God Save the (British & Canadian) King!

The Constitutional masterpiece hiding behind the bombast

[Image: King Charles III in the Ottawan Parliament with the Canadian PM, 27 May 2025]

“And Samuel said to all the people, See ye him whom the LORD hath chosen, that there is none like him among all the people? And all the people shouted, and said, God save the King¹.” (Samuel 10:24, King James Version)

We've all heard God Save the King, grunted tunelessly before every England football match. Or at least we think we have. For although the hymn is the national anthem of Great Britain - and the royal anthem of Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth realms - most are only conscious of its first verse, replete as it seems to be with fawning approbation of the Head of State. The apparent self-congratulatory effect of the hymn’s opening is only heightened by the accompanying music, which though undeniably and annoyingly catchy, is nonetheless bombastic. A cursory listen will be sure to alienate republicans, atheists and anti-imperialists alike. But is this first impression fair? It will be my contention that when viewed in its lyrical and musical entirety, the anthem is not only salvageable, but positively enlightened and a veritable blueprint of how to maintain stability in a Consitutional polity.

That God Save the King (/Queen) has multiple verses is something of which the casual listener is only passingly aware. As if encountered in singular, childhood dream that has long since passed from memory, we remember, if but fleetingly, that the anthem has a barely recited continuation, part of which speaks in imflamatory fashion of the “rebellious Scots”. Such embarrassing factoids learnt, one feels little inclined to read on. But we must. If only as a necessary prelude to our constitutional education.

Before diving deeply into this gilded treasure, hidden with masterly discretion in plain sight, we would do well to consider the following preliminaries. The first is that the song, full of the little-used subjunctive form, is a prayer, not a declaration of facts. You will note “God save” not “God saves” and this latin formulation of non-certain hope fills the lyrical hold of this historical hymn. It shares this characteristic with Rule Britannia! which, far from being a statement that Britain rules the waves in present times, is the sung hope that this may come to fruition. This alone tells the reader something important about the national hymn and its co-patriotic musical comrades: that though they are sung with bombast, they are whispered with trembling concern about the future and in the deeply held religious belief that only God can save the nation and the world beyond.

The second preliminary is that although the hymn is nominally the “national anthem” of Britain - and sung, for want of a better verb, before English football and rugby matches, it is, in fact, an international anthem. Scotland, Wales, Canada, New Zealand and the rest all have their own hymns sung in conjunction with today’s musical subject, and even England commonly sees Parry’s Jerusalem as representing its unique nation, as evidenced by its recital before cricket internationals. Canada, as we shall see, has its own additional verse and in respect for its French-speaking province, the first, most commonly known, stanza has an official French translation². Thus God Save the King is less a representation of singular, English-speaking, national pride than the international longing - at least among Commonwealth nations - for global stability under a Constitutional laws-based order of freedom.

The third preliminary, as prefaced by the above-referenced Canadian exceptionalism, is that the hymn has an indeterminate number of verses and an ill-defined order. Over the course of history some have been added, removed and re-added and the confusion is such that there is no easily-located official version to which one can make reference. The first and final verses, the only two that are still sung on official occasions in Britain, are quasi-fixed in their musical moorings, but only relatively so as I have seen the assumed final stanza as the third in a collection of six. Interpretation thus is an unusually complex business.

The interpretation abyss is further deepened by the extremely uneven tone of the work. In parts congratulatory and nationalist, it turns abruptly to barely concealed suspicion of the monarch, fear of the future, heartfelt professions of faith and near-utopianism. Sometimes it is contemporary, as when speaking about the Scottish Jacobite rebellion (hence crushing the rebellious Scots and calls to protect the King from assassination), otherwise it is future facing and highly liberal democratic. It is as if it has been penned by a collection of authors with distinctly different world views and concerns. Indeed it may well have been. Because, for an anthem written in relatively modern times, its original composer and lyricist are both unknown. Perhaps - or probably given its contents - it is a compilation of writers and national attitudes.

Its authorship is thus shrouded in mystery just like that of the Bible, the very inspiration for its famed title. First publicly performed in 1745 in London, it may nonetheless date back to the previous century. Poet and composer Henry Carey (1687-1743) was once claimed to be the scribe, but such was claimed rather unreliably by his own son, and has since been refuted by scholars.

Despite doubts over its origin, it must most profitably be interpreted as one entire work. And as with its more illustrious Biblical predecessor, the interpretation we must most reasonably give is prophetic, inspiring and future facing, although laced with an undeniable warning. Let us begin.

[Image: A beautiful orchestral arrangement of the three-verse version of the anthem. Note the prayerful interpretation of verse 2.]

The opening refrain is familiar to all, but rather more in effect than in content. To the uninitiated it reads thus:

God save our gracious King,

Long live our noble King,

God save the King!

Send him victorious,

Happy and glorious,

Long to reign over us,

God save the King!

To those unfamiliar with the subjunctive form so pervasive in romance languages - which is to say the vast majority of Britons - this relentlessly positive opening may appear an exercise in reverse humility. Yet to those birthed in the tempestuous seas of linguistics, the verb conjugations employed suggest prayerful hope. To be sure, that prayer, bathed as it is the Heaven-sent pleas of “save”, “send” and “live” may appear confident, yet as the continuation of the hymn will attest, it is a veritable pre-modern case of “fake it until you make it”.

The overwhelming hope is for a future of stability. If our King were to live a long and upstanding life with his nation(/s) gloriously winning every battle and his people(/s) benefiting from the “happy” effects of prosperity and success, then we would be thereby saved the reversals, revolutions and negative plagues brought forth by instability. It is not so much the person of the monarch themself, but their office, and the life-long unchangeability that it promises, that we treasure so dearly. Originally the refrain commenced “Long live great George the King³” but given the poetic unscanability of William and Victoria, it was changed to reflect rhythmic reality. The historical effect, however, was more than lyrical; it was serendipitous. By placing the emphasis on the office over the office holder, the lyricist showed that the monarch’s lengthy life was less of a (inter)national interest in terms of their personal wellbeing and rather more in respect of its effect on (inter)national solidity.

Yet through the refrain’s prayerful structure, it neatly hides a warning behind the bombast. If the King is not noble, not glorious and a failure in battle; above all if the monarch refuses to regale us with a long life, then the effects will be distinctly injurious to the nation. And in hope of a positive outcome, we look neither to the King nor his people; rather to the grace of Heaven, hid as it so often is behind unwanted slings and arrows that assail us. This theme will continue to ring proud throughout the entire piece and in so doing, shows a certain humility on the part of the King’s Commonwealth. It is not us - so afflicted by fortune - that can ensure our fragile survival; it is Heaven sent.

The verse raises a particular pointed question, one which is asked of the reader at the outset and is denied a response until the hymn’s conclusion: what is the meaning of “save”? The term is intentionally ambiguous. It has a surface meaning of physical safety, but dissimulating not far behind is the religious connotation of salvation. If the monarch is to be saved - and the nation’s stability along with them - what is the Divine condition? Is the national future predetermined, a question of Heaven decreed luck, or is something demanded of the monarch in return? If so, what? In either event, it is clear that this apparently patriotic melody hides a deeper agenda: a directive to the monarch to remain within certain bounds. The King who hears his name sung with such unrestrained passion - and apparent loyalty - is being subtly warned of his Constitutional vulnerability. In this light, let us see how the hymn proceeds.

O Lord our God arise,

Scatter our enemies,

And make them fall!

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix,

God save us all!

British patriotic music, both here and elsewhere, rests on the delicate interplay between the temporal and the spiritual. I vow to thee my country, the gorgeous orchestral piece made famous by the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, has two interrelated but starkly contrasting verses. The first of these makes reference to the love of our physical home: our country, our nation here on Earth; but the second brutally jolts the listener to hear of ”another country”: the Kingdom of God, whose “fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering”. In biting contradistinction to our lived reality, that invisible utopia (?) - growing steadily soul by soul - counts no armies and lives in the blessed tranquility of eternal peace. Our Earthly nation, for all its blessings, is fallen and flawed. We praise our nation in our music, but recognize its failings in our words. We live today with love of nation, but we hope for a better tomorrow.

Jerusalem, the unofficial English national hymn, is similarly bipartite. It's oraise of England's green and presence land is diluted in biting social criticism. This is the country of the Industrial Revolution, that nation of “dark satanic mills” and immiserated child labor. May Jerusalem “be builded here” among this apparent hopelessness, we pray. Oh God help us to find a better way! Once more a beautiful, uplifting tune cannot succeed in hiding the reality of our true lives. British patriotism, rightly understood, is thus a humble prayer for a future where all are counted as in the “image and likeness of God”. It couldn't be further from “Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world⁴” satirical hubris.

As with I Vow to the my Country and Parry’s Jerusalem, God Save the King is a prayer for what we don't yet have but might yet be. The second stanza, reproduced above, makes reference to our “enemies”. At is unclear at this point who are enemies are. Are they external or internal? In what sense do they threaten us? And who are “we” anyway? These are questions that will yet be answered, but the stanza is penned in a mixture of apprehension and desperate prayer, a gentle, almost begging tone reflected beautifully in the cathedral choir style quieting of the orchestra in any well-performed rendition. Whoever our enemies are - they from whom we need to be saved - they can only be defeated through some manner of Divine intervention:

“ Oh Lord Our God arise, scatter our enemies”: Only you can do it, not we. Not yet is our fallen nation worthy of the Kingdom of God.

“On thee our hopes we fix”: There is none but you that can help us prevail.

“God save us all”: again the question is posed. Are we speaking here of physical salvation or that which only the monotheistic God can provide?

In order to determine how we might be saved, we are enjoined to discover from what; and in what way the Commonwealth tradition may be uniquely worthy. The question may lie in the poetic symmetry. God is called upon to save us all as well as its King. Just how the Monarch and Nation combine in their salvation is at the heart of the mystery and it is an enigma that the hymn will soon be wont to answer.

But first, we are beckoned to consider whose politics it is that we wish confounded and whose knavish tricks they are that we pray frustrated. Are they those of foreigners or rather is the enemy cultural? If the threat is external, from whence does it come? From the entire world or within a particular subset? As previously referenced, certain sometime-included verses suggested a contemporary threat, be that the Jacobite challenge from Scotland or from those who wish the Monarch physical harm. It is to this that the author refers when he proclaims:

From every latent foe,

From the assassins blow,

God save the King!

Yet, as with the Bible, which intermixes contemporary desert-based menace with the needs of eternity, so does God Save the King soon turn its gaze towards a quasi-utopian vision. In the compelling “not in this land alone” stanza, we are reminded that the author's motives are far from nationalist. Just as they seek the arrival of God's Kingdom in England's green and peasant land, so they pray for its coming throughout the entire world. In an echo of the common bipartite pattern throughout Britain's patriotic canon, the reader is gloriously reminded:

Not in this land alone,

But be God’s mercies known,

From shore to shore!

Lord make the nations see,

That men should brothers be,

And form one family,

The wide world o’er.

It is a verse unrequiring of commentary.

So if we pray for worldwide salvation, what, may we ask, is the meaning of the second stanza? Whose politics is it that we need defeating in order that God may save the King? Given that God Save the King is truly international in tone, as it was and remains to this day, who are the enemies to our freedom? Ah freedom! I may just have hit upon it with my untimely, nay precipitous, desire to arrive at utopia. And if not utopia, in a better and more stable land.

The unstable ordering of the hymn’s verses is deliciously ironic given the central theme of national and international stability. Yet though there are exceptions, the rendered hymn tends to end in the following, extraordinary manner:

Thy choicest gifts in store,

On him be pleased to pour,

Long may he reign!

MAY HE DEFEND OUR LAWS

AND EVER GIVE US CAUSE

To sing with heart and voice,

God save the King!

Finally, the answers have arrived and they flood towards us with the hoped for certainty of God's future blessing. What is asked of the King? That he be morally upstanding? That he be an unparalleled practitioner of war or bringer of peace? That he transform effortlessly into a philosopher with the legislative wisdom of Plato? Not at all and none of that. Only that within the bounds of his office he defend our laws. In a Constitutional Monarchy, the king is neither called upon to govern nor impelled to legislate. Indeed the noble, gracious King must stay as far away from politics as possible, lest his name be dirtied with the mud of division. Otherwise how could he long reign as the anthem enjoins?

Rather he must defend our laws, our rights and above all our freedoms. ONLY THEN will he give us cause to sing with heart and voice “God Save the King!” The office of the monarch promises stability and for that we pray for its continuance, but we interest ourselves not especially in the person of the King. After all, the pages of history have been bloodied with the ill-advised foolishness of meddling monarchs. Such Heads of State give us no cause to sing for their salvation. So we, in our liberal, Constitutional Monarchies, pray that it may be different this time.

We pray that God will Save the King both in body but more importantly in action. And even should this Monarch comply with our wishes, so that we may yet again be given cause “to sing with heart and voice God Save the King”, we will continue to sing that refrain because the next Monarch will require saving also. The idyllic garden of Constitutional Monarchy, is a fragile ensemble that requires constant and loving tending. Just one misplaced sin could force us to depart into a world of horrors. So it is that we will never be relieved of the duty to call on God to save the King. Today’s tranquility is an illusion falsely suggesting that freedom is natural. It takes one monarch, one populist, one autocrat to threaten the work that we have constructed together.

But we must not stop there, for there is an encore. Our Canadian friends, equally blessed with the stability of Constitutional Monarchy - indeed the same constitutional monarchy - previously added one further refrain. Although absent from the recital of her British cousins, it is a worthy addition which underscores who are friends and who are enemies. It reads:

Our loved Dominion bless

With peace and happiness

From shore to shore;

And let our Empire be

Loyal, united and free,

True to herself and Thee

For evermore.

As this appended stanza recounts, the Commonwealth conception of native and foreigner is neither related to blood nor location nor ethnicity nor religion. It demands only that “our Empire” - our Commonwealth of Nations, our attempt to create a realistic Kingdom of God on Earth - be free and that we be united in this endeavour. If the King defends our laws in Britain, in Canada and throughout the Free World where his dominion holds sway, that is a territory of friendship. If the monarch defends with the tools of his office our ancestral rights, our freedom-imbued customs and our statutes vested with the sovereignty of the people, he himself is frustrating the knavish tricks of our enemies; those who would roll back freedom so that we may no longer be true to ourselves and to our God. Yet if the monarch becomes a tyrant, placing his own desires above the common good, it is his politics that need to be confounded. The stability of monarchy can only bring peace and happiness from shore to shore - and from continent to continent - if we are united in our common values and loyal to them eternally.

The monarch is a figurehead. His coronation ceremony determines that he is the symbolic representation of the Divine, not in his person - oh most certainly not in his person! - but in the unity that his office brings. One who rules in a titular fashion from Australia to the ends of the Earth imitates the Divine Godhead who also rules from Shore to Shore as one; as the ultimate symbol of oneness. “Adonai echad⁵”. He, like God in Heaven, restricts himself in his powers, so that humans may be sovereign and free⁶. And just as the Divine must be disassociated from human politics to maintain its unifying power, so those human monarchs who stand aloof from the bear pit of division act nobly and with Heaven’s blessing. It is precisely by those means that we reach that “other country” promised in our most famous of patriotic hymns.

The hope promised by God Save the King and her fellow British patriotic hymns is that we have a future: a future of freedom, a future of stability, a future of unity. In the true British empirical tradition, we do not strive for continental utopia. That is not our conception of God’s Kingdom. Instead, where all are free to live according to their just laws, defended by a monarch who sees that defence as their duty, thereby we create that better world where we need no armies and where “soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase”. Put simply we believe in the future.

This grandly positive, yet realistic vision contrasts in the most vivid of terms with that provided by The Sex Pistols in their 1970s anthem “God Save the Queen”. This nihilistic, depressing, hope-deprived travesty provides us with no future. Instead the future is explicitly denied:
God save the Queen

She ain't no human being

There is no future

In England's dreaming. //

Don't be told what you want, you want

And don't be told what you want to need

There's no future, no future

No future for you.

…..

God save history

God save your mad parade

Oh Lord God, have mercy

All crimes are paid //

When there's no future, how can there be sin?

We're the flowers in the dustbin

We're the poison in your human machine

We're the future, your future.

This is the dystopia that the British people reject. And the Canadian people. And the Australian people. And all those within the Commonwealth dominions. We are free, independent and sovereign; and we intend to keep it that way. We proudly affirm that which William Hickson stated in his 1836 alternative version and we direct it at all those enemies that threaten our liberty, borders and values with knavish tricks. God Save the King!

God bless our native land!

May Heav'n's protecting hand

Still guard our shore:

May peace his power extend,

Foe be transformed to friend,

And Britain's rights depend

On war no more.

…..

May just and righteous laws

Uphold the public cause,

And bless our Isle:

HOME OF THE BRAVE AND FREE,

Thou land of Liberty,

We pray that still on thee

Kind Heav'n may smile.

1. The more precise translation is “Long live the King!” but the King James rendering is meant to have inspired the hymn’s title.

2. Canada also has a mixed French-English first verse. In addition, we can find an official Maori and Jèrriais translation in the relevant territories.

3. George II initially

4. The Borat film’s satire of nationalist anthems

5. “God is One“. The declaration of God’s unity in the Jewish Shema prayer.

6. The Jewish mystical idea of Tzimtzum teaches us that God contracts Himself to allow space for humanity to be free.