"Kings, Identity & Theseus’ Ship"
Enough time has probably passed since the death of the UK's longest monarch to write this newsletter ... probably, anyway!
You probably heard that the longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom recently passed away and her son inherited her kingdom and Commonwealth as King Charles III.
The pageantry and pomp has been in full swing wherever moving images move. People have wept, people have sung and true to the great British national identity, they have also queued diligently for hours on end. And that’s what this edition of Pop Mythology is about. Identity, how Royalty relates to it and how it’s all somehow connected with the ship of the ancient Greek hero Theseus.
As usual, bear with me…
The Ship Of Theseus
You may have heard of Theseus, the great Founder-King of Athens who slayed the Minotaur on Crete. His story is fantastic, from birth to death, and it was a story at the heart of Athenian identity. So much so, that the 1st Century AD philosopher and historian Plutarch told the following story about how the Atheneans honoured Theseus’ legendary ship:
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of [4th/3rd Century BC], for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
The ‘Ship of Theseus’ has since become the name for the ‘thought experiment’ that asks the question, if all of the parts of an original object are replaced, is that object still the original? For most readers, the answer will be obvious: replace all the component parts of something and it’s no longer the original thing. Football fans and Royalists, on the other hand, may be forced to disagree.
The Royal Families
The English … wait … British … nope … the Monarchy of the United Kingdom & Commonwealth has been on the throne of the rainy island of my birth for over a thousand years by all estimates and it’s easy to think that it’s been the same family - or House, as they’re quaintly termed in royalty - all that time. But that’s not exactly the case.
The “Royal Line” starts fuzzily in the 8th century with the House of Mercia, then it was the House of Wessex, then the House of Denmark (yep, like the country), then Wessex again, then the House of Normandy, then the very English-sounding House of Blois, then the House of Angevin, the House of Plantagenet (new name, old House), the House of Lancaster, the House of York, the House of Tudor, then the House of Stewart.
After this there was a pesky civil war where they cut off the king’s head, cancelled Christmas and took out their frustrations by massacring the Irish.
Then the Houses came back with the Stuarts, the Oranges, the Stuarts again, then the Hanovers had the job for a while, then it was the House of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha who had to change their name (because it sounded a bit too German for a country supposedly fighting a war against Germany) to the House of Windsor, to whom every citizen of the UK and Commonwealth is a ‘subject’ today.
If you ask a Royalist today they might give you the sense that the “Crown” or the “Throne” is eternal or at least from some legendary age where all identity was formulated and written in stone. Just like the Athenians may have done with the Ship of Theseus.
Holding An Oar On The Ship Of Theseus
By most accounts, Elizabeth II was a decent queen. She was mourned by top-hat-wearing Londoners and staunch American republicans alike. There was a hell of a lot of secrecy and image-moulding around her but let’s say, for argument’s sake, it wasn’t too bad having your identity tied-in with her.
This wasn’t always the case, though. There have been a LOT of good monarchs (subjective) and bad monarchs (also pretty subjective) and, more often than not, they dragged the country kicking, screaming and with much emptier pockets into wars. On this day in 1492, in fact, King Henry VII of England invaded France, which was a long and beloved family tradition from his mother’s side, the House of Plantagenet.
The Plantagenets family home was in Anjou (France) and its most famous member was Richard “The Lionheart”. So, this icon of English identity was from a French family and during his ten-year reign he spent around 6 months of it in England, raising money for his jollies on the Third Crusade by selling off damn near everything he could. Kind of weird for a country to still pin their national identity to a bloke who only spent 6 months there and basically milked the country and its citizens for money. Anyway, I digress.
Henry VII grew up watching his meek uncle, Henry VI, inherit the 100 years war, where a lot of non-royal people died for Plantagenet possessions in France but we’ll breeze past that, this is a mythology newsletter not a manifesto.
Or is it?
Shut up!
All I’m saying is, isn’t it strange how we laugh at the Atheneans for idolising a ship with no ‘original’ parts but kick war, energy crises, poverty, sickness, death and a whole bunch of actually good things happening around the world off the news to watch a transition of wealth within the family of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha?
Which is a sillier symbol for identity? A ‘renovated’ ship or a country’s leader? It’s unlikely a symbolic ship would get caught up in - to take some perfectly random examples out of thin air - scandals like unnecessary wars, whimsical taxes, extra-marital affairs, or paying off legal settlements. Could there be another way of curating modern identity? Like, love of beans, for instance? Or love of justice, fairness, things like that. Yeah those are probably better.
Anyway, just a thought.
Signed,
A Seemingly Pretty Crappy ‘Subject’