So I broke into the Palace
With a sponge and a rusty spanner
She said ‘eh, I know you, and you cannot sing’
I said ‘that’s nothing, you should hear me play pian’er’
-The Smiths, “The Queen Is Dead”
So, Queen Elizabeth the Second has died. She was 96 years old. Her mother (also named Elizabeth) actually made it to 101 until dying in 2002. When you live that long, I see little reason to mourn, rather I would celebrate the fact that one could live so long, and for the most part in good health (although the Queen was seen formally recognizing Liz Truss as Prime Minister just two days before her death in Scotland, and she was smiling but really didn’t look great).
Yet there is still great mourning. This is after all a truly historic event. Elizabeth ruled 70 years, longer than any other monarch besides Louis XIV of France. (Even Ramses II was estimated to have reigned only 66 years.) The former Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, is taking the throne at 73, having been heir longer than most people get to live. Which is why, incidentally, I have no reason to believe Charles is going to follow a common rumor and hand over the title to his son, the far more popular and glamorous Prince William. I seriously have to ask, why would you give up a destiny that is literally the only reason for which you were born? And frankly, while Charles seems to be in good health himself, I don’t think William has nearly so long to wait.
There has been much said about how Elizabeth had her own personality, her hobbies with raising corgis and horses, her sense of humor (which she expressed in appearances with James Bond and Paddington Bear) and so on. But she was never part of the emotional celebrity culture like Princess Di or Andrew or other royals who kept the family in the scandal sheets. Elizabeth spent most of her life as a professional national symbol, never letting the uniform off, mostly because she had to. (And as Edward VIII showed, you really don’t HAVE to be monarch.) But also she was still part of that old-world, sense-of-duty culture. The other royals, including Charles and even Prince Phillip, were not quite so restrained, and that’s partly because the times changed but partly because they didn’t HAVE to be the monarch and set the national example.
Yet even somebody who (unlike some of those people) didn’t destroy her reputation with bad behavior is still inspiring rage and hate even before she’s buried. A Nigerian-born professor at Carnegie Mellon attracted a lot of attention when she said: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Other people used this event to call upon Great Britain to return the Kohinoor Diamond which has been part of the Crown Jewels since Britain conquered India during the Victorian Era.
It all points up the fact that Britain, that much more than America or Russia, has its glory and history built upon “centuries of exploitation, oppression, racism, slavery”. And while Britain is for the most part a free country where the monarch reigns but does not rule, the government still acts in the Crown’s name. All the stuff that we are obliged to celebrate (and there is much to celebrate in Elizabeth’s reign) is tied up with everything that the rational humanist must oppose if Britain is to progress.
This is why, in his Substack column, Andrew Sullivan said: “You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.
“The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:
Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”
But then Sullivan, like Lewis, is an old British Conservative, from a culture where conservatism still means something more than “life begins at the point of erection.” Or at least it did.
I don’t think it’s either-or. Our current events indicate that there might be a need for some national focus beyond politics, and that some Americans’ desire for a strongman, not to mention our own gossip-rag obsession with the Royals, indicates that we have our own primal desire to look up to kings, as Edmund Burke might put it. But I am at heart an American, which means I am a small-r republican. The (C)onservative idea that every nation needs some monarchical leader, even if not titled as such, is to me not a virtue of humanity that must be accepted, but a tribal vice that must be overcome. The idea that someone is just better and made to rule, Dei Gratia, is inherently opposed to the Declaration of Thomas Jefferson, that “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal”.
And while I’m on Jefferson, that example means that you don’t need to be a monarchy to have a racist and imperialist global regime, nor does such history invalidate the real virtues of a national culture. Nor does monarchy prevent or even mollify the worst aspects of humanity. Would the Germans have been better off with a Kaiser than with Hitler? The German Empire may not have been the lowbrow gangsters that the Nazi Party were, but they were still capable of committing genocide. Austria-Hungary might have been better in some ways than the nations that succeeded it, but it broke up precisely because it was a multitude of communities that were united only by one beloved old monarch, and after Franz Joseph died (and Austria lost World War I) there was no other common focus. Even Hungary wanted to call itself a monarchy but it didn’t want Franz Joseph’s successor. As for Russia, the Bolsheviks were definitely worse than the Czars, but most of the reason the Bolsheviks got traction is because the Czars were THAT bad.
You can see from that latter example that certain people in the Russian Federation (specifically, Vladimir Putin) want to have all the “good stuff” about monarchy (like absolute power) and the “good stuff” about a democratic republic, namely the premise that the leader is a regular guy who rules with popular support and not just cause he immediately crushes any dissent against his own evil and incompetence. At the same time, Putin has attempted to embrace traditional Russian culture (like the Orthodox Church) as he also attempts to embrace the “good stuff” about Bolshevism (which was historically anti-Christian). But just as the Soviets attempted to cast off both the monarchy and the church, but merely replaced them with their own secular religion, Putin has not transcended old-world traditions so much as replaced them with an arbitrary structure that cannot appeal to those primal, mysterious, anti-logical urges but just stands naked in its craving for power and fear. And as such it has even less justification than monarchy.
Because if you don’t have that sense of mystery, what reason is there to say one person should be anointed just because? The traditions themselves were a means of rationalizing that any barbarian who wanted to seize the realm was going to do so anyway and getting the blessing of the Church was the realm’s means of validating the fait accompli. And now that we have no reason to assume there is a Mandate of Heaven or that God will strike down those who strike the King, it is a lot harder for us to suspend our disbelief and embrace the mystery.
Simply having a monarchy doesn’t change the fact that Britain’s new government under Liz Truss (a British politician name that ranks right up there with Ed Balls) is facing catastrophic levels of inflation. A study this year indicated that the rising cost of living meant that one in seven adults is in food insecurity (food insecurity being a polite way of saying you don’t get enough to eat because you’re not making enough money to survive). You can have the lion and unicorn and castles and stuff but it doesn’t change the fact that the United Kingdom is in the real world with everybody else and its government is facing real problems, and as with some other countries, many of those problems are self-inflicted.
I think that exactly because Britain is a pragmatic, (small c) conservative culture, most of the British, and even most people in the outer Commonwealth, will resist the urge to republicanism and accept Charles, because it’s a lot easier to roll with tradition than contemplate the potential dangers that Sullivan and Lewis raise. But then the British are also pragmatic in their liberalism, which is why Burke could defend both British tradition and the American Revolution but stood against the French Revolution. In a similar vein, another British Conservative was quoted as saying “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” That may indeed be why Britain has kept its monarchy for so long, because unlike France and so many other nations, its nobles and its commoners were both able to adapt. But I think the reason the monarchy is so well thought of is precisely that Elizabeth set an example that so many other royals (like the aforementioned Edward) failed to uphold. And the fact that she reigned so long means that in the modern world she became a standard with no other comparisons, as opposed to our opinions of presidents and prime ministers. So while I’m not expecting radical changes to the Commonwealth because of Charles, the world has already changed a great deal in the 70 years of Elizabeth’s reign, and I am not expecting Charles to attain the same level of reverence. And this year, even the popular William and Kate got a lot of flak for their tour of the West Indies, where in one case protests forced the couple to cancel an appearance, and as John Oliver pointed out, “this was a clear attempt to try and keep the Commonwealth together, especially as just four months ago, Barbados formally removed the queen as their head of state and, during the same ceremony, recognized Rihanna as a national hero, proving Barbados is currently making all the right decisions.”
We should feel glad that someone could rise to the occasion of her moment and be exactly the kind of figure that tradition required her to be. We should also acknowledge that not every human, even every born royal, has the kind of character to precisely maintain tradition, that, as with Diana Spencer and to a lesser extent Meghan Markle, the attempt to fit in to that world can literally break you, that privilege even without power has an immense temptation to spoil and deform the human character, and privilege WITH power is a temptation that much worse, that precisely because traditions are made within specific cultures, not every culture is made for monarchy and even those that are are finding it increasingly implausible to maintain, and maybe we could not put so much trust in specific individuals who are meant to represent lasting traditions even as they themselves come and go, and instead try evolving our governments to practice more shared responsibility and accountability?
Just a thought.
The Queen is dead boys
And it’s so lonely on a limb