On Monarchy

In my post written to commemorate the Queen’s ninetieth birthday I mentioned that I wanted to give a proper explanation of my monarchist sentiments.  The week of Elizabeth II’s official birthday (why shouldn’t she have two?) seems a good chance to do so.  This is a written version of a monologue with which I have bored many friends but which explains, as well as I can manage, why I believe this country owes its peace and freedom mainly to its monarchy, judging not simply by how things have turned out in practice, but also in principle.

Portrait to mark H.M. the Queen’s official ninetieth birthday and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh’s ninety-fifth birthday

(Source: The Royal Family at Instagram.com)

The United Kingdom has a constitutional monarchy as its system of government.  Parliament and the head of Government receive their political power by democratic election, whereas the position of head of State can only be inherited, that is, held by a monarch.  Many nations, particularly during the last century, have abolished the hereditary elements of their governments, but not this country, where the monarchy (I believe) remains of essential importance to the nation’s health and freedom.  I have two reasons for saying this.  The first is pragmatic and a little unoptimistic about human nature; the second emotional and more hopeful.  Either by itself, in my view, would justify and reinforce the Crown’s continued position at the summit of government.

It is easy for us who live in Great Britain, politically one of the safest and stablest places on earth, to forget the fragility of all civilisations and political entities.  Most of our borders have followed the same lines, mainly the coast, for centuries; no land invasion has been attempted on us since 1797; our throne comes down to us from the year 1066 and before.  The changes undergone by our nation have tended to take place glacially, even organically; the important exceptions are all the more notable by their rarity.  Yet few countries have enjoyed such clarity and tranquillity of national identity.  For instance, even Germany, made up as it is of states with strong regional identities, has only existed in its present form since 1990. Poland, invaded from all four points of the compass, partitioned and repartitioned, emerged as an independent state in 1918 only to be plunged again into the whirlwind of the twentieth century, and when it was again re-established seemed to have been moved bodily a hundred miles westwards.  Other nations, even if they have kept their borders, have undergone change after change, not simply of governments but of forms of state: occupations to dictatorships to republics, and so on.  The British constitutional monarchy has not simply dawdled into the twenty-first century.  It has outlasted many forces which might have destroyed it, and its survival should not be taken for granted.

Why are nations so fragile?  It is because of the fluidity and volatility — even the intoxicating quality — of raw political power.  Those who win it may have just intentions but, if unimpeded, tend quite often to be seduced and then corrupted by it, using it not for the nation’s sake but to prop up their own positions.  Power like this has an intoxicating quality; it is alcoholic.   This is the pessimistic part of my argument: that few people can be relied upon to handle it in quantity, however legitimately or democratically they may have obtained it.    History teaches us, with examples beyond number, of the danger posed by too much ready power in too few hands which, sooner or later, are bound to become the wrong hands.

If concentrated power is so hazardous, and so must be restricted, the obvious reaction might be to distribute it very widely and thinly so as to restrict the influence of any single person.  This results only in dilution, however: it makes competent government difficult and might lead to division, disintegration or even anarchy.  Somewhere there must be a single meaningful authority that is recognised by the whole nation and which keeps it whole.  This tension between the concentration and the distribution of power requires a fine and carefully-observed balance.  Any country is only as stable as this equilibrium: every nation has to find its own way to achieve it.

The trick of the constitutional monarchy is to control the readiness of political power without watering it down.  It may repose all the power and authority of government in a single person, the Queen, whose position is made unassailable by heredity, but the power is safe with her because she cannot wield it directly: it is not ‘live’.  She can only delegate her power to others, which what happens at a General Election.  First Her Majesty’s subjects elect members to the House of Commons to represent them in Parliament.  Seeing the result, she will ask one of these members to form a government as Prime Minister.  In doing so, she delegates to the Members of Parliament the responsibilities of state, the authority to bring Acts before her for assent, the power to take the country in a particular direction (notwithstanding the House of Lords, unelected though no longer entirely hereditary).  Yet it remains always Her Majesty’s Government, which in theory she can dissolve at any moment if she thinks it unfit to govern her subjects.  It is rather as if the Queen were teetotal, but possessed the only key to a wine-cellar.  She can bring out bottles and pour out glasses for others of any size she likes, she can refuse a drink if people have ideas above their stations, and she can even close the bar altogether, but she cannot herself take a single sip.  By this mechanism of Parliament and Crown power may be balanced and counterbalanced without being weakened or diluted.

Some might object that this is mere formality, pointing out that the Queen is unlikely to reject the result of a general election or to refuse to give royal assent to an Act of Parliament.  It is certainly likely that, like a bee-sting, the threat to pull the plug on a government could be carried out only once and at the cost of the whole institution.  This might be so, but I think even formalities carry far more weight than is often thought, not least with regard to language, for instance.  Mr. Cameron might be tempted to speak of ‘his government’, but he is not allowed to: it is Her Majesty’s Government which he runs on her behalf.  (see for instance John Major, calling the 1997 election here, who has to be careful to say that he has ‘sought Her Majesty’s permission to dissolve Parliament’).  Similarly, politicians are elected to ‘office’, not to ‘power’.  These rules about language are important checks on politicians’ habits of thought, and if they are broken can produce important warning signs for the rest of us.

The system of constitutional monarchy also has other, happier effects, doing us a lot of good as well as sparing us harm.  By reposing national authority in a person who is always above ordinary politics and so untainted by them, the monarchy gives us a head of State to whom we can be loyal without even thinking about, still less embracing, any political cause.  Everyone, of any political persuasion or indeed none, can gladly allow the Queen to represent our country and us, her people, and cheer her without anything sticking in the throat.  Compared to the United States or France, where as much as half the electorate must accept  a president whom they voted against as a symbolic as well as an administrative leader, I think there is little contest (though there are many admirable aspects to both these countries’ political traditions).  Where Americans have to resort to pledging allegiance to a flag and the French to principles (la République and les valeurs républicaines; what are they exactly when all’s said and done?), we have a Crown and the real and living person who wears it, robed in majesty and lifted up with ceremony that we can enjoy wholeheartedly and without cynicism.  We can be the Queen’s loyal subjects without being overly inquisitive about her personality, treating her as a celebrity (it is precisely because of my loyalty to her that I despise any journalistic poking and prying into the Royal Family’s privacy) and certainly without worshipping her.  The important thing is that she is on the throne, occupying a supreme position and receiving loyalty and affection that (significantly) many a politician probably envies.  Indeed, the monarch makes it very easy for us to disapprove of the members of the House of Commons without ever calling the institution into question.  The government does not get in the way of our relationship with the State.  We uphold the Queen’s majesty because, in a certain way, this majesty is ours to share in, and is an expression not of the Queen’s might only, but also of our own pride in our country.

The Queen’s ninetieth birthday and her recent surpassing of the length of Victoria’s reign has also reminded many people of the continuity brought by monarchs to our sense of national history.  Presidents are limited by terms, so history marches on in time to the political clock.  This is far less the case with monarchs, who tend to reign for a generation at a time.  It is true that our Queen’s sixty-three years on the throne have made this continuity a particularly notable aspect of her reign — not least since sometimes very little else seems to link us with the vanished Britain of 1953 — but even the passage of the crown down the generations is a story told not in multiples of five years but at the slower, more natural pace of most families’ histories.

Monarchs can certainly be good or bad and wise or unwise (in which respect I have already explained, here and here, why I think in our present Queen Elizabeth we have been given the blessing of a personal example that this country hardly deserves but sorely needs).  The important point is that the same applies to elected presidents and chancellors.  All nations need ways — the simpler and less heavy-handed the better —  to appoint a source of just but not overbearing authority to which all are willing to pledge loyalty, and to guard against malevolent political designs without stifling the government.  The constitutional monarchy may not seem at first to be the most obvious solution, still less a sleek, rational, twenty-first century solution, but I think it remains the best and fairest, if not for all countries, certainly for the United Kingdom, in which case the results arguably speak for themselves.