Word: kingships
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...poetic (and doomed) Richard II prophetically says in the play named after him. "Some have been depos'd," he goes on, some "haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd ... all murder'd." But were a modern Richard speaking today, he would more likely talk about the death of kingship-the very idea of a useful, functioning monarchy. The last quarter of a century has seen the number of democracies and republics in the world explode from 40 to about 120. Monarchs, as a consequence, have come to seem as obsolete as court jesters or princesses in towers. For nine...
...Thailand's 78-year-old King, the longest-ruling royal in the world, has done this with particular success. As we watched the old-fashioned titles and costumes assemble in Bangkok last week, it was possible to speak, unlike Richard II, of the life-not death-of kings and kingship...
...Queen has told aides. "I am not an actress!" She wants the monarchy to be a focus for continuity and enduring patriotic values, which make instinctive sense to her. She was never a rebel: she venerated her father, a shy man with a stutter who was thrust into kingship by the abdication but mastered his task through hard work. During her wartime adolescence, the idea of obedience and doing one's duty for the greater good was the norm. She really meant it when she said at age 21 that "my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall...
...theological necessity. Bethlehem had been King David's hometown. And in a confused 1st century theological landscape in which many Jews expected a mighty new leader but disagreed on his nature, David's biblical status as God's "anointed one" (or "Messiah") provided a potent precedent of divinely sanctioned kingship. Binding Jesus to him by family (through Joseph) and birthplace consolidated that definition, which then matured into Christianity's far grander messiahship. Says White: "No Bethlehem, no David. No David, no messianic prototype. Matthew and Luke both understood that." The way each Gospel writer got the Holy Family there...
Juan Carlos was an unlikely monarch. His branch of the Bourbon dynasty was impoverished and living in Rome. It was eligible for the kingship only because the direct line was tainted with the hemophilia gene inherited from Britain's Queen Victoria. Needy and apparently pliant, he thus became the acceptable heir to Francisco Franco, military dictator of the kingless kingdom of Spain. At Franco's 1975 death, Juan Carlos, above, at his 1962 wedding, took the throne. Spaniards expected little. But the King pressed the move to a constitutional monarchy. When militarists opposed it and attempted a coup...