In the wake of Keir Starmer’s resignation much has been made of the fact that in the past decade we have had six prime ministers, and a seventh – almost certainly Andy Burnham – will enter Downing Street before the end of summer. People are asking whether Britain has become ungovernable. Perhaps the electorate demand the impossible. There must be some rational, material explanation for this disastrous state of British politics.
Medieval and even sixteenth and seventeenth century Britons would see things very differently. According to Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, people of those ages denied ‘the very possibility of chance or accident’. Everything that happened was according to God’s design and carried a message. ‘Plagues and misfortune were usually a punishment for some notorious sin’.
Britons lived in a world in which ‘omens and portents, sprang from a coherent view of the world as a moral order reflecting God’s purpose and physically sensitive to the moral conduct of human beings,’ and ‘in which the rise and fall of nations appeared as the expression of God’s unsearchable purpose’.
The symbolism would have been clear to our ancestors. The Crown and the Kingdom are facing a rupture
