This is the moment republicans have been waiting for and their drumbeat will grow ever louder. But history proves Britain’s unique monarchy is a bulwark against dictators and revolution
WCountries which gave up monarchy fell victim to tyranny
E HAVE lost a beloved Queen, but we have not lost the monarchy. And that is no accident. Thanks to her careful custodianship, and thanks to that of her predecessors and our wiser old statesmen and women, it is in good health — although we cannot take anything for granted.
The majority of people in Britain still support the idea of monarchy. But throughout the Queen’s reign, there have been those
who have said: ‘ This outmoded institution will last Queen Elizabeth’s time. When she dies, we’ll think about it again, and many of us will decide Britain should be like the other sensible countries in the world and become a republic.’
With the Queen’s death, they will now be gathering their forces and marshalling their arguments.
Britain, they will tell us, must learn to grow up. The U.s., after all, has been a successful republic for nearly 250 years. France, Germany, Italy, Ireland — they are all nations modern enough, grown-up enough, to have a head of state they elected for themselves.
Why should we be stuck in the past, with a head of state imposed on us solely because she or he was the eldest child of the last white, privileged person who sat on the throne?
Yes, these so- called sensible people will argue, a bit of pageantry cheers us all up, and it helps the tourist industry to have a monarch who can be paraded through the streets like someone in a fairy tale, in a glass coach, wearing a crown. But although this might appeal to our hearts, do not our heads tell us that it is time for a republic in which we are allowed to choose who will be our leader?
Funnily enough, I am the polar opposite of people who think like this.
As a schoolboy studying history, I hugely admired Oliver Cromwell, our only republican leader, and I later wrote a book about his Latin secretary, the famous poet who wrote Paradise Lost, John Milton.
My emotions thrilled to what those doughty 17th- century republicans called The Good Old Cause — their determined stance against any form of monarchy.
But as I have reflected upon the matter over many years of reading history, I realise that my youthful enthusiasm for Cromwell overlooked quite a number of disturbing facts.
This supposed defender of Parliament in our English Civil
Wars lost no time in abolishing Parliament when it disagreed with him. He then ushered in an era in which he outlawed anything he disapproved of, including theatres, maypoles and Christmas — our equivalent, really, of being ruled by the Taliban.
You may say that there’s no danger of a modern British republican president making it illegal to eat a Christmas pudding, and you would probably be right. But, as you look back over the long life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II, your brain should tell you there is no room for complacency.
she was born in 1926, at about the time of the General strike, when many in Britain feared that there would be a communist revolution akin to what had happened in Russia in 1917.
I remember an ancient doctor saying to me when I was a very young man: ‘I worked
As a GP in the East End of London in those days. There were children dying of Rickets. Living conditions were awful. If you had lived then, you would have become a communist on the spot.’
Thankfully, not everyone did, and Britain escaped the hideous fate that befell Russia where, a little under a decade before the Queen was born, the communists ushered in generations of soviet tyranny by brutally murdering their own royal family.
But it wasn’t just communism that threatened the peace. While Princess Elizabeth grew up, Italy had a fascist dictator, Mussolini; and after 1933, Germany — the land of Beethoven and Bach, and of the most rational scientists and philosophers in the history of the world — plunged into the madness of being ruled by Adolf Hitler.
As the terrible decade wore on, a government of the extreme Left arose in spain, where whole convents full of nuns were lined up and shot as Catholicism became a crime.
The civil war which followed divided Europe, between those who supported the quasi-fascist General Franco — who won, having killed tens of thousands of his fellow spaniards — and those backing the republic, which would undoubtedly have come under the control of a genocidal stalin’s Russia if it had been victorious.
But none of this happened in Britain. And that is in large part because throughout the period when the Queen was growing up, her forebears maintained in this country the idea of a constitutional monarchy.
Under this system, the Crown, which is the symbol of power, is ‘above politics’. But the person who wears the crown is a guardian of the institutions which keep us free — namely the rule of law, the judiciary, jury trial and Parliament.
Those who think that constitutional monarchs are simply figureheads, symbolic figures who are occasionally paraded through the streets wearing strange clothes, should look again at the life of Elizabeth II, and of the two men from whom she learnt her craft — her father George VI and the man she called Grandpa England, George v.
Day in, day out, the Queen would read through the state papers brought to her in red boxes. Once a week, she would meet the Prime Minister.
All the Prime Ministers who have paid tribute to Her Majesty over the past couple of days have acknowledged the meticulous and patient way in which she had mastered all this material, and how wise she was in her advice.
Of course, the elected government makes all the executive decisions, but it would be quite wrong to ignore how intimately they work in tandem with the monarch. It was not an accident, during the Queen’s childhood, that those countries which had given up monarchy — Germany and Russia in particular — fell victim to the most appalling tyranny; nor that Italy, which retained a constitutional monarchy of sorts, was the first country to emerge from the horror of fascism, when the King of Italy sacked Mussolini.
(After that, alas, Italy became a republic and has lived in total political chaos ever since — with the highest offices of state utterly corrupt.)
It was not an accident that Britain avoided the pitfalls of having a communist or a fascist dictatorship. These horrors were kept at bay in very large
She learnt all from ‘Grandpa England’
measure by our monarchs, working in tandem with the Establishment, or the political class, whatever you want to call it.
George v was a dyed-in-the-wool old Tory countryman who loved shooting pheasant, partridge and snipe, and who was ultra- conservative in
It is not a cult of personality, or being a celeb
outlook. But he also befriended the leaders of the trades unions — he asked Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, to form a National Government of
unity at a time of grave crisis — and he is one of the prime reasons that constitutional government survived in Britain.
This was because, like his granddaughter Elizabeth II, George V saw quite clearly that the humble role of a modern sovereign is simply to look after those institutions which protect the liberties of the people.
The monarch can also do what no individual president, however admirable, could ever do. The King
provides, in his own person, an embodied link with the past. Charles III has only been our King for a few days, but he arrives with the great weight of history — all his ancestors and the shared experiences of their people, stretching back to the time of Alfred the Great.
Our late, ever-beloved Queen was not just a figurehead. She carried with her the experiences of her subjects, so many of whom she had met personally. That is why, at times of great national solemnity, the monarch is so much bigger a person than any elected president could ever be.
Think of the ceremony at the Cenotaph each year when the monarch joins with the nation and remembers the sacrifice of those who died in war.
Of course, we could hold such a ceremony with President Blair or President Esther Rantzen or whoever had put themselves forward for the role. But it would not be the same, because these individuals, however admirable as individuals, could not carry with them the nation’s past as the sovereign does.
There is a great paradox here, which the Queen understood so perfectly. Only she could have
fulfilled the role because she inherited it from her father, just as only Charles III could continue it for the same reason. He inherited it.
But although the Crown can only pass to particular individuals, the monarchy, as an institution, is not about those persons. It is not a cult of personality.
This is what made the Queen so different from, for example, her grandson’s poor wife, Meghan, who thinks that being royal means being a super-celebrity.
It is true that members of the Royal Family are famous simply because they are royal. But they are not celebrities, and the role of the constitutional monarch is not to be at the centre of it all.
Those who were close to Her Majesty often remark that there were many personal qualities which were never, or seldom, on display — a keen sense of fun, even of satire, for example. This is partly because she was, in public, a shy person, but also because she was so keenly aware of the difference between being a monarch and a celebrity.
Republics came into being, in history, because of the arrogance of monarchs. States, which are composed of all of us, were seen by the absolute monarchs as their own personal possessions. Louis XIV of France famously declared that he was the state (‘ L’Etat c’est moi’).
Never in all her long life would such a thought have occurred to Elizabeth II, who was so well-taught, by her grandparents and parents, in the tradition of constitutional monarchy. She was not the state, but the role she played within the state was central. She was its linchpin.
As I said, it was no accident that Britain was lucky enough, in the 20th and 21st centuries, to escape having a brutal dictatorship such as those that held sway over most of the European landmass, from Stalin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany to Franco’s Spain.
It was, in fact, the result of the wisdom of relatively few people.
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she was a clueless teenager, and it was only when she had a petulant teenage strop with her second Prime Minister, Robert Peel, that she began to learn the ropes.
Peel was a moderate conservative who taught Victoria and Albert that you did not have to choose between having a monarchy and having a state in which the people chose their leaders.
In those years in Europe, diehard conservatives wanted to go back to absolute monarchy, and the revolutionaries wanted a republican world.
Peel and Prince Albert instead pioneered a precious ideal. The lawful, inherited monarch would remain not only what kings and queens in Britain had always been — upholders of the law and the judiciary — but they would also work hand-in-hand with representative government, with Parliament and eventually democracy, as it evolved during Victoria’s long reign.
Teenage ignoramus Victoria grew up into the wise old grandmother of Europe, who implored her grandson, the German Emperor, not to be a tyrant. In vain — he was overthrown. She begged her foolish granddaughter, the Empress of Russia, to adopt a constitutional monarchy there and to see the point of allowing the people their voice in elections. Again, in vain. The Russian emperor heedlessly ignored the advice and they ended up with Lenin and Stalin.
In Britain, thank God, the legacy of Peel, Albert and Victoria was understood by our later monarchs. They all deserve our thanks for carrying on this modest but vital role.
It must, sometimes, be very boring to be the Queen or King. It must also be very frustrating to be the head of state if you do not have the power to say in public why you think the politicians are making a hash of things.
The paradox of the role of constitutional monarchy is that, much as we treasure the late Queen’s utterances (her Christmas broadcasts, her speeches), her greatest and most eloquent gift was in her silences.