Could “the conscience of the king,” as Shakespeare put it, create a constitutional crisis in Britain? The question arises amid a report that King Charles, whose job description includes serving as “Defender of the Faith,” is, per the Daily Mail, facing “a dark night of the soul” over “two pieces of legislation he may soon have to sign into law.” The bills would legalize assisted suicide and decriminalize abortion, posing a moral predicament for the king. 

Both measures passed the House of Commons thanks to its Labour majority, won in last year’s landslide election. The abortion bill would mark “the biggest change to abortion laws in England and Wales for nearly 60 years,” the BBC reports, legalizing abortions even in cases when a pregnancy has lasted 24 weeks or more — “late-term” abortions, in American parlance. Women, in such cases, would “no longer be at risk of being investigated by police,” the BBC adds.

The assisted suicide legislation raises more ethical quandaries. The bill, described in the Spectator as a “sweeping, society-changing proposal,” would allow physicians to help terminally ill Britons end their own lives. Opponents, like Alistair Thompson of Care Not Killing, insist that “the state should not be complicit in encouraging people to end their lives.” A Catholic archbishop, John Sherrington, said he was “shocked and disappointed” by the bill.

The bill, if enacted into law, would “change the culture of health care,” the archbishop adds, “and cause legitimate fears amongst those with disabilities or who are especially vulnerable in other ways.” Plus, too, the Daily Mail reports, the “Royal Family will have to be excluded from the legislation,” or else revisions will be needed to the Treason Act of 1351, “still in force,” which “makes it an offence to ‘compass or imagine’ the death of the monarch.”

That provision could well come up in the House of Lords, which, in Britain’s unwritten constitutional regime, has the power to review and amend bills that come up from the Commons. Critics of both bills are vowing to fight them in the Lords. Yet the upper house, once a bulwark comprising Britain’s Lords Spiritual, the clergy, and Lords Temporal, the landed nobility, itself faces reform or extinction via Labour’s majority in the Commons.

If the Lords — disempowered by Liberal and Labour incursions — fail to hold the line on the abortion and suicide measures, it will “pose problems for His Majesty as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which opposes both bills,” the Daily Mail says. The dilemma reflects the dual role of Britain’s monarch embodying both temporal and spiritual power, underscored by Charles being anointed during “the most sacred part” of his coronation ceremony.

Which brings us back to the king’s conscience. It’s not our intention to appraise Charles’s religiosity. In 1994, though, he mused about a royal role as a “defender of faith” as opposed to a “defender of the faith,” meaning Christianity as practiced by the Church of England. The queen’s former chaplain, Gavin Ashenden, says Charles “has chafed at the exclusiveness of Christianity and only recently committed himself to Anglicanism.”

If Charles’s soul is troubled by the abortion and suicide bills, would he give “Royal Assent” for them to become law? Parliament says that the king “has the right to refuse Royal Assent,” but this has not happened since 1708, when Queen Anne vetoed a Scottish Militia Bill. “Royal Assent is regarded today as a formality,” Parliament avers. Yet it’s hard to see how Charles can approve these measures while honoring his coronation vow to “maintain the Laws of God.”