Fiction or fact: Crises facing King
WHILE many of us pretended that the Queen would, somehow, live forever, others among us knew better.
One of those who knew these days of mourning — and celebration — would come, and gave thought to what they might portend, was British playwright Mike Bartlett.
His thoughts turned to the man who would succeed the Queen and the times into which the reign of Charles III would be launched, and he wrote a play. Like all wordsmiths, Bartlett understood that if one truly wished to tell the truth, then one had best write fiction.
Bartlett’s play — later turned into a BBC Two television drama starring the late Tim PigottSmith — was called, simply, King Charles III. Described by The Telegraph critic Jasper Rees as ‘‘pure televisual gelignite’’, the
BBC Two adaptation places before royalists and republicans the two most dangerous questions that have always lain, unasked and unanswered, at the heart of constitutional monarchy.
The first: Is there any act of Parliament so injurious to the common good that no monarch, in good conscience, could be expected to give it the royal assent?
The second: What is likely to unfold if the royal assent is withheld from such an act?
The legislation Bartlett invents for the purposes of his dramatic thought experiment seeks to restrict the freedom of the press. For centuries, this tradition has protected the people from those who would oppress them. Bartlett’s fictitious Charles, aware that the Bill has passed through both Houses of Parliament, knows that he now constitutes the sole remaining barrier to the destruction of a fundamental freedom.
According to 19th century constitutional writer Walter Bagehot, there are three crucial rights available to a British constitutional monarch. These are: The right to be consulted. The right to encourage. The right to warn. Having swiftly exhausted all three, the fictional Charles must decide upon his next move.
The real King Charles III will soon face a series of equally portentous choices.
The Government of the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is committed to passing legislation inimical to the survival of British civil liberties. She has filled the upper echelons of her Cabinet with individuals who are well to the right of most Tory MPs.
The 80seat majority bequeathed to her by Boris Johnson is almost certainly large enough to withstand any lastminute pangs of Conservative Party conscience. Only if the King withholds his royal assent will the ancient rights of ‘‘freeborn Englishmen’’ be preserved.
Having pledged to both Houses of the British Parliament that he will follow the example of his mother on matters constitutional, the smart money would have to be on the real King Charles III behaving very differently from the fictional King Charles III.
In the months ahead, the British Isles look set to be rocked by civil discord and statesanctioned violence. In the looming contest, the British people may win, or, the British State may win. Either way, the British Crown will certainly lose.
If the British people are trampled beneath the boots of the police. If their most inspiring leaders, like trade union leader Mick Lynch are imprisoned. And if, throughout it all, their king maintains a constitutionallysanctioned silence. Then, whatever system of government emerges from the crisis, its Head of State will not wear a crown.
A bloody, bold and resolute monarch, however, might fare better than even the fertile imagination of Mike Bartlett has compassed.
A recent survey of British voters aged 1834 indicated about 60% of them believe their country should be ruled by a strong leader with the power to make decisions for the good of the country, without being constrained by Parliament.
Is it stretching too long a bow to suggest Bartlett has perceived in the personality of the real Charles precisely the character traits that make his fictional King Charles so compelling? Having waited 70 years to exercise sovereignty, will he really be content to follow dutifully in his mother’s outsized footsteps?
The multiple crises which loom ahead of the United Kingdom are of sufficient severity to cause it to come apart at its historic seams. The corrupt system that threw up Liz Truss may no longer be capable of saving it.
If a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, then, surely, so should a king’s. Or what’s a kingdom for?
LAST month, the Government passed legislation repealing the ‘‘three strikes’’ rule which had been operating within the nation’s criminal justice system. Put briefly, under the threestrikes rule, after committing a third qualifying offence, an individual would be sentenced to the maximum possible penalty for their crime, without parole. If the second or third offence in question was murder, the court would sentence the perpetrator to a life sentence without parole.
In either case, the paroleless sentence would be mandatory, unless the court considered that this sentencing would be ‘‘manifestly unjust’’.
Without in any way downplaying the tremendous injustice and suffering endured by the victims of violent crimes, the repeal of the threestrikes rule is worth celebrating because it is a victory for the Christian virtue of hope.
In a sermon on Holy Saturday in 2020, Pope Francis spoke of how Jesus’ resurrection from the dead reveals all of humanity to have been given the ‘‘right to hope’’ by God. By rising from the dead on Easer Sunday, Jesus ‘‘plants in our hearts the conviction that God is able to make everything work unto good, because even from the grave he brings life’’. This message follows from the Pope’s earlier remarks in 2014, where he condemned life sentences as incompatible with a belief in the fundamental human dignity of all persons. A life sentence imprisonment without the possibility of parole, Pope Francis observed, is ‘‘just a death penalty in disguise’’.
From a Christian perspective, a sentence without parole denies the individual the possibility of believing that they might make amends for what they have done and reenter society; in short, it denies them of Easter Sunday’s message of hope.
There is a remarkable Christian icon (pictured above) by Fransican Robert Lentz called Christ of Maryknoll. The
TODAY is Friday, September 16, the 259th day of 2022. There are 106 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1839 — The first New Zealand Company emigrants sail from Gravesend.
1859 — Lake Nyasa, which forms Malawi’s boundary with Tanzania and Mozambique, is discovered by Scottish explorer David Livingstone.
1870 — Wellington becomes New Zealand’s third city.
1905 — The ‘‘Originals’’ All Blacks open their tour of the British Isles with a 554 victory over Devon. They go on to defeat every English side they play, including a 163 victory over English county champion Durham. The tourists’ only loss was a controversial 3nil result against Wales.
1914 — The Government announces the formation of a ‘‘Maori Contingent’’ of 200 men for service with the NZEF. This is later expanded to 500 men.
1932 — A magnitude7.2 earthquake strikes the east coast of New Zealand. Although it is one of the strongest recorded in New Zealand, it does no serious damage.
1954 — The new South Dunedin Post Office, at the corner of Lorne and King Edward Sts, is opened by the postmastergeneral, Mr Broadfoot.
1957 — The Hermitage Hotel at Mt Cook is razed by fire. Its destruction, following soon after the loss of the Franz Josef Glacier Hotel, is a major blow to New Zealand’s growing tourism industry.
1974 — Police raid the Auckland Medical Aid Centre and confiscate all patient files during icon shows Christ peering from between two layers of barbed wire while reaching out across this barrier with his bare fingers. What perhaps makes this image so powerful is that it is left deliberately ambiguous to the viewer which side of the barbed wire Christ is approaching from: is Christ reaching from outside the wire towards the prisoners confined within, or is Christ perhaps the one who is behind the wire? The icon may be conveying either of these situations, but I think it is best seen as depicting both. The figure of the ressurected Christ — and the message of hope that this entails — must be understood as reaching out
debate on the availability of abortion in New Zealand; US president Gerald Ford announces a conditional amnesty programme for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders.
1975 — New Zealand’s first female stipendiary magistrate, Augusta Wallace, is appointed.
2014 — A helicopter skiing trip ends in tragedy when the helicopter crashes on Mt Alta, 25km northwest of Wanaka, resulting in one death and injuring six other passengers.
2016 — New Zealand Paralympian sprinter Liam Malone hits headlines around the world when he wins the men’s T44 400m in a worldrecord time of 46.20sec, just 0.11sec outside the New Zealand ablebodied 400m record time. towards those on both sides of the prison wire.
This connects to a wider point about the nature of justice. Justice, from a Christian perspective, should not only be retributive — a matter of someone ‘‘paying the price’’ for what they have done. Rather, justice should also look to transform or restore the condition of the individuals involved. Justice, in this sense, should aim to be healing. By mandating that the maximum sentence be imposed upon individuals for their crimes without parole, the threestrikes rule effectively communicated that the convicted would remain a wound upon society.
The author of Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, once wrote that ‘‘[w]hen he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery’’. While many systemic problems remain to be tackled around crime and punishment in Aotearoa New Zealand, the end of the threestrikes regime at least lessens human misery, by sowing the possibility of greater hope.
Dr Greg Marcar is a Harold Turner Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) at the University of Otago.