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.  

Kings and Carols

Right, hold tight: I’m about to explode a cherished seasonal myth: Wenceslas was not a king; he was not even called Wenceslas! He was Václav, duke of Bohemia. It was the Emperor Otto I who extended the regal dignity to him posthumously. This was a purely personal honour, one that only serves to confuse, especially as the real King Wenceslas I of Bohemia finally stood up in the thirteenth century!

In a recent brief article I read on Wenceslas, not the first, the original, Jonathan Pollard asks if he was good, as the carol alleges. Well, he was declared a saint and all saints have to be good! But really it’s all a question of party politics, the parties in question being Pagan and Christian. Václav was a Christian, which seems to have been the only measure of his ‘goodness.‘ He was brought up by Saint Ludmila, another goody, eventually strangled on the orders of Drahomira, Václav’s mater, a Pagan, and therefore a bad person, although there is not a trace of evidence to suggest that she was - a Pagan, that is!

The fact is the saint came from a back-stabbing, power-mad family. His mother had his grandmother murdered and he was murdered in his turn by Boleslaw, his brother, who wanted the throne for himself. Which party did Boleslaw belong to? You've already guessed, I suspect - he was a Pagan! That’s how the hagiography goes, though Boleslaw seems to have been somewhat relaxed when it came to matters of personal faith, encouraging the growth of Christianity while he was duke and asking the Pope to make Prague a bishopric, rather odd behaviour, I feel sure you will agree, for a Pagan. It gets even odder when one remembers that Mlada, his daughter, became a nun and his son of the same name was so pious that he was to be known as Boleslaw the Pious!

The murder, as Pollard says, probably had nothing to do with Václav’s Christianity or his goodness and everything to do with his pro-Holy Roman politics, which was in danger of turning Bohemia into just another province of the Empire. His retrospective kingship shows how valued he was by the imperial court, just as Boleslav’s decision to go to war soon after his succession shows that he was the true defender of Czech liberties, not his brother, rather ironic considering that it was Václav who went on to become the nation’s patron saint.

Never mind the history; you are still left with the carol, the much loved classic with words by John Mason Neale. Incidentally I made up my own version of that, one my set used to sing at school, which opens like this;

Good King Stephen last looked out
On the feast of Wenc-lass,
When a snowball came in sight
And nearly knocked him senseless.
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cruel,
Oh, the stars he saw that night,
And his head was cru –ooo –el.

I was a bad girl, a Pagan, clearly, not a Christian. :-)

Yes, a super song, just so seasonal. There is just one tincy-wincy thing. The tune to which Neale set his lyrics is Tempus Adest Floridum (It is time for flowering), a thirteenth century carol celebrating spring. So, you see, nothing really is as it seems.

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.

L'etat, C'est Moi – a response to Adam

OK, Adam, with reference to your argument set out in The Autocratic Republic on your One Nation blog let’s strip things back to first principles. Monarchy simply means rule by a single person. While it is normally associated now with royalty there is no reason, no etymological or philosophical reason, why this should be so. According to your definition it implies “feudal hereditary selection.” But this is a contingent, not a necessary relationship. Go back to early history and you will find plenty of examples of elective monarchies: Rome was an elective monarchy before the advent of the Republic, with no hereditary selection, a tradition that was later revived in the Holy Roman Empire. And on the subject of Holy and Roman, the Vatican continues to be governed by an elected monarchy, again with no feudal or hereditary selection.

Look at the history of the Roman Empire: between the creation of the Principate by Augustus and its end under Diocletian it was governed for the most part by a single individual, though stable and hereditary succession was to be elusive in the extreme. After the death of Nero it was the exception, not the rule. During the most stable period of imperial history, from the ascent of Trajan to the death of Marcus Aurelius, reigning emperors simply chose the best man, meaning the strongest man, as a potential successor by cooption. It fell down when Commodus, the son, succeeded Aurelius, the father, simply by right of primogeniture, the feudal principle at its purest.

So, monarchy is not necessarily royalty. If you need a further example, one closer to home, then I give you the Protectorate. England was a republic in strict legal terms, but Oliver Cromwell was a monarch, a king in all but name; he was even referred to as “Your Majesty”. A dictator, an autocrat, he even managed to pass his ‘crown’ to his son in a non-elective, non-feudal hereditary succession. Closer to our time there is the example of the United States, which began as a revolution against monarchy...only to give monarchy an entrenched constitutional position. It is no accident that by the time of 'King' Andrew Jackson his opponents are referring to themselves as the Whigs. Bringing matters up to the present day look at North Korea. Is there any better example of a hereditary and absolute monarchy without any kind of feudal element?

Now let’s consider France. To begin with I have to say that you overestimate the importance of the Third Republic in general and Jules Ferry in particular, a figure of passing and transient significance. French history between 1792 and 1958, as I have already argued, is the history of a nation in search of a stable and lasting form of government. And what a bewildering picture it is –republic, empire, restoration, empire, restoration, bourgeois monarchy, republic, empire, republic, new state, republic, republic. Only the last stage, the Fifth Republic, reached a resolution because it finally answered the long question, the long struggle between parliamentary and monarchical governance in favour of monarchy.

Previous republics, even the long lasting Third, were driven by a system of parliamentary rule, weak to the point of self-destruction. Time and again the Third Republic sank into crisis, the most serious of which came with the riots of February 1934. I have said that it only survived because its enemies were weaker still, because they could not agree on an acceptable alternative. In the end the Republic committed suicide. Many people assume that Philippe Petain was a German puppet ruler. He was not. He was the embodiment of the state; he was a new Napoleon III. All power was accorded to him by the National Assembly, by the Republic itself.

De Gaulle was a politician of genius. He knew that the parliamentary republic was a failure; it always had been. Still, the outward trappings of monarchy were impossible, either in an imperial or a hereditary and kingly form. The solution was a Presidential Republic, a non-hereditary monarchy; the solution was the Fifth Republic, quite different from all of its predecessors. In many ways it resembles Weimar Germany under the presidency of Paul von Hindenburg than any previous French regime. Or, if you prefer to stick to the French example, De Gaulle was Napoleon I, Napoleon III and Marshal Petain all in one: he was the state. During his rule he was most often depicted by cartoonists as Louis XIV. Everything that you wrote about him in The Autocratic Republic confirms his stature, confirms his monarchy. The Fifth Republic, barring some unforeseen political disaster (never say never when it comes to France), is his abiding legacy. Against this background Ferry was a little man, an irrelevance. Modern France owes little or nothing to him; modern France scarcely remembers him.

The Revolution was a mistake; long live the King!

One small thing helped to bring a little extra brightness to my day-a report that Prince Jean, Duke of Vendôme, has published a book calling on the French, groaning under the weight of public debt and moral decay, to admit that the Great Revolution was a mistake! In his book, Un prince français, a kind of royalist manifesto, he goes that one step further, calling for a restoration of the monarchy.

He is absolutely right of course, the Revolution and all that followed was an absolute disaster for France, as Edmund Burke anticipated. The record is there: a revolution drowned in blood followed by a brutal military dictatorship. What came after was weakened monarchical experiments, followed by a succession of unstable republics, punctuated by a comic-opera empire. Where he is wrong is to believe that contemporary France is without monarchy: that was reestablished by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 with the erection of the Fifth Republic, far more stable, so far, than all of its predecessors. One can never tell with the French. :-)

But the antecedents of the dear old Duke were part of the problem that ailed France, not the solution. He is a representative of the Orléans family, the junior branch of the French Royal house, and a descendent of the last king of France, the unglamorous, pear-like Louis Philippe, deposed in 1848. The senior branch, the House of Bourbon, overthrown in 1830, still exists and has a far superior claim to that of the Orléanists, treasonable in 1789 and treasonable thereafter.

Vive le Roi!-just as long as he is not the Jean III, erstwhile Duke of Vendôme.
:-))