When the early Christians draw their first portraits of Christ, he was shown as a youth, like the boy Samuel or the young ruddy-faced David, or, most commonly, as a beardless adolescent shepherd boy. Anglo-Saxon England was haunted by the Christ figure of the young warrior king who shepherded his people and was prepared to die for them ; he is the central figure in the Dream of the Rood, and is carved on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses.

It's hard for us who are anaesthetised by the form of a mere constitutional monarchy which we have today to appreciate what trememendous reverence was paid among English barbarian peoples to the figure of a king, particularly a young king. This is why Edmund's young death caused such outrage among his subjects. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely notes: 'In this year, 870, the raiding army rode across Mercia into East Anglia, and took up winter quarters at Thetford. And that winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danes had the victory, and killed the king, and conquered all the land.' The death was hailed as a martyrdom and caused such such revulsion that its memory lived on in oral tradition for years. Abbo of Fleury who wrote his life of St Edmund a century after the martydom heard his version from St Dunstan who himself claimed to have been told the details by one who had witnessed the death itself.

In the last couple of months, I have seen St Edmund twice. In the chapel of the English College, Rome, a picture of the Holy Trinity hangs behind the high altar before which young priests prayed before they set out for possible martyrdom in England. The Trinity is flanked by the kneeling figures of St Thomas Becket and St Edmund. Church and State, if you like, although the more knowledgeable will realise that before the Crusaders presented us with St George as our patron, it was St Edmund, King and Martyr, who was England's patron. Then, three weeks ago, I found myself looking at the frieze in the English College Chapel in Valladolid which is a shrine to the Vulnerata, the statue, that is, of Our Lady with her face smashed in by English pirates in Cadiz, who also chopped off her arms to tear the child from her knee, so as to leave only a pitiable infant foot still attached to the statue. Next to the Vulnerata stand two English kings, Edmund, pierced with a knife, and Charles I, beheaded by the regicides in 1649.

Christ's kingship, which we celebrate tomorrow, is not, we are told, of this world. And through his example and his teaching, he was to shape a new sort of king, a Christian king, not a barbarian king who ruled by conquest or a Machiavellian king who ruled through cynical political cunning and practical politics, like the Gothic king Totila who came to Monte Cassino to pay his respects to St. Benedict, but only when the coast was clear, but a Christian king who ruled by patience and by a level of virtue demonstrated through service in council, court, arms, letters and even commerce. 'Bona agere et mali pati, regium est' 'To rule as a king is to do good and to endure evil'.

Like Christian kings, we win our crown not by fasting and external deeds which bring respect, but by patience in every trial and affliction. We read that patience is the foundation of all virtue; it is peace in time of war, calm in troubled waters, and safety in danger. No weapons or arrows, no army or flying spear can shake it. As we discover that we ourselves are incomplete, we learn to be patient with ourselves; as we recognise the incompleteness of our relationship with others, we learn to be patient with those around us. Patience allows us to resist discouragement and despair in times of trial, to hold out in a given situation over a long period of time without letting the truth of who we are become distorted, and to sustain others and their situations. There is nothing particularly heroic about this, but like the patience shown by that young king suffering a cruel death, Christian patience challenges the status quo , and as it provokes, so it disquiets.