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By way of corroboration, another text—this one by Richard O’Sullivan, The Inheritance of Common Law (1950)—states that:
Hubert Walter (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury) and Henry of Bracton were at pains to argue that it is not absurd to call the Law and Customs of England, though they are not written, by the name of law.
The implications are clear, not only for the people of Britain but also of the Commonwealth. It is that they can take King Charles at his word and lawfully assert their right to a trial by jury. With this comes the power of the jury to engage in annulment by jury, where the jury has the power to acquit someone guilty of infringing a piece of legislation where its jurors determine that the legislation has no validity.
According to William Keyte, this is where democracy comes into its own, with the power of jurors to annul bad legislation. Significantly, Charles’ oath, with its undertaking to observe the ‘laws and customs’ of the realm, provides the necessary underpinning to this assertion of the democratic principle.
Having seen the full force of the commitment to the ‘laws and customs’ of the realm, let us move on now to Charles’ second undertaking, namely to observe the ‘laws of God’. What does this add?
b. The laws of God
Elizabeth II undertook in her oath to follow ‘the laws of God’, and this commitment was repeated in Charles’ oath. The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, make frequent reference to God’ laws, showing us that these are regarded as the last word in law, and therefore immutable. You can glean this from the following passages in Deuteronomy, for example:
4:2 Ye shall not add to the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.
12:32 What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.
We can clearly see how Deuteronomy precludes making additions to God’s laws, and this means that any monarch with these words in his oath must resist adding his signature to new legislation, since otherwise he stands in breach of their oath. Queen Elizabeth II signed no fewer than 4,272 statutes into existence in the span of her reign between 1953 and 2022—and the fact that this breached her oath not only invalidates the statutes, but also those institutions that derive their authority from the monarch, including HM Courts, HM Revenue and Customs, and HM Government. Note that a commitment to support the ‘laws and customs’ of the Realm corroborates this view, since, according to Hubert Walter and Henry de Bracton, the phrase ‘laws and customs’ explicitly excludes codified law.
As if this is not significant enough, an undertaking to be bound by the ‘laws of God’ has further implications. Indeed, according to Deuteronomy, the handing of power to a ‘stranger’, or what we might refer to as a foreign power today (this double meaning of ‘strange’ and ‘foreign’ occurs in French too, in the word étranger) is a breach of God’s laws. Here are the relevant sections from Deuteronomy that outlaw handing power to a stranger in the land:
17:14 When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that [are] about me;
17:15 Thou shalt in any wise set [him] king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: [one] from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which [is] not thy brother.
What is the implication of this? It is that the act of passing powers to a foreign body, be it the European Union or the World Economic Forum, is in conflict with God’s laws. This means that when Elizabeth II provided her assent to the European Communities Act in 1972 or to the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, she broke her oath, since both pieces of legislation handed British powers to overseas bodies.
The jury is out on King Charles and on whether he will continue to lend his support to the World Economic Forum (WEF) as he did when he was the Prince of Wales. We do know that he continues to support their and the UN’s policies for lower carbon emissions—his involvement with the ‘Climate Countdown’ initiative on 28 June is testament to this—and so his actions in support of overseas bodies must be closely monitored.
More generally, there is the larger question as to whether the action of the monarch is in congruence with divine law; and so we finish by considering this all-important question.
Divine law as the ultimate arbiter
Over time, esteemed minds have suggested that divine law takes precedence over human law where the latter opposed divine principles. Thus, Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics (V, 7) states that what was ‘just by nature’ was not always the same as what was ‘just by law’; and the Justinian Code continues this theme in its discussion of common law (iūs commune) and its treament the distinction between sentences that follow natural justice and those that follow the letter of the law. So too does John of Salisbury, who, in his Policraticus, written in the twelfth century, recommends that where human law is at variance with natural law, the human law must not be enforced.
This line of thinking continued with the great thirteenth century Italian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, asserting that ‘”[E]very human law [that] is incompatible with the natural law, will not be law, but a perversion of the law.” In the eighteenth century, Sir William Blackstone, the great compiler of English common law and chief justice of England, stated that:
[I]f any human law should allow or enjoin us to transgress the natural or divine law then we are bound to transgress the human law, or else we must offend both the natural and divine.
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