Charles, the most Christian king

Defender of the persecuted church and bridge to Islam

In February 2015, soon after 20 Egyptian Christians and a Ghanaian were murdered on a Libyan beach by ISIS, the Coptic Church in Britain was contacted by a high-profile sympathiser.

The Martyrs of Libya had been working in Egypt’s violently unstable neighbour because they were desperately poor, and British Copts were fundraising to support their families. So the Coptic Pope Tawadros II and Bishop Angaelos of London, the head of the British community, were reassured to receive a letter from the then Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles had first approached the Copts late in 2013, just weeks after the worst anti-Christian violence in Egypt in centuries; the events were barely reported in the English-speaking press, and the Coptic community felt deserted by friends and vulnerable to enemies. 

The Prince’s private secretary approached the Egyptians, and in December that year he visited their home in Hertfordshire, along with a Jordanian prince. There Bishop Angaelos presented Charles with two Coptic icons as gifts for his newborn grandson George.

One of the less well-known interests of the King, who has just had cancer diagnosed less than 18 months into his reign, is his great passion for the persecuted church. It is far less publicised than his concern for the environment or architecture, but it goes to the heart of his character. Charles III is a most Christian king, to use the old French monarchical title, and perhaps the last.

Charles also donated to Aid to the Church in Need’s campaign to help Iraqi and Syrian Christians, and after the Islamic State drove Christians and Yazidis out of the Nineveh Plains in 2014, was the most high profile individual to show public support. In December that year he gave a video address for the launch of ACN’s Religious Freedom in the World Report, and spoke of his ‘mounting despair’ over events in Nineveh. The prince, who had also written to one of Iraq’s bishops to express his ‘heartbreak’ at events there, called it ‘an indescribable tragedy that Christianity is now under such threat in the Middle East — an area where Christians have lived for 2,000 years’ and where ‘people of different faiths living together peaceably for centuries’.

In the last few weeks of 2014, the prince also made three visits to eastern Christian congregations in London, joining in with the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic and speaking at length with the faithful. At the Syrian Orthodox St Thomas Cathedral in Acton, he ended his talk with the words of St Paul: ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.’ Then, when he visited Jordan in 2015, Charles made a point of heading straight from the airport to meet Iraqi Christian refugees at the British ambassador's residence.

Charles’s support for the persecuted church sits happily with a strong interest and fondness for Islam; he is not a crusader but a seeker of understanding and accommodation. In some sense he feels himself to be the protector of Britain’s Muslims, as monarchs of past empires have often been the defenders of minorities. Charles even started learning Arabic to read the Koran, as explained by Abdal Hakim Murad, a British convert to Islam (and a man as clever as brain pie).

Charles is a deeply religious man, perhaps more so than his mother, arguably our most religious monarch since the Stuarts, even if it is rather esoteric. At the time of the succession to the throne, the theologian Theo Hobson wrote in the Spectator that this interest in religion goes right back to his time studying archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, something ‘which deepened his interest in non-western cultures. His college chaplain, Harry Williams, encouraged him to take a broad view of religion and was the first to interest him in the thought of Carl Jung. He was also influenced by the eccentric bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, whose interests included parapsychology. This acquaintance with 1960s Anglicanism gave him permission to be a spiritual seeker, without fearing a conflict with his destined Anglican role.’

Charles was especially influenced by the South African philosopher Laurens Van der Post, who ‘spoke of rescuing humanity from “the superstition of the intellect”  and of restoring the ancients’ spiritual oneness with the natural world. 

‘The prince was encouraged in this Jungian idea of the monarchy by the poet and mystic Kathleen Raine, and by the poet laureate, Ted Hughes, who spoke of its “shamanic” power to unite the national “tribe”. Of course this is compatible with traditional monarchism, but the pagan tinge has a freshness that appeals beyond conventional conservatives.’

This is indeed eccentric, and the prince’s spiritual musings have often confused a population which treats religion with suspicion, in a country where even the England football manager - the ‘other’ impossible job - could be sacked for expressing unusual beliefs.

In 2000, the prince called for a new ‘sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other’. He said that: ‘If literally nothing is held sacred any more… what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some “great laboratory of life” with potentially disastrous long-term consequences.’ 

Hobson cites the influence of René Guénon, a ‘Frenchman who converted to Sufi Islam in the early 20th century. It’s basically Theosophy but with less of an esoteric aura’.  In 2010 Charles co-wrote a book, Harmony, in which he called for a ‘revolution’ away from materialism towards traditional spiritually, which Max Hastings said in parts resembled ‘the ravings of a Buddhist mystic.’

This inspires both amusement and suspicion in many of his subjects, as has his interest in Islam. As Hobson wrote: ‘In the 1990s he began to speak of Islam as especially worthy of respect, even suggesting that it exhibited what modern Christianity had lost, “a metaphysical and unified view of ourselves and the world around us”. In another speech he suggested that more Muslim teachers in schools could teach us “how to learn with our hearts, as well as our heads.” His Islamophilia was only slightly muted by 9/11, despite much right-wing disquiet.’

Later, ‘He began to dial down the Orientalism, to put more emphasis on what the Abrahamic faiths have in common, and the danger of false interpretations of Islam. But his insistence on the core wisdom of Islamic tradition remained strong. Again, his Islamophilia should be seen in relation to his semi-detachment from Anglicanism and the role he felt this gave him. He felt that British Muslims were in need of reassurance from a representative of British tradition and that it could not come from politicians or bishops. It was a task for a different sort of spiritual leader, above the political fray and also above narrow religious allegiance.’

Despite this, Charles’s deepest ties are with Orthodox Christianity. For his coronation he was anointed with oil from the Mount of Olives and blessed by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem. The king is known to be fond of reading Greek mystics, and there are Byzantine icons in The Sanctuary, the chapel in the grounds of Highgrove House, where he would often go to pray and meditate. At his marriage to Camilla there was a recitation of the Creed in Old Church Slavonic.

Charles’s grandmother Princess Alice was an Orthodox nun and Righteous of the Nations for her role in shielding a Jewish family in wartime Greece. Alice, who endured both deafness and schizophrenia, was a woman of noted holiness and founded an order of nuns in 1949 after becoming a widow.

When Alice’s youngest child, Philip, married the future Elizabeth II he had to join the Church of England, but maintained links with the Greek religion and there were rumours about his true beliefs. After the marriage, Alice was given a small Orthodox chapel in England until her death in 1969 when she was buried at a Russian convent in Jerusalem. Charles’s great-aunts Alexandra and Elizabeth are also considered martyrs to the Orthodox faith after their murder by the Bolsheviks.

Such is the king’s attachment to the eastern church that it’s a not uncommon belief in parts of the Mediterranean that Charles is in fact Greek Orthodox. If this sounds implausible, it’s known that at Highgrove Charles had visits from Ephraim, an Cypriot-born abbot of the ancient Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, which Charles regularly visited. A few days after the death of Princess Diana, the king flew to the secluded monastery to escape from the widespread hysteria that overcame the country.

Alone with Ephraim in the chamber there, Charles is rumoured to have made a ‘spiritual commitment’ to Orthodoxy. After one of his visits to Mount Athos, a monk was quoted in one newspaper saying Charles was ‘Orthodox in his heart’.

Perhaps, but it is more likely part of a desire to repair the schism within Christianity and the conflicts between the Abrahamic faiths. For Charles, Middle Eastern Christians are a bridge between Islam and Christianity, and their persecution makes any sort of deeper understanding impossible. As he told the Syrian Orthodox churchgoers in London, ‘At a time when so little is held sacred, it is quite literally diabolical that these symbolic bridges should be so destroyed.’

Those bridges become harder to maintain as the realm he rules over becomes not just more secular, but repaganises. The Christian aspect of monarchy makes British society more intelligible to those of other religions, and as Bishop Richard Chartres wrote last year, quoting the political scientist Tariq Modood, ‘the minimal nature of the Anglican establishment… may be far less intimidating to the minority faiths than a triumphant secularism’.

But repaganisation is moving ahead, to the point where even the residual symbols of Christianity within the monarchy are slowly disappearing. The late Queen’s funeral, and the king’s coronation, felt like flickering embers of the old faith, overtly Anglican events that are unlikely to be repeated by his successors. God willing the king will recover from his present illness, but in the fullness of time he may be remembered as the last Christian king. Or perhaps the first Greek Orthodox one.