Power being the immemorial fantasy of the powerless, it's unsurprising that modern witches should ask: What if the king were one of ours? What if the king were a witch?

Ever since Margaret Murray, who viewed witchery as a kind of Protest Paganism, first suggested a hundred years ago that the ancient cult of the Sacral/Sacrifical Kingship persisted in the British Isles into early modern times, novelists have asked the question again and again.

Forthwith, a few memorable examples.

The King is a Witch (Evelyn Eaton, 1965)

The year is 1342, the king is Edward III, and yes, he's a witch: our kind of witch, the pagan/Old Religion kind.

Alas, that doesn't mean that he's not a nasty piece of work who spends most of his time looking for divine substitutes to die—in his stead—for the life of the people.

So maybe he's not our kind of witch, after all.

The Devil and King John (Philip Lindsay, 1956)

The king isn't a witch, but his wife is. Bad “my kingdom for a horse” King John, from an Old Craft Revisionist Historical p.o.v.

Well, it's a romp.

King of the Wood (Valerie Anand, 1989)

The king isn't a witch, but his boyfriend is. The life of William II “Rufus”—he of Lammas sacrifice fame—like you've never heard it before.

Let me just mention that his boyfriend, Ralph des Aix, is a horn-wearing King of the Witches himself. He leads the secret (but international) Cult of the Wood, and has a grouping of moles shaped like the constellation Orion on his chest.

Are you in love yet, too?

Watch the North Wind Rise/Seven Days in New Crete (Robert Graves, 1949)

You'll never forget the Midsummer sacrifice of the Antlered King of New Crete, Robert Graves' Goddess-worshiping utopia (but is it?) of the post-apocalyptic future.

Pagan ritual should always be so good.

Dies the Fire (S. M. Stirling, 2004 et seq.)

I'm a sucker for “Witches-rebuild-civilization-after-the-apocalypse” fiction—to my mind, it seems a realistic enough possibility—and Stirling's Emberverse series gets a place of honor in that surprisingly well-populated genre. Hel, at fifteen novels, it gets its own shelf in the section.

In King Artos I of Montival—that's plain old Rudi Mackenzie of Oregon, back home at the covenstead—Stirling aims for a larger-than-life hero in the old Cuchulainn/Achilles/Beowulf mold. His most memorable feat: surviving the unstoppable stampede of a million-strong bison herd by mounting and riding a buffalo bull.

Alas, in the end, this (literally) post-Modern hero simply does not measure up to his counterparts of yore. Heroes engage because, though in some ways larger than life, their flaws nonetheless instill in the rest of us a sense of fellow-feeling. In this way, they inspire us to become better than ourselves. If Cuchulainn, with all his flaws, can be so generous, then maybe I can, too.

Artos, though, has no flaws. Though Stirling, skilled writer that he is, strives mightily to make us like this character, at thirteenth and last, he's simply too perfect. Drop-dead gorgeous, wise, generous, unfailingly fair, good at everything that he does, incapable of losing a fight—he even has a sense of humor—he successfully quests for the magic Sword of the Lady that gives him the ability to read minds and to speak any language fluently, and so (in the end) manages to save the world from an attempted invasion by Cthulhu & Co.

Yes, that Cthulhu.

Lammas Night (Katherine Kurtz, 1983)

The king isn't a witch, but his younger brother is. The witches of Britain need a willing sacrifice to forestall Hitler's proposed invasion. Prince William dutifully steps forward as his brother's Divine Substitute.

No, not that Prince William (i.e. bonny Prince Billy). He wasn't even born yet when this novel came out.

Interesting coincidence, though, isn't it?

Omega (Stewart Farrar, 1980)

After ecological collapse has destroyed civilization as we know it, the witches of Britain rebuild Witchdom from the ground up.

(Seeing a theme here yet? Hey, after things fall apart, are we just going to sit there, or are we going to gird up our robes and actually do something?)

In the Madness immediately following the collapse, a couple of covens take refuge in—of all places—Windsor Castle. Then, one afternoon, they hear the by-now unfamiliar sound of a helicopter.

It lands, and a middle-aged man jumps out, accompanied by “a handsome woman about his own age, a younger man and woman with a baby, and two teenaged girls.”

Norman Godwin, leader of the Windsor witches, draws his gun and tells them to drop theirs, which they do.

Then he recognizes them.

“Forgive me, sir,” he stammers. “We weren't exactly expecting you.”

Yes, it's King Charles III himself, though Farrar never names him. (This, too, was written well before Charlie and Diana's ill-omened match: hence the demographic disconnect.) The royals settle in amicably with the witches. One day he and Norman are chatting.

“Wasn't there a controversy in your Craft, oh, about forty years ago, over whether there was such a thing as a King of the Witches?” asks Charles, harking back to the Alex Sanders brujaja of the late 60s.

“Quite a heated one,” replies Norman.

“Wouldn't it be ironical if people started calling me that?” asks Charles.

One thing you've got to give QE II: it was hard not to take her personally.

One of my very earliest memories—it may even be my first memory—is of seeing the royal coach on our tiny black-and-white screen in a working-class suburb of Steeltown, USA. I'm sure that the image struck with such force because it looked so much like the pumpkin coaches in my storybooks. Suddenly, what I'd always thought was make-believe, took on a weird kind of reality.

Really, when you think about it, real kings and queens aren't all that much stranger than real witches: the Unreal suddenly become Real.

So, enter King Charlie, “the Philosopher Prince”. Well folks, rumors apart—sorry, that goat in the Queen's funeral procession is a regimental mascot, not a Satanic stand-in—this king's not a witch, either; but he always has been an ecumenical kind of guy. Now he's (as Farrar would have it) Protector of the Faiths.

With northwards of 800,000 witches among his subjects, I reckon he's King of the Witches now too, whether he likes it or not.