makes it clear that God did not approve, on the grounds that He was the only authority they required. Subsequently, the Jews never fully solved the problem of how to incorporate monarchs into a system where their one God was also a ‘jealous God’.

Christian Europe, on the other hand, developed a different emphasis to cope with the problem: the Divine Right of Kings, in which monarchs were appointed by, and answerable only to, God. This, though, was not meant to give monarchs a direct line to the deity. There were ‘middlemen’, as it were – the Pope and the Church in Rome which, in medieval times, claimed the kings of Europe as their vassals and punished them for failures of fealty. Several kings fought hard against these restraints. One of them – Henry II of England – caused the greatest scandal of medieval times when his quarrel with his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, led to Becket’s murder in 1170.

Europe’s kings did not get a real chance to exert total mastery over their own realms until after the Renaissance began in around 1450. The royal urge for independence was succoured by the revival of ancient Greek and Roman culture, the ‘new learning’, the development of humanism, which celebrated human abilities and, above all, the serious divisions in the Church which resulted in the breakaway Protestant movement. Ultimately, this produced a more draconian form of monarchy: absolute monarchy in which a king’s word was law, his will was unquestioned, his person was hallowed and his decisions were incontrovertible. The monarch who most epitomised this form of monarchy was King Louis XIV of France whose statement ‘L’état c’est moi’ – ‘I am the state’ described in a nutshell the basic belief that lay behind absolute rule. It was ironic, though, that the Renaissance also gave rise to those concepts of human rights and the dignity of the individual which ultimately brought down absolute monarchy and did so in a very violent, bloody fashion.

England escaped this fate by settling its account with its monarchs in its own way. Kings and queens in England had never ruled by Divine Right and the Stuart monarchs who attempted it paid a heavy price for their temerity. One, Charles I, was executed in 1649. Another, his son Charles II, spent eleven years in exile before he was able to claim his throne in 1660. His brother, James II, was deposed and driven from his kingdom in 1688.

Although the English experimented with a republic – the short-lived Commonwealth that followed the death of Charles I – they later found an ingenious way of retaining their monarchy while keeping it under parliamentary control. Constitutional monarchy, in which monarchs reigned but did not rule, was first introduced in England in 1689. This, of course, was a full century before the ultimate explosion of protest against absolute monarchy – the French Revolution. The Revolution in its turn gave rise to a mass of liberal uprisings right across Europe in 1848, and these ultimately snowballed so far that absolute monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings ceased to exist in Europe seventy years later.

What followed was the heyday of republican government, which achieved a clean sweep of central and south-east Europe by the mid-twentieth century. However, monarchy and royalty failed to fade into history, as republican lore had foretold. In its constitutional form, monarchy survived to serve as a focus of national loyalty, recasting royalty as social leaders or as celebrities spearheading charities and other good works. In these various ways, monarchy has beaten all the odds and evolved its way into a new millennium where many once presumed it had no place.

ONE

Monarchy in the Ancient World

Human beings are not equal. If they were, there would never have been any kings, emperors, aristocracies, leaders or anyone else who stood out from the crowd. In our egalitarian times, it may be unfashionable to say so, but nature, which is the driving force in such matters, has never worked on the basis of equality. The lottery of the gene pool from which individuals take their characteristics, abilities and personalities has always ensured that some are better endowed than others. In modern societies, all may be equal before the law. Opportunities are there for everyone. Human rights are, or should be, universal.

However, theory and practice part company before the obvious fact that some are better than others at exploiting the chances offered to them. Leaders have an inborn quality of command which impresses those who lack it. Talent is a mysterious gift, arising from a mixture of intelligence, inheritance and sheer chance. Genius is even more rare.

Nature’s inequalities have been of benefit to all societies across the centuries, from the most primitive to our own age of space exploration and advanced technology. In all ages, extraordinary individuals have been required to solve problems, provide hope or inspiration in times of trouble and, when life has been under threat, devise ways of enabling it to continue. In earliest times, rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and superstitions all had their part to play in mollifying the destructive forces of nature – fire, volcanoes, floods or the strange workings of heavenly bodies. However, it was those who looked as if they could exert control over rampant nature who leapt ahead of the rest and began to forge the brand of personal power that eventually led to the institution of monarchy.

Monarchy, especially in Britain, has long been regarded with awe, infused with magic. Royalty is special, almost a race apart, human because royals die like everyone else, but somehow perpetual. This may sound like some fanciful delusion but it is more solidly based in human experience than it sounds.

The ancient medicine man, with his ritual dances, strange gestures and magic potions exerted a strong influence over the members of his tribe, who looked to him to cure their ills or devise a defence against their enemies. Shamans appeared to have the ability to make rain, produce thunder or drive the moon from the face of the sun during total eclipses. Sorcerers could curse and kill from a distance. Today, we would say that the medicine man had some basic medical knowledge not given to all. The shaman knew how to read the sky and realised that the sun in eclipse was only a temporary state. The sorcerer had an inkling of human psychology. But for those unaware of the secrets of such magic, this was impressive – and comforting – stuff.

It was also power, and power where it most mattered. This not only raised these ‘magicians’ to a special position in society, it raised their families as well. In time, magic became a family business, and a family secret. Oligarchies arose in which magic abilities were thought to pass from one generation to the next.1 The first heirs to the ‘throne’ were heirs to tribal magic, with the knowledge and the right to exert power over the tribe. Their abilities ensured their dominance, the dependence of the tribe ensured their continuity.

Shamans may have been working their magic 27,000 years ago or more, when cave painters at Lascaux in France, Altamira in Spain and Panchmarhi in India were making images of the animals they hunted for food. Working in semi-darkness with crude tools and raw pigments, these prehistoric artists achieved a wonderful degree of realism, perspective and skill in the use of colour. These cave paintings were discovered in the late nineteenth century, but only recently was it realised that there was more to them than met the eye.

Many animals were shown pierced with spears. Some paintings were effectively X-ray images, showing the animals’ insides. From this and other evidence, the theory grew that prehistoric cave paintings were a part of a system of sympathetic magic designed to promote success in the hunt. Situated deep inside the caves, the areas of the paintings were like temples or shrines where prayers were said and the appropriate rituals performed.

Quite possibly, the shamans or medicine men presided. The caves, infused with mystery and an eerie, frightening atmosphere, were the perfect stage for magic. The small oil lamps that passed for illumination in prehistoric times flickered among the pools of darkness. Shadows moved over the walls. The shaman’s voice echoed in and out of the grottoes and uneven surfaces. In this setting, the paintings could take on a dreamlike air of virtual reality. Afterwards, the hunters set out, spiritually fortified by the ceremonies. If the hunt was successful, it was an easy matter to ascribe its success to the shaman and his rituals – and the images painted on the cave walls.

Prehistoric cave-dwellings, and their paintings, were not isolated, however, or if they were, it was not for long. Where the hunting grounds were fruitful, they attracted numerous families to the area, and the crowding, inevitably, led to rivalries. Just as inevitably, rivalries led to war. Most of the early wars arose over food and water resources or the invasion of territory by neighbouring tribes. The weapons – stakes, axes, bows and arrows – were already to hand: the tools that could kill animals could also be turned on enemies. So could the skills already developed for the hunt: strategy, tactics, or the nerve to stage ambushes or work the element of surprise.

In these circumstances, the most able, most fearless warriors would naturally rise to positions of command. They knew by instinct how and where to attack the enemy, defend a position, work out a plan of action or inspire trust and confidence in others. How they knew, where their abilities came from, were part of the mystery that made them superior.

Wars and winning wars became so vital to the survival of the tribe that the warrior general soon became the warrior chief. In larger groupings, he would become the paramount chief or the warrior king. Somewhere along the way, the proto-kings of prehistoric times took on the mantle of the shamans and medicine men. Quite possibly they were descended from them, so that magic and military leadership were powerfully combined in one person.2

There was more to this than the rise of one man to the pinnacle of power. The connotations of this rise were of vital importance in the evolution of human society. In The Golden Bough, the classic work of comparative religion first published in 1890, Sir James Frazer put it this way:

The rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. . . . The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will often happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he will readily avail himself of the opportunity.

Even the whims and caprices of a tyrant may be of service in breaking the chain of custom which lies so heavy on the savage. And as soon as the tribe . . . yields to the direction of a single strong and resolute mind, it becomes formidable to its neighbours and enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.3

However, the rise of kings was not simply a political development, but one that was intimately bound up with religion and the idea that monarchs enjoyed a line to the gods not given to other mortals. From there, it was easy to see kings as the earthly representatives of the gods, and finally, as gods themselves. These transitions were hardly difficult. The ancient shamans and sorcerers were believed to commune with the gods. This made them into a readymade élite. The gods ‘spoke’ to them, and only to them, and they conveyed the divine pronouncements to the people.

Kings as warriors had a similar interest in reserving their eminence to themselves and their families. However, the notion that innate talent or genius enabled some to succeed where others failed was rarely in keeping with the thought processes of a superstitious age. Instead, the most obvious explanation was that successful war leaders were personally guided by the gods or spirits. And when the functions of king and priest or magician were combined, there was a dual interest in maintaining the supremacy their skills had enabled them to achieve.

Ultimately, all the most vital elements in life were claimed by, or accorded to, the king. One was the fertility of the soil, which became of cardinal importance once the early hunter-gatherer stage of civilisation gave way to farming. Another was the direction of religious ceremonies, on the principle that if the gods were present in the form of their earthly representatives, the kings, then prayers would be more efficacious. The leadership of armies was a further monopoly and another was the right of kings to choose their own successors. Frequently, although not always, successors were sons of the previous monarch: they became kings in their own right on the premise that heredity had given them the same abilities and qualities as their forebears. In this way, dynasties – the greatest of all monopolies – were established and perpetuated. So was the veneration accorded to monarchs, which was little different from the worship given to the gods. It was therefore in the interests of kings to appear as godlike as possible. In Sumeria, the earliest known civilisation of Mesopotamia, monarchs buttressed their power by laying claim to divinity. This, they said, came to them at birth from the gods and goddesses who were their parents. They also took on the mantle of established deities and were worshipped, in addition, as incarnations of Tammuz, the god of fertility, or as the earthly lieutenants of Ishtar, the goddess of heaven. Later, in the twenty-third century BC, Sargon, King of Akkad, asserted his divinity towards the end of his reign, after his military conquests had created the first great empire in Mesopotamia.

In the ancient world, the godly status of kings was nowhere more elaborately displayed than in Egypt. The divine pharaoh was an integral part of the Egyptian religion and was thought to be the reincarnation of Horus, son of the god Osiris. It was from Osiris that the pharaohs inherited their ability to live after death. With the pharaoh as its centrepiece, the civilisation of Ancient Egypt institutionalised the powers of the ancient shamans and sorcerers. According to Dr Henri Frankfort, the Dutch-born Egyptologist: ‘Kingship in Egypt remained the channel through which the powers of Nature flow into the body politic, to bring human endeavour to fruition.’

This exalted function was maintained even after the concept of kingship changed during the Middle Kingdom (2080–1640 BC): the pharaohs, it was now believed, were not in themselves divine but were appointed by and answerable to the gods. This was the origin of the Divine Right of Kings, which later saw its greatest days, and greatest disasters, in Europe.

Whether as gods or divine appointees, the pharaohs possessed qualities not given to ordinary mortals, such as Ka or vital energy. They were expected to dispense maat – justice, stability and truth – maintain the cycle of the seasons and perpetuate the divine order. They were the source of the continuing relationship between nature and human beings, which was first established by Osiris. Through their power, they regulated the passage of the sun through the sky from sunrise to sunset. Through them, the River Nile ebbed and flowed.

The importance of the divine pharaohs could hardly have been greater. If anything, they regarded themselves as even mightier than the gods. In the twentieth century BC, Pharaoh Amenemhet I, whose divine name, Wehem-masul, meant ‘he who repeats births’, set out the all-embracing extent of his powers when he said: ‘I was the one who produced barley. The Nile respected me at every defile. None hungered in my years or thirsted in them. Men dwelt in peace through that which I wrought.’

Amenemhet, originally a vizier of humble origins and a usurper, was still subject to the cut and thrust of politics and the rivalries inherent in the use of power: a ‘harem conspiracy’ was brewed against him and he was assassinated by his bodyguards in 1962 BC. However, in ancient Egypt, death was not the end. A dead pharaoh, it was believed, was still capable of caring for his people and exercising his powers for their benefit in the afterlife. Divinity was also his legacy: Amenemhet’s son, Senusret I, automatically assumed his father’s godly status when he succeeded him.

The perception of the pharaoh as god depended, of course, on the continual existence and worship of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. This was why the priests in the fourteenth century BC reacted so violently when the maverick pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten, the ‘pious son of Aten’, sought to alter the basis of ancient Egyptian religion. In place of a pantheon of gods, Akhenaten chose to worship only one, the sun god Aten, later known as Aten-Ra. Akhenaten retained his divinity as pharaoh and presented himself as the mediator between Aten and the Egyptian people.

The dislocation of Egyptian spiritual life was immense. Amun, the supreme creator god, was demoted. The cult of Osiris was banned. The names of all other Egyptian deities were erased from the walls of temples. All previous religious festivals were cancelled. The main temple at Tell-el-Amarna was realigned with a valley through which the sun first appeared at daybreak: unlike the temples of Amun, they were left open to the sky – and the sun.

However, even the divine pharaoh could not shift the huge weight of traditional worship and devotion given to the established gods. Ordinary Egyptians refused to alter their beliefs. The priests pronounced Akhenaten’s changes blasphemous and Akhenaten himself, a heretic. After his death in around 1336 BC, he was buried in a small, undecorated tomb. The priests of Amun, who returned to power in the reign of his successor, Tutankhamen, defaced the name and image of Akhenaten wherever they occurred, and destroyed the monuments he had built. The Egyptians were never again diverted from their ancient beliefs until the advent of Christianity in the first century AD. Up to that time the divine status and all-embracing powers of the pharaohs continued to derive from the traditional gods.

Much later, royal, or rather imperial, divinity made its appearance in ancient Rome. Shortly after 29 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, achieved power: although he never claimed the title, contenting himself with pater patriae, father of the people, or princeps, first citizen, Octavianus eventually assumed the status of Rome’s first emperor under the new name of Augustus. After their deaths, Augustus and several of his successors were proclaimed gods. Special temples were erected dedicated to their worship. The Romans were generally tolerant about religion, and faiths that had originated all over the Empire were permissible in Rome. Each faith was allowed its own temple. However, there was one proviso: all of them had to acknowledge the Roman emperors as gods. Only the Jews, with their devotion to Yahweh, the one and only God, refused to obey. The tone was set by Julius Caesar, who was made a god after the conspirators who murdered him in 44 BC were caught and punished. The divinity of the Roman emperors lasted for three centuries: they were still being worshipped in western Asia and Egypt when the Roman Empire turned Christian after 313 AD.

The king as god was not a principle confined to a single part of the world. It was global. It arose in places far away from the civilisations of Mesopotamia, China, India or Rome and did so without any known contact. In Aztec Mexico, for example, the Great Speaker, or tlatoani, was regarded as divine, and elaborate precautions were taken to avoid looking them in the face. This belief was similar to that of the ancient Jews that to look on the face of God was to invite death. In addition, the tlatoani was considered so sacred that his feet were not supposed to touch the ground. This accounted for the behaviour of the tetecuhtin, the Aztec nobles, who carried the litter of the Great Speaker Moctezuma Xoyoctzin, better known as Montezuma, at his first meeting with Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who invaded Mexico in November 1519:

‘Montezuma descended from his litter,’ wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ conquistadores, ‘and . . . great [lords] supported him beneath a marvellously rich canopy of green feathers, decorated with gold work, silver [and] pearls. It was a marvellous sight. The great Montezuma was magnificently clad . . . and wore sandals . . . the soles of which were of gold and the upper parts ornamented with precious stones. . . . Many more lords . . . walked before [him] sweeping the ground on which he was to tread and laying down cloaks so that his feet should not touch the earth. Not one of these [lords] dared to look him in the face.’

Elsewhere in pre-Hispanic America, in Tahuantinsuyu – the ‘Land of the Four Quarters’ better known as Inca Peru – the Sapa Inca or Supreme Lord was thought to be so exalted that no one was fit to eat meals with him. Instead, he ate alone, twice a day at eight in the morning and at nightfall, taking his food with his fingers from gold and silver dishes held for him by handmaidens. If any gravy or pieces of food fell on the Sapa Inca’s fine vicuna wool tunic, he immediately changed into another garment. The soiled tunic was burned. If there were any of his hairs on his clothing, his servants would eat them so that no one could ever touch any part of his sacred body.

As with the Aztec tlatoani, it was forbidden to look directly at the Sapa Inca. Often, when he received visitors, attendants would hold a purple cloth veil in front of him so that no one could gaze upon his face. Customs like these inculcated awe and dread in all who came into the royal presence. In 1532, when another Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, brought a small group of men to the Inca capital Cuzco, one of them, a fifteen-year-old page called Pedro Pizarro saw what happened when a provincial governor arrived late at the palace of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa.

‘The [Sapa] Inca gave [the governor] the Lord of the Huaylas, limited time in which to go to his estates and return.’ Pedro Pizarro wrote forty years later in his Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru. ‘He took rather longer, and when he came back, he brought a gift of fruit and arrived in the Inca’s presence. The Lord of the Huaylas began to tremble in such a manner before the Inca that he was unable to remain on his feet.’

This reaction was hardly surprising when the Sapa Inca was regarded as the son of the sun god, Inti. Shining brilliantly in the sky, Inti represented Viracocha, the giver of all life and owner of everything and everyone on Earth. It followed that everything under the sun belonged to the Sapa Inca. The land was his, the soil was his, the people were his property, the vast wealth of gold, which was called ‘the sweat of the Sun’ belonged to him, and so did the silver, ‘the tears of the Moon’.

Inevitably, there were risks involved in loading so much power and obligation on to monarchs that they became responsible for the ongoing survival of their subjects.4 In some parts of the world, this led to a savage conclusion. Once a king aged and his health declined, the well-being of the whole community was in danger. The fertility of the soil, for which the king was responsible, declined with him. The solution was to kill the ageing king and put a younger, more vigorous successor in his place.

In this context, the soul was bound up with the body. A feeble body meant a feeble soul. It was thought much better to kill a king before his soul weakened too far, to catch it as it emerged at the moment of death and transfer it to his young successor. This killing of the god-king occurred all over the ancient world. It was widely believed that if a monarch were allowed to die a natural death, disaster was imminent, although the deed itself was normally left until almost the last moment.

In ancient Cambodia, for example, when the elders decided that a sick monarch was not going to recover, he was stabbed to death. In the Congo of central Africa, where the chief, the Chitomé, was regarded as sole sustainer of the earth and its benefits, his natural death meant the end of the world. To avert this catastrophe, a dying chief was killed by his chosen successor.

This, it appears, was not simply done with the victim’s assent: the Chitomé himself ordered that he die in this fashion. In 1732, Father Merolla de la Sorrento, an Italian missionary in Africa, explained the ramifications of the custom in his Relazione del Viaggio nel regno di Congo (Account of a Journey in the Kingdom of Congo).

Let us pass to the death of the magicians, who often die a violent death and that for the most part voluntarily. I shall speak only of the . . . Ganga Chitomé, being the reputed god of the earth. The first fruits of all the crops are offered to him as his due, because they are thought to be produced by his power. . . . He asserts that his body cannot die a natural death, and therefore when he knows he is near the end of his days, whether it is brought about by sickness or age . . . he calls on one of his disciples to whom he wishes to communicate his power, in order that he may succeed him. And having made him tie a noose to his neck, he commands him to strangle him, or to knock him on the head with a great cudgel and kill him. His disciple obeys. . . . This tragedy is enacted in public, in order that his successor may be manifested, who hath the power of fertilising the earth, the power having been imparted to him by the deceased; otherwise, so they say, the earth would remain barren and the world would perish.5

In Aztec Mexico, the killing of kings was observed in a ritualised form. The victim was not the tlatoani but a substitute king who was chosen for disposal at the annual Festival of Tezcatlipoca, one of the Aztec creator-gods. A young man of sixteen or seventeen was selected to be ‘King for a Year’.

During that year, in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital situated on Lake Texcoco, he was pampered in every way possible. He was taught how to play the flute and was given splendid garments to wear. He had gold bangles to decorate his arms and gold bells to wear around his legs. He was garlanded with flowers and had eight attendants to wait on him and grant his every wish. His wishes included as many young women as bedmates as he could manage during his year as ‘king’.

Some three weeks before the next Festival of Tezcatlipoca, the young man was dressed as a warrior chieftain. A week of feasting and dancing preceded the festival itself. The ‘king’ was the centrepiece of the celebrations. Then, on the day of the festival, the ‘king’ stepped into a canoe and was paddled to a small temple on the shore of Lake Texcoco. As he walked towards the temple steps, he broke all the flutes he had played during his year of leisure and pleasure. He mounted the steps and became the latest of the thousands of human sacrifices offered by the tlenamacac, the élite priests whose daily task it was to rip open chests and offer the still-beating hearts to the sun god Huitzilopochtli.6 Immediately, another young man was chosen to take the dead ‘king’s’ place and to die in the same way at the next year’s festival.

King-killing was most common in Africa where, in pre-colonial times, there were hundreds of small kingdoms, all of them relying for survival on the moods of the gods and many of them prepared, it seems, to sacrifice their monarchs to ensure divine blessing. In this context, a gruesome fate awaited kings of Fazoql, in the valley of the Blue Nile. One of their duties was to dispense justice, sitting beneath a tree designated for the purpose. However, if a king failed to appear ‘in court’ for three days in succession, through illness or some other reason, his relatives and ministers declared him persona non grata. He was no longer of use to his people, his country and even to his animals. It followed that he had to be hanged. This, though, was not a simple execution. The noose was equipped with two sharp razors so that as the rope closed tight around the king’s neck, his throat was cut. The killing of the kings of Fazoql was still going on in the nineteenth century.

The principle of king-killing could, of course, be abused. In Meroe, an ancient Ethiopian kingdom dating from around 300 BC, the priests decided whether the king should live or die. The ostensible reason was that an oracle from the gods had decreed the king’s death. More practical purposes could have been personal, political or dynastic. Priests with another, possibly more pliant, king in mind could use this custom to get rid of a monarch who was less agreeable to them. However that may be, when the order went out, kings were expected to obey, and for many centuries they did so. Then, some time in the mid-third century BC, according to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, a king came to the throne of Meroe with no intention of committing royal suicide on the say-so of his priests. He was Arkamani, whose eventual grave was the first of the pyramid tombs of Meroe. Arkamani, also known as Ergamenes, had been educated in Greece and had imbibed Greek ideas of individualism, free will and logical thinking. A king like this was unlikely to be a slave of custom, nor was he. When Arkamani received the order to kill himself, he went down to the temple, accompanied by a troop of armed soldiers. This time, it was the priests, not the king, who died.

Elsewhere in the ancient world, the kings as gods, their responsibilities and their duty to die for the sake of the community were not universal. For instance, the claims to divinity of the early kings in Sumeria did not spread widely among the later kingdoms of Mesopotamia. In a different, more practical tradition, councils of elders chose kings only in times of emergency, much as the Romans later chose their dictators. The royal role was to solve crises and preserve the people. The royal mission was seen as divine, but not the kings themselves. This concept of kingship left evidence in the bas reliefs and statues that celebrated Mesopotamia’s monarchs: unlike the Egyptian pharaoh-gods, they were carved life-size rather than oversize.

Divine kingship – in fact kingship itself – did not have much currency in ancient Greece, either. This land of sturdily republican city states which fostered the first stirrings of democracy was unlikely to want much to do with god-kings. In the fourth century BC, even Alexander III of Macedon – Alexander the Great – got short shrift when he attempted to assert his divinity with the liberty-loving Greeks. Chauvinism played its part. The Greeks had a great sense of superiority vis à vis the Macedonians, whom they regarded as barbarians. The Athenian politician and orator Demosthenes went so far as to call King Philip II, Alexander’s father, a ‘pestilent knave from . . . a district [where] we have not yet been able to purchase a decent slave.’

The autocratic Alexander was not typical of Macedonian royalty. Macedonian kings were not supreme lords, divine or otherwise. They were elected monarchs, whose appointment was confirmed by the acclamation of the military. They could be voted out of office if they lost popular loyalty and their powers were constitutional, not absolute. Under this system, kings were primus inter pares, first among equals, and they had to prove themselves worthy of their royal authority on a regular basis. There was no pomp, no pageantry and no royal regalia until it was introduced by Alexander. Kings of Macedonia did not even have a superior form of dress: they wore the same clothes as the hetairoi, the nobility.

Alexander’s view of his position in life was far too exalted to be confined by such ideas. He believed that divine blood coursed through his veins and he claimed descent from the legendary Greek heroes Achilles and Herakles. He even referred to his father Philip II as ‘my so-called father’. It followed that Alexander was much more despotic and demanded much more veneration than the Macedonian concept of kingship ever envisaged, or the Greeks were willing to give.

Monarchy in Greece had barely outlasted the eighth century BC, 400 years before Alexander was born. Once considered suited only to the large tribal group, kingship gave way to rule by councils of elders. Starting on the island of Crete, this type of government spread to mainland Greece, where it was first taken up in Sparta. Where monarchy survived, as in Laconia, the kings were military and religious heads, but the elders held powers that were equal to theirs. Long before Alexander, therefore, the Greeks had become accustomed to what might be called ‘rule by committee’, a committee whose members were either elected or chosen by acclamation.

The picture changed, however, when Philip of Macedon won supremacy over the Greek city states after a long struggle lasting almost twenty years. By 338 BC, Philip had prevailed but two years later, he was assassinated. Alexander, then only twenty years old, succeeded his father as king, but the Greek city states refused to accept him. With the connivance of Athens and other states, the state of Thebes rose in revolt in 336 BC and again the following year. Alexander’s answer was to destroy Thebes, sell its people into slavery and parcel out the Theban lands among its neighbours.

After this, the Greeks had no option but to submit to Alexander’s military genius. At the Diet of Corinth, all the states, except for Sparta, elected him as Hgemn Autokrator, sole leader, for a campaign designed to free the Greek colonies in Ionia from Persian rule. Subsequently, the city states – some out of gratitude, but others unwillingly – granted Alexander the ‘godlike honours’ he demanded of them. Doubtless to their relief, Alexander’s imperial ambitions soon took him far away from Greece as he embarked on the conquest of a vast empire that stretched to the edge of the then known world, along the coast of India. Alexander died in 323 BC, aged thirty-two. The emissaries the Greeks sent to his bedside wore crowns, possibly in his honour, but maybe as a derisory comment on his royal ambitions.

The Greek reason for resisting the idea of the god-king had been political and philosophical. A much stronger challenge, based on religious principles, arose in ancient Israel. This was due to the nature of Yahweh, who demanded from the Jews a much stricter brand of obedience than any other deity imposed on worshippers. At the very start of the Jews’ relationship with Yahweh, He demanded exclusive rights to worship: this fundamental rule was set out in the Book of Exodus which recounts how Yahweh master-minded the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt: ‘I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’7

However, obedience to Yahweh’s requirements was never easy and rarely complete. The Bible is full of accounts showing how the Jews constantly strayed from the straight and narrow, how they sought to emulate their neighbours against the wishes of Yahweh, how they worshipped pagan gods and how the prophets delivered regular warnings about the dire penalties all this would incur.

Some of the strongest warnings concerned the Jews’ demand for a king. The Jews had no tradition of ancient shamans, medicine men or magicians and consequently their priests never evolved into kings or founded royal dynasties. In the early days in ancient Israel, the loose-knit tribes were ruled by ‘judges’ who were chiefly military leaders and scored some success in fending off attacks by neighbouring tribes. From time to time ‘deliverers’ also arose to get the Jews out of trouble. In ancient times, small, weak states had a poor future in Mesopotamia and the adjacent lands. Sooner or later, they were overrun and absorbed by neighbours with more muscle and better armies. To avert this fate, the Jews decided they must have a king to centralise government, build up the nation’s defences and confront their enemies on more equal terms.

This was not an idea that found much favour with Yahweh or the Prophet Samuel. Israel was a theocracy. Monarchy was an intruder, introducing a rival, secular system of government. By their very nature, the two were mutually exclusive. Samuel saw immediately the paradox of monarchy in a land where Yahweh ruled supreme and His laws were paramount. He predicted that Israel would bitterly regret the day it acquired a king. Taking examples from the despotic regimes of surrounding states, he warned the Israelites of what a king would do. It was not an agreeable forecast:

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you. He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. . . . And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. . . . He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen. . . .

Samuel’s warning was ignored. The Jews insisted on a king and they got one in the shape of Saul, a Benjamite who came from one of the smallest of the twelve tribes of Israel. ‘Saul’ meant ‘requested’ but, if the Israelites thought they were going to have a king like other kings, they were mistaken.

King Saul was a poor imitation of the grandeur and eminence of other monarchs. He had no palace. He conducted government business from beneath a tree in Gibeah, his home city. He created no body of officials, advisers or civil servants. He had no appreciable standing army and those soldiers he did command were poorly equipped. He was not even full-time, but combined kingship with his work as a farmer.