Nothing New

A white man stabbed a Saudi to death in Cambridge in August. He denies murder, but he has admitted having the blade and his father is already on remand awaiting sentencing for having assisted an offender. We have knife crime in County Durham, which is more mixed than it was 20 years ago, but which is still very white indeed. Some of the families involved have been at it since time out of mind. Where would that not be the case? I more than suspect that it is in, say, Glasgow.

That is also where the West End Ulster Defence Union refused to sing God Save the King at its Remembrance event on Saturday, on the grounds that, following Charles III’s recent prayer with the Pope, “we cannot, in good conscience, recognise him as the rightful King. Our loyalty is to the Throne as ordained under God, not to any individual who betrays the faith and duty upon which it stands. We continue to pray that he will repent and turn to the truth of the Gospel and the responsibilities of a Christian Sovereign. If he does not, then we pray that a true and faithful Protestant will arise to restore righteousness to the Crown and to the Nation.” Gosh.

I Vow to Thee, My Country was sung instead. Staunch Protestants who were rather more doctrinally orthodox than culturally conservative, although they have often been both, have not uncommonly never liked it because, while it was theologically nowhere near as bad as O Valiant Hearts (in his 1939-1945 Star, his Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, his Italy Star, his France and Germany Star, and his War Medal 1939–1945, my father simply would not have that one, and he was not alone in that view), it does offer one’s country “the love that asks no questions”. What I assume that the West End Ulster Defence Union knew was that, at the bride’s request, it had been sung at the King’s first wedding, which was why it was also sung both at his first wife’s funeral and at her tenth anniversary memorial service. And now, it has become an alternative National Anthem for those who considered him an illegitimate monarch. Again, gosh.

But again, none of this is new. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist once more the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia. That it is the origin of the epithet “Hun” is contested, but there is no doubt that the opponents of Irish Home Rule conspired with “Protestant Bill the Kaiser”. Far from having decommissioned its weapons, Ulster Resistance has never so much as declared a ceasefire. And here we are. Right when the Raise the Colours fraternity, which has amused some of us by making parts of Consett look like East Belfast, has been expressing its scorn for the King because of his environmentalism and his perceived Islamic sympathies.

And when none of the children of Queen Anne and of Prince George of Denmark and Norway survived, then that the Throne passed to the House of Hanover was largely due to arrangements made by the Spencers, entwining the two dynasties for centuries until they went too far and intermarried. The King is a patrilineal member of the same House of Oldenburg as was Prince George. It took that very ancient and illustrious Royal House 308 years to accede here, but it has. Even from beyond the grave, will Spencer Whiggery do for it a second time?