In Praise of William and Kate; in Praise of Monarchy

There was a post on Blog Catalogue congratulating William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, on the forthcoming birth of their first child, good news for them in particular and for the British monarchy in general, the succession now secured far into the future.  I added my own congratulations but the post also attracted ignorant comment from people who should know better but don’t. 

One American described our monarchy as a ‘travesty’ and an Australian pompously went on about what an anachronism it was in the modern world to have an inherited head of state.  This was supported by arrant nonsense about philosophers and political thinkers in the seventeenth century being “more modern and more rational.”  It demanded a response and response I gave, highlighting the importance of monarchy in history.  This is my broadside on ignorance.  It’s been slightly adapted and expanded. 

I’m not sure who the ‘more modern and more rational’ seventeenth century political thinkers were alluded to here. It just so happens that the seventeenth century is my speciality, a period of intense political upheaval in the history of England. It was the one time that we got rid of our monarchy, albeit for a brief period.

It was a period when the gentle authoritarianism of King Charles I was replaced by the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell and the dire Puritanism of the Major Generals. In the end the people had enough of Protectors, Republics and Confusion, calling Charles II home from exile. Since then the institution has gone from strength to strength, gently devolving its former prerogatives and powers to Parliament and People.

There is an acute historical irony here.  The monarchy, it might be said, is an institution in evolution.  It evolves now just as it has in the past.  In the eighteenth century the Americans rebelled against the perceived ‘tyranny’ of George III, eventually creating a monarchical republic.  As George and his descendents continued to devolve power to Parliament, an imperial presidency arose in the States.  Presidents as varied as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised forms of prerogative power that even Charles I would have found shocking.

Looking further afield, consider the history of France, where a monarchy was replaced by ‘rational’ forms of terror, mass murder and dictatorship. Look at the history of the last century, conceivably the most terrible in human history, where in place of traditional monarchies in Russia and Germany we had murderous tyranny; instead of Nicholas II we had Stalin; instead of Wilhelm II we had Hitler.

Bringing the story up to date, the most politically advanced, stable and culturally tolerant countries in Europe are all monarchies. Apart from my own country there is the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was the monarchy in Spain that acted as the midwife to a modern democracy after years of dictatorship.

I do wish people would think a little more deeply before they use words like travesty or before they waffle on about anachronism and rationality.

Anyway, well done William and Kate, two more charming people I find difficult to imagine.  They will make splendid parents just as one day they will make a splendid King and Queen.  

Vivat Regina!

She was only eleven years old when she was confronted with her future destiny.  It wasn’t something she wanted or welcomed, a little girl interested in the things that little girls are interested in.  For many nights thereafter, as she told her grandmother, her mother’s mother, she prayed for a little brother, someone to come and relieve her of the burden.  Her prayers, thankfully, were not answered.  She was Lilibet; she became Elizabeth; she is our Queen.

England is having a party.  This week we celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, sixty years on the throne, only the second time in our history that we have seen such an occasion, the first being for Queen Victoria in 1897.  But then Victoria, for so long in morbid isolation and declining in health, was the ghost at the party, the ghost of a passing age.  Not so Elizabeth, as active, as involved, as committed and as dutiful as ever. 

It was in 1947, when she was only twenty-one years old, that she made a promise to Britain, to the Empire, to the Commonwealth and to the world.  She was in South Africa at the time.  With the radio microphone before her she said “It is very simple.  I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.”  It was five years later she came to the throne, suddenly and unexpectedly, following the death of George VI, her beloved father. 

And so it has been.  The Empire has gone, falling away bit by bit, but for the most part without bitterness or acrimony.  One by one former colonies emerged as self-governing republics, though still bound together with Britain in a Commonwealth of interest and affection for the Queen, a rock and a symbol above all petty politics.  I remember when I was in Uganda, there told of a past state visit, when the people of Kampala came out to greet Her Majesty in thousands. 

We should be grateful for all that she represents, for her continuity and for her strength.  I have the latest edition of the Spectator in front of me.  There, on the front cover, she can be seen in an illustration by the cartoonist Peter Brookes,  She is looking at portraits of all of the Prime Ministers of her reign, right back to 1952.  There are twelve in all, counting Harold Wilson’s two ministries as one, beginning with Winston Churchill (he headed a post-war ministry) and ending with David Cameron.  I say ending but I am convinced she will see more before the day is done!

The Queen quite simply is the Queen, recognised as such across the world.  Even in the United States, where she has never reigned, she has an approval rating of over 60%, far in excess of the President, having long since made up for the perceived misdemeanours of her ancestor George III.  Even in England, as we have moved from an age of deference to an age of vulgarity, she has stood like a rock, one upon which every republican tide has broken.

We challenge the institution of monarchy at our peril.  It defines who and what we are in this country.  I revere Queen Elizabeth not for what she says, or what she believes, or what she does – it’s simply for who she is and what she represents.  She is consistency and stability in the midst of change.  We have come to despise politicians as much as we revere the Queen.  The very idea of a republic with an elected head of state, a Tony Blair or a David Cameron, would, I imagine, give most English people nightmares.  It certainly gives me nightmares. 

Yes, we challenge monarchy at our peril.  I was eleven years old when Princess Diana died.  I still remember the mawkish outburst of sentimentality; I still remember the displays of emotion that shamed this nation, shallow, gay and fey.  I still remember my grandfather’s comments on the irresponsibility of the press, voicing gratuitous criticisms of the monarchy in general and the Queen in particular.  Once again it exercised the prerogative of the harlot throughout history: power without responsibility.  Elizabeth II survived it all; she survived the fashions of a season, growing stronger, the People’s Monarch in a deeper sense than the ghastly Tony Blair could ever comprehend.

I’m under no illusions about our present condition and future predicament.  I do not share the sentiments of Boris Johnson and others in the press in their over-the-top celebration of a new Elizabethan Age.  This is an age of decline; we have, with the brief intermission of Margaret Thatcher, been in decline as a nation for decades.  The future does not look good, shackled as we are to the Sick Man of the European Union.  But, for a moment or two, we shall take time out; we shall enjoy the spectacle of a wonderful pageant on the Thames. We shall fiddle while Europe burns! 

Anyway, I am getting set to carry the good news from England to Italy.  I leave tomorrow morning, spending my Jubilee week in Rome and Florence.  Have a super time, one and all, and declare with me, Vivat Regina! Vivat Regina Elizabetha! Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!

Mobs and cops

As the carriage made its way along the highway the royal couple within were subject to repeated insults. Ugly faces pushed through the windows, spitting on the prince and tearing the dress of his wife. The mood within was one of fear, shock that there was so much violence and brutishness in the world, shown at its worst in the nation’s capital. Here the obscenities and the abuse issued freely. It was only with difficulty that the escort kept the foul mob at bay.

No, it’s not what you are thinking. This is not London and the people in question are not the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. They are Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette returning from Varennes in the summer of 1791, the furthest point they reached in trying to escape from the excesses of the French Revolution. But when I saw the look of fear on the Duchess’s face as the royal car was attacked last Thursday by those brutish ‘students’ it occurred to me that this must have been the same expression that appeared on the face of the divine Marie Antoinette all those years ago.



Who would have believed that our capital could have been desecrated in this fashion; who would have believed that a loathsome mob could have attacked the future King of England and his wife; who could believe that a British citizen could have swung on the flag on the cenotaph, the nation’s most sacred symbol, like an ape, or another urinate on the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, the nation’s greatest wartime leader? We must have gone back in time and imported the sans-culottes of 1791, stinking, animal-like, corrupting the air with their rotten halitosis. They’re still at work, this Varennes mob, on the Guardian comments website, posting remarks like “fuck Churchill” and describing the attack on Charles and Camilla as “hilarious.”

I have a busy life. I try to keep up with the news, though it’s not always possible. So, I have a question about quite an important item that I’ve clearly missed. Can anyone tell me, please, when the Metropolitan Police were replaced by the Keystone Cops? To lose control in one riot may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose control in both looks like carelessness. No, Lady Bracknell is far too mild: it looks like utter incompetence, like comic stupidity, if only the possible consequences were not so serious.

Sir Paul Stephenson, Keystone Cop-in-chief, sorry, make that Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, says that the protection officers, some of whom were armed, showed “enormous restraint and good judgement.” We now know that one of the beasts leaned through an open window and stabbed the sixty-three year old Duchess with a stick.

What if it had been a knife? How did these officers know that it was only a stick? What, exactly, are the circumstances in which they would draw arms if not this? Are they so afraid of the political fall-out that they are effectively numbed into inaction? Just imagine what would happen if an American President had been attacked in this fashion. The individual in question would have been shot dead even before he managed to poke his stick, of that I have not the least doubt. With a clot like Stephenson in charge of royal security, of the security of visiting heads of state, personal incompetence has turned into national embarrassment.

Every bullet which leaves the barrel of a police pistol now is my bullet. If one calls this murder, then I have murdered: I ordered all this. I back it up. I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so.

You may recognise this quote; if not these are the words of Herman Goering, a statement issued shortly after he became Prussian Minster of the Interior in 1933. I suppose the Stephenson version would be that every bullet that does not leave the barrel of a police pistol is a sign of his ‘remarkable restraint.’ I hope we are better prepared to deal with rabid mobs, ‘students’ or whoever they are, in the difficult times ahead. With a man like this in charge I’m not at all confident.

The Thoughts of Citizen Pete

Those of you unfamiliar with English ritual and custom might not be aware that we still have an established church, a national church, supposedly. Yes, we have the Church of England, the dear old C of E, the church in which I was baptised and confirmed. It has ancient roots as part of a worldwide Catholic communion, though since the Reformation it has been headed not by the Pope but by the reigning monarch as Supreme Governor.

Now the powers conferred by this office are really residual in nature. Still, the archbishops and bishops all owe a basic loyalty to the institution of monarchy. But the Church of England, you see, is a broad church, with room for all sorts of people; it even has room, as I discovered recently, for republican bishops: it has room for the likes of Pete Broadbent (apparently he insists on ‘Pete’), Bishop of Willesden. Now that’s another new discovery for me: I had no idea that there was a Bishop of Willesden.

Anyway, Bishop Pete is a trendy sort of guy, a sort of Tony Blair kinda cleric. He twitters and tweets and he has a Facebook page. He’s used Twitter to announce to the world that he was going to have a ‘republican day’ in France on the occasion of the forthcoming wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Not content with that, he went on to Facebook to describe them as ‘shallow celebrities’ whose marriage would last seven years at the outside, before proceeding to a sustained assault on the monarchy in general, with some offensive and distasteful remarks about Prince Charles (Big Ears) and his late wife (Porcelain Doll) thrown to season the stew.

What can I say about Pete? He is entitled to his republican and anti-monarchist views, of course he is, though I would have thought that this was something of a problem for a senior cleric in a church that professes outward loyalty to the royal house. But set that aside, for is there not something even more basic, anti-Christian, it might even be said, in his churlish and boorish dismissal of the marital prospects of a couple setting out on life together? It does not really matter if they are celebrities or not (William can hardly help being a celebrity), it does not really matter of they are ‘shallow’ or not (judging, I suppose, by his depth); they deserve the respect that every other couple is entitled to, not this ghastly man’s uncharitable and hurtful rudeness. With people like him in charge small wonder that the decline of the Church of England in recent years has been so rapid.

I simply can’t abide ill-manners, boorishness and discourtesy in any degree. When a man like Pete (a citizen and not a subject, as he says on Facebook) jeers at a couple who have given no offense and caused no harm, other than to announce that they intend to marry, then it becomes absolutely intolerable. But I’m not as uncharitable as Citizen Pete. I really do hope that the sun shines on his republican day and that the French make him very welcome. I hope they make him so welcome that Willesden and England never see Citizen Pete again.

The faces of Janus – a response to Calvin

Calvin, there are two things you must understand about me: I’m a rationalist…and a romantic! The seventeenth century is by far my favourite period in history, the time of the Stuarts, the time of the Civil Wars. If I had been living then I like to think that I would have been cast in the same mould as Charlotte de La Trémoille, Countess of Derby, a royalist who in 1644 successfully defended Lathom House with only a few men against a much larger enemy force, led for part of the time by Sir Thomas Fairfax in person, the foremost parliamentary soldier.

What was the depth of her attachment? It was based on emotion, on loyalty and on the attractions of legitimacy; on a belief that Charles I, the king, had been divinely appointed and that monarchy was the rightful government of the land. It’s an institution honoured by tradition; it’s an institution that continues to be honoured by tradition. It was for Charlotte de La Trémoille; it is for me.

But, you are right: strip it back and kingship, any form of monarchy, arose in the way you suggest; that it is an original exercise in tribal power obscured by the passage of time, sanctified by the veneer of religion. You might, if you have not already done so, have a look at William Hazlitt’s ‘demolition’ of royalty and divine right in his essays On the Spirit of Monarchy and On the Connection Between Toad Eaters and Tyrants, both written in the early part of nineteenth century, in which he more or less makes the same observation as you: that a king is no more than a rich thug surrounded by a gang of flunkies. As for your point about Mugabe and Blair it’s something I addressed myself in L'etat, C'est Moi – a response to Adam.

You are also right about our present Queen: she is a monarch by honour and tradition alone. Her powers, the powers of the royal house itself, have devolved over time to the office of prime minister, the real source of power in our constitution, more important than parliament itself, with forms of patronage that Charles I would have envied. But the Queen is still transcendent; the Queen and her heirs represent the nation at a deeper level, at a level above politics. We all require some kind of symbolism to identify with, a flag in your case, a person in ours. There are no rational arguments I can draw on here to justify this process, because none exists. It’s all about emotion, all about sentiment.

Now, why do I prefer monarchy to the other traditions you mention? To begin with I would say that monarchy both incorporates and transcends a theocratic tradition, too narrowly based in itself to stand the test of time and change. Purely sacred monarchies had a tendency to collapse when they lost the mandate of heaven. Democracy and anarchy, to take these purely as intellectual concepts, might be said to be so closely allied that there is little practical difference; that pure democracy is anarchy, and anarchy is unworkable as national idea. Roman democracy collapsed in anarchy. The state was only saved by a new form of monarchy.

So, I’m a monarchist, a royalist, to be exact, because royalty gave shape to my nation, because it gave cohesion and identity where there was none; it gave continuity through time. Continuity, now that’s the thing. Thinking specifically about England regicide was the exception, not the rule. Kings were removed, yes, often because of incompetence, but they were invariably replaced by other kings from the same family, not by outsiders. The seventeenth century regicide is the great exception here, when Charles I was replaced by a republic. What then happened? Why, the republic was replaced by a monarchy, which became a republic again, a position of constitutional chaos only resolved by the return of the King!

The King returned in 1660, that’s true, but matters were never quite the same again. Absolutism - which never really existed in England in the sense of Brunei or Saudi Arabia in any case - had but a limited lease. A new monarchy arose in 1688, one that has been adapting and modifying ever since, one that takes the shape of the age. That’s why it’s been so enduring, that and the fact that it was still able to stand above the common political fray.

In the end it all comes down to sentiment and romance, I can give you no better reason for my attachment to royalty than that. The origins are unimportant; only the tradition matters. Besides, I have the luxury, which you do not, of being able to hate the head of government while loving the head of state. Surely there can be no better reason for believing that royalty is the best possible institution for my nation? Others can do things differently. We should just muddle along as we have for the past thousand years or so! And, if I can return to my previous blog, I have now taken Kate Middleton completely to my heart, a sign that tradition and novelty is the Janus image that England shows to the world, looking back and looking forward at one and the same time. I hope we always shall.

Queen Kate

Karl Marx spent a good bit of his life as an exile in England. It was the place to be, the place at the most advanced stage of industrial development, the place with the most developed working class; it was the place where revolution, by the lights of his theory, was bound to come, had to come. After all, it was historically inevitable.

Except it did not come; it never would come. For all his time in this country he acquired no understanding at all of the English way of doing things. We do not rebel: we absorb, we adapt, we adjust. According to Marx the bourgeois should have overthrown the aristocracy, just as they in their turn would be overthrown by the proletariat. But no- it was the middle classes who became the measure of all things, not the aristocracy or the proletariat, the middle-class who would be the motor of change from the high Victorian age onwards.

The truth did actually dawn on the old prophet towards the end of his life. He began to share the cynicism of Friedrich Engels, his collaborator, a factory owner from whom Karl had not the least hesitation of skimming off a spot of ‘surplus value’ now and then to support his own bourgeois lifestyle. The English proletariat, Marx said, “"was becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie."

Marx! thou should’st be living at this hour. Yes, he should, because he would be able to see that he got one thing right at least: the bourgeois advance has continued. We have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat, yes, but now we have a bourgeois monarchy!

This is a long and convoluted way of saying that I’m absolutely delighted at the announcement that Prince William is to marry Kate Middleton, his long-standing amour from Saint Andrews days, an impeccably bourgeois girl! Actually she is more; she has poise and she has elegance, the most fantastic dress sense I’ve seen on a public figure for such a long time. I think she will make an absolutely delightful queen for a new monarchy, a monarchy for the twenty-first century, a monarchy for the people, by the people, of the people.

She won’t be the first commoner to marry into the royal house, an honour that belongs to Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward IV in 1464. There have been others since, not just commoners but people without any aristocratic lineage. I'm being disingenuous, though, in suggesting that that Kate is the harbinger of a new middle-class monarchy; that’s long been in evolution, a monarchy of quite domesticity and familial duty; a monarchy really created by Victoria and Albert, impeccably bourgeois in taste and morality despite their disreputable Hanoverian lineage. Edward VII was really the last king with any vestiges of the old fashion. Thereafter it was comfort, duty and dependable mediocrity! Now Kate brings a touch of colour and style, a new bottle for old wine. I wish her well, our once and future queen.