Ahead of the Queen’s funeral next Monday 19 September, Dr Jason Edwards, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Programme Director of the MSc in Social and Political Theory, delves into the mystique of sovereignty. 

Buckingham Palace, London

Watching the live broadcast of the proceedings of the Accession Council on the morning of September 10 2022 is the closest many of us will ever come to seeing the trick of sovereignty played out in real time. Like all good magic tricks, sovereignty needs the right staging to convince us it is real. And there is no greater stage for performing the trick than the ritual and ceremony around the death of the monarch. 

While theorists of sovereignty don’t routinely talk about it as a trick, they have long wrestled with the problem of its mystique. The mystery of sovereignty was clearly on display at the Accession Council in its proclamation of the death of Elizabeth II and the apparently seamless accession of Charles III. The Council was not making Charles king – he became ‘our Sovereign Lord’ the moment ‘our Sovereign Lady’ died. This suggests that sovereignty was somehow transferred between two bodies, or that it was ‘alienated’ from one person to another. But if we know anything about sovereignty, or at least so the story and the language goes, it is ‘inalienable’. Indeed, the constitution of the UK relies on the idea that sovereignty both never ceases and never moves – it is always invested in a single body eternally occupying the space of command. What is the mysterious process that allows a mortal human being to become the bearer of a supposedly permanent and inalienable power of sovereignty? 

In the later Middle Ages, one way of dealing with the conundrum, as Ernst Kantorowicz sets out in a famous book, was to say that the king occupied ‘two bodies’ – the natural body of his own person and the body politic, or the state. Something of this is captured in Louis XIV’s declaration that l’état c’est moi (‘I am the state’). We might also note, as more than one commentator has this week, that for many, the Queen was Britain in a way that went beyond mere symbolism. At a time when it is increasingly difficult to discern commonly valued national institutions or a common culture, Elizabeth II was the ‘constant’ in people’s lives, the shared reference point of Britishness in a society of growing division and conflict. 

The medieval theorists maintained that the king came to occupy the body politic through an act of God. That notion remains at the heart of the Accession Proclamation: it is God ‘by whom Kings and Queens do reign’. In his Leviathan, written over the course of the English civil war, Thomas Hobbes sought to remove God from the picture of king-making; it’s not God who creates kings and queens, but the ‘Multitude United in one Person’, or the mass of the people agreeing to live under the laws of a sovereign lord.  But Hobbes wanted to maintain that the sovereign power exercised by a king or queen (or indeed by an assembly of men like a parliament) was not their possession but a power that emanated from the state as a permanent body, an ‘Artificial Man’ or a ‘Mortal God’, as he put it. This ‘Leviathan’ is the enduring site of sovereign power, of which sovereign lords and ladies are only ever bearers for a term of life. 

The Accession Council is a bit behind the times in being somewhere between the idea of the King’s two bodies and the Leviathan. In his own declaration, Charles said that he is aware “of the duties and heavy responsibilities of sovereignty which have now passed to me” and that “I know that I shall be upheld by the affection and loyalty of the peoples whose sovereign I have been called upon to be”. In other words, Charles is taking on the personal exercise of powers invested in him by God. But the picture is much more complicated. Charles knows the implications of being head of state in a constitutional monarchy, with the sovereign’s powers (such as they are) largely delegated to the government, as well as being limited and revocable by Parliament. “I shall strive to follow the inspiring example I have been set in upholding constitutional government”, he declares. The King thus acknowledges that he is one element of the state, not the state itself. All this is perfectly consistent with the constitutional law doctrine that the sovereign in the UK is the ‘Crown-in-Parliament’. 

But if a magician promised to pull a rabbit out of a hat and rather produced a tedious document defining what ‘rabbit’ means, we’d probably feel short-changed. The Accession Council was about sustaining the illusion that the King Charles-shaped figure pulled out of the hat is not just the sovereign but sovereignty itself, when we know that this cannot be the case. So the trick can’t stop there. On Saturday, it culminated with the revelation of the sovereign – in obvious tension with the idea of a constitutionally bound monarch – as the unbound law-maker or uncommanded commander (legibus solutus). The concept of an earthly sovereign, is, of course, an essentially theological one, drawn from the notion of God as uncaused cause and unmoved mover. God speaks and it happens; it’s the same idea with the sovereign. Historically, the real expression of this idea of sovereign command was the control the sovereign exercised over their subordinates. In late medieval and early modern Europe this effectively meant command of the court retinue, who promised obedience to their ‘Liege Lord’ (a feudal pledge that remains in the Accession Proclamation) and, as became increasingly important, command of the armed forces. Indeed, the clearest indication of the power of the uncommanded commander is reflected in the British monarch’s status as the ‘Commander-in-Chief’. 

The really important part of Saturday’s ceremony, then, was not the words uttered in the Accession Proclamation, which magic away the problem of how unbound sovereignty can be exercised by a sovereign bound by the constitution, but rather in the reading of the Proclamation on the balcony of St James’s Palace in front of the public. For standing there between the Heralds and the gathered spectators, were the King’s Guards, soldiers armed with bayonets fixed to their rifles, drilled to the maximum, and poised to kill on command. At one point they placed their rifles on the ground so they could raise their bearskins in a perfectly synchronised and completely terrifying rendition of three cheers for the King, an act which, if performed in front of a child at their birthday party, may well have left them traumatised for life. And this, really, is the way that sovereignty has always ultimately shown itself and completed the trick – through the awe and fear inspired by the spectacle of a very coordinated squad of trained killers coming towards you, their deadly weapons drawn. 

Sovereignty is smoke and mirrors. We know that in reality human beings don’t possess two bodies, just the one; the ‘body politic’ is not a ‘Mortal God’, but a highly differentiated complex of institutions and daily-applied rules that are constantly challenged and transformed by forces internal and external to the state; and no individual or group can last long pretending to be an uncommanded commander – if we want to survive and flourish in the world we have to engage and compromise with other people rather than just threaten to kill them. For a long time, though, many people bought the trick and embraced the mystery of sovereignty. The reasons are complex – Empire and faith both played a big role – but key was how sovereignty’s workings took place behind closed doors, away from the eyes of the public. But in the present, the permanent gaze of TV and social media mean the trick is increasingly difficult to perform convincingly. The live broadcast of the Accession Proclamation is just one example of the way in which the exercise of sovereign power has been laid bare as quite unmysterious. As Anthony Barnett notes, there are other ways in which the mystique of monarchy is fast diminishing. King Charles seems to understand well that it needs to if the institution is to survive. But the danger to the monarchy is that once the secrets of the illusion of sovereignty have been exposed, you have to find some other way of persuading people you serve any useful purpose. In today’s Britain, the new King will find that a very hard trick to pull off.  

 Further information 

• Study Politics at Birkbeck 
• Study MSc in Social and Political Theory