One is, and should be, reluctant to give advice to His Majesty the King, and it’s quite possible that the man who is reported by his former servants to have toothpaste laid out on his toothbrush for him, and is in the habit of asking his staff to bend down and collect a piece of paper that has accidentally fallen into the wastepaper basket by his desk, may not find it easy to be offered advice.

We have given some thought already to the deep disturbance that has emerged from King Charles demoting Christ. But there is also not just what he had done, but the way he has gone about doing it.

There are some serious difficulties involved in His Majesty’s latest attempt to make the world conform to the idiosyncratic religious map he cherishes inside his head and the means he has chosen to achieving it.

He has not publicly announced that he has reneged on his coronation oath. Instead he has smuggled his change of allegiance into a financial report.

The duties of the monarchy has been covertly changed by means of a few amended lines in the Sovereign Grant Annual Report 2025 to 2026, published at the end of last week.

On the plus side, the incompetent draftsman of last year referred to the King as Head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith. And the first half of this has been amended to the accurate historical title, the technicality of which matters greatly, and so ‘Head of the Church of England’ (?!) has been replaced by ‘Supreme Governor of the Church of England,’ (the title his ancestor Henry 8th took to himself.

Either way, Catholics will be reminded that the real intention of Henry VIII was to become the ‘anti-pope’ in these islands, just one of many anti-popes that Europe threw up to during the course of history.

But whatever satisfaction might be gained by those with a well-informed grasp of history, something rather dreadful has taken place at the end of that sentence, smuggled into his accounts. ‘Defender of the Faith’ has been replaced by ‘Protector of the Space for Faith within the Multi-faith Nation.’

The Constitutional Problem

The difficulties this presents are serious ones.

The mangled sentence, full of contradictory concepts, presents a false impression. This is as constitutionally and philosophically problematic as it is wrong and muddled.

To begin with process rather than content, the Sovereign Grant Annual Report 2025 to 26 is not the place to initiate a process of undemocratic, unconstitutional and unwarranted development of the concept and duties of monarchy.

The fact that it is unmonitored brings us face-to-face with the second problem, which is that it is in direct conflict and confrontation with his Coronation Oath.

And that raises a question of to whom the King is accountable.

He is, of course, accountable to Parliament, as the events of 1688 made clear. Indeed, the House of Windsor depends upon the invitation of Parliament on the strict terms that it fulfils two central requirements. The first is to be Protestant, and the other is to defend the Protestant faith.

The abandonment of the role of Defender of the Faith, which is a confessing role with precise theological and constitutional ingredients, and its replacement with Protector of the Space for Faith within the Multi-faith Nation is a very serious one.

Abandoning the specific role the King bound himself to by oath in order to take up a different role is no small matter.

Opinions may differ as to whether the role he has carved out for himself has any real existence, in which case it is a threat to his constitutional role, or no existence beyond his imagination, in which case it constitutes no threat but merely a labyrinth of confusion.

The Myth of a “Multi-faith Space”

To anyone with the simplest understanding of the history of religions, it must be clear that whatever elements of overlap there are, and there are many, the religions distinguish themselves by being in conflict with each other.

The conflict may not be very deep in some. For example, the arena of overlap between Buddhism and Judaism is one with little history of mutual distinction and little antipathy.

The conflict between Zoroastrianism and the Sikhs is not one that has derailed much of asian history.

But the conflict between Islam and everybody else, and in particular Christianity, runs deep and long and is steeped in blood.

The idea that there is a space of Abrahamic mutuality is a confection of a particular cast of political and theological mind that has emerged in the last century or so and has no basis in actual history.

That’s not to say that people haven’t tried to construct a revisionist history of mutuality that reflects the way they would like things to have been rather than the way they were.

But this shallow and fantasy revisionism founders whenever it is confronted with the facts on the ground, as for example in the book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.

Not only is there no ‘space of faith in a multi-faith culture’, but there is no means of protecting it either, even if it existed, which it doesn’t.

If such a means did exist, it might indeed justifiably attract the King’s attention in order to save less aggressive religious minorities with ambitions from more aggressive and autocratic programmes that are contained within (one has to say it) for example, Islam.

But there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the King has shown any concern in his realm for defending minority peaceful religions against the aspiring dominance and uncompromising violence that seems to accompany the more violent religions wherever they emerge.

The Failure of the Defender

That leads straight into the next difficulty, which is the question that current affairs raises in relation to actually fulfilling his promise to defend the faith of his people.

In a country where two-tier policing has become normative and notorious, the faith he has sworn to defend is finding its own ‘space’ threatened, by an aggressive secular left-wing government on the one hand, which is willing to endorse police arresting faithful Christians for loitering on the streets anywhere near an abortion clinic for the thought crime otherwise known as prayer; or by the muscular violence inflicted, for example, at Speakers’ Corner by knife-wielding theocrats, attempting the murder of converts to Christianity who are trying to witness to Jesus in the public space about a mile and a half from his palace.

There might very well be room for a Defender of the Christian Faith to come to the rescue at this point, but the King has shown no more desire to exercise it than he has as yet to, for example, put his own toothpaste on his own toothbrush.

It also raises the question of the degree to which he is letting down his people.

Many people feel that some degree of betrayal is taking place.

Not, in fact, (technical) treachery, which is a very serious political concept but not one that can be relied on here since, in English law (the 1351 Act and its descendants), it runs from subject to sovereign, and not the other way around. Treachery, formally, is a breach of allegiance the subject owes to the Crown. The King cannot betray the state in that sense, because he is the terminus of allegiance, not its bearer.

And yet many people feel some active betrayal has taken place.

There are other ways of describing it though.

There is a sense that he is in breach of his covenant and coronation oath. At the Coronation he swore to maintain “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, but that is exactly what he is abandoning with his preference for becoming guardian of safe spaces for religions in general.

Parliament, Oaths, and Public Law

The distress and dismay that the more politically alert have, is the betrayal by the King of Parliament. This has in fact happened before with disastrous consequences to the monarchy.

In 1688 James II sought to alter the religious settlement by personal and executive instrument rather than by Parliament. The Bill of Rights in 1689 abolished precisely that pretended power. This took place after getting rid of the King in question, since Parliament was not willing to accept this level of subversion.

There is an emerging sense that he has betrayed the unwritten constitution by the process he has adopted.

For lawyers and historians, the act of betrayal has a technical name called détournement. This is a technical and exact public law offence, describing the exercising of an administrative power for an end other than the one for which it is conferred. The Sovereign Grant Report exists for fiscal accountability. Loading it with a constitutional theological redefinition is using the instrument against its proper purpose.

Those with an acute sense of constitutional propriety might see the act of betrayal in terms of the impropriety of smuggling in a constitutional change, using a parliamentary vehicle whose scrutiny lens is about value for money, under the eye of the National Audit Office, and the Public Accounts Committee, which has no remit to scrutinise or perhaps even understand the religious duties the Coronation Oath embodies.

Then there is a straightforward and simple sense that the King is accountable to his people. He is, after all, accountable to Parliament, and Parliament is accountable to the people, and the people have not been consulted about the massaging of his Coronation Oath into oblivion in order to fulfil the personal predilections of the monarch’s private religious map.

The Language of Broken Faith

The Christian world has words for breaking faith which have long historic roots. There is the active perfidia, which is a breaking of faith itself, which is only too apt for a discussion about the integrity of the title Defensor Fidei.

There are other solemn and shameful words.

There is recreancy. What is a recreant? Recreant comes from recredere: to yield one’s pledge, to recant, to surrender in trial by combat, to confess oneself beaten. The recreant knight might throw down his sword and forsake his cause; the word fuses cowardice, faithlessness and combat. A defender who yields quietly is, with etymological exactness, recreant.

There will be those who care about making oaths, who think that Charles is forsworn. He has been false to his sworn word, his Coronation Oath and the faith he pledged there.

If you want to push the sense of outrage and betrayal a little bit further, one even comes to the point of abdication.

This is not abdication of the throne, not yet at least, but abdication of his duty. He abdicates the office (its defining trust) while retaining his dignity. The irony writes itself. He will not abdicate the Crown, only the duties the Crown was there to defend.

Abandoning the defence of the faith evokes another word that matters to Christians. It is apostasy. He may only be renouncing Christ by implication, rather than openly, but he is hollowing out his office as King. It is at the very least a kind of constitutional apostasy, although it might be full blown religious apostasy as well. That is what renouncing Christ actually is for one who was publicly committed to his cause.

The Final Question

Will this smuggling of new terminology into a public accounts document upset Parliament? The answer is probably not greatly. It no longer cares about the Christian faith or its Protestant variant.

It does care about taxes, of course, and political opinions, but not faith in Christ unless it is expressed outside an abortion clinic.

But as one more nail in his allegiance to Christianity and his responsibility as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, it will offend some Anglicans and all other Christians who take their faith seriously.

Just at the very moment when the faith is under the greatest pressure in this country from the political progressive left and what one might call the theocratic right, and Christians are being de-platformed, cancelled, unemployed and sometimes imprisoned for their determination to choose Christ above the demands of political culture, the King has abandoned the cause.

While the monarch cannot technically be a traitor, we might take refuge in grammar and find that the verb carries our feelings even if the noun cannot. Parliament and the oath it presented to the King as a condition of being crowned are betrayed; the Church of England is betrayed. The constitution is betrayed; Anglicans are specifically betrayed. And Christians in general will legitimately feel abandoned at the very least. Some of them too will feel betrayed.

Sooner or later, someone may put the question: beyond keeping us from being a republic, what is the purpose of a monarch solemnly crowned in a historic Christian Abbey for, if he defines himself by an ambition to protect a space that exists neither as a concept or as a social or spiritual reality?