A staple of Christmas Day in Britain since 1932, the monarch’s Christmas broadcast marks the one time of year when the Sovereign addresses his or her subjects without government input.
When the late Queen Elizabeth II gave her festive address on television for the first time in 1957, she spoke of how the monarch’s role had historically evolved.
“I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”
Almost invariably, her message mentioned the Christian values underpinning the season, thereby providing a distant echo of the actual leadership her forebears gave before the constitutional reforms wrought by the Civil War and the 'Glorious Revolution’.
At a deeper, more profound level, these exhortations to charity and service, at a time of year that awakens our innermost desire for beauty, symbolism and moral leadership, speak of what England lost spiritually in the Protestant Reformation, which sought to largely strip Christianity of its sense of mystery and transcendence, and above all to deny the people the consolations of Our Blessed Lady.
The system of constitutional monarchy, in which the monarch is devoid of executive power, bound never to act on his own initiative or publicly express his opinion on any current topic, evolved over two-and-a-half centuries, from Charles I until Queen Victoria.
With hindsight, one of that project’s principal objectives can be seen as shrouding the sovereign in so much mystique as to paradoxically make a powerless king more of a Christ figure than one who wields the Divine Right of Kings; and more importantly to make a reigning queen a figure of Our Lady, to satiate the desires of a people bereft of Marian devotion.
This had the advantage of maintaining the awe in which the monarchy was traditionally held, as well as appearing to fill that gaping void left by the Reformation.
Netflix’s drama series The Crown (created by Peter Morgan), whilst taking much artistic license, won great acclaim for its portrayal of the monarchy's unique place in the nation’s hearts and minds throughout Queen Elizabeth's reign.
Nowhere is that sense of beauty and mystery more poignantly displayed than in the Season Four finale, ‘War’.
With the Royal Family assembled for Christmas at Sandringham, Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) tries to comfort a melancholic Princess Diana (Emma Corrin), facing up to the inevitable collapse of her marriage to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) – now King Charles III.
Having failed to assure Diana of the family’s support and then warned her not to leave ‘the system’ despite her outsider status, Philip tells her, “Everyone in this system is a lost, lonely, irrelevant outsider, apart from the one person, the only person that matters. She is the oxygen we all breathe, the essence of all our duty.”
As the Prince describes his wife in unmistakably Marian language, the ethereally beautiful Marian carol ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ plays in the background, and a montage shows us the pathos and heartache etched on the faces of senior royals.
At the climax we see Elizabeth herself (Olivia Colman) kneeling in prayer, firm in the belief that she is appointed by God and morally answerable only to Him, despite her lack of political power and subjection to the elected government.
We, as Catholics, should regard Mary as the essence of our duty, the close and loving mother of all the faithful on their earthly pilgrimage.
Now we are shown how Britain’s Protestant establishment replaced this priceless treasure with a harsh system whereby subservience to the Queen, and dependence on her for one's life force, will make her own family exiles and strangers, even if her people love and admire her.
For the late Duke of Edinburgh, that meant having to live in his wife’s shadow for almost the entirety of their marriage, denied even the right to pass his family name onto his children – upending the traditional dignity of the husband as head of the family.
For Diana, with her combination of visible vulnerability and daring celebrity, it meant a life of suffering which, ultimately, was cut short by tragedy.
Earlier in that same Crown episode, however, embattled prime minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), explaining her desperation to stay in office, tells the Queen that, unlike a politician, “you have power... in doing nothing.”
Few words could better summarise the mysterious sway the modern monarchy holds over the popular imagination.
Those of us tuning into the King’s Christmas broadcast this year will be all too aware that, much as some of us might desire it, we are extremely unlikely to see a return to the traditional Catholic model of monarchy in our lifetimes.
For better or worse, parliamentary democracy is here for the foreseeable future.
But we can be grateful, as we celebrate the fathomless mystery of the Incarnation, that we still have recourse to the maternal protection of the Queen of Heaven.