So it seems especially impertinent — hence especially appropriate — for an American to criticise your monarchy. Especially an American monarchist like me. I am not even a costume monarchist — I am not in it for the castles, weddings, and funny hats. I actually think of monarchy as a legitimate form of government. And by monarchy I mean actual monarchy: absolute monarchy.

There are only three forms of government: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of few), and democracy (rule of many). Monarchy is good because it is better than oligarchy. Democracy is neither good nor bad — it is just impossible. With today’s voters, at least. It is not just that voters are not wise enough to control the government. It’s worse: the voters are not powerful enough to control the government. They — or at least the politicians they elect — have not had significant power for decades.

Monarchy is both the most common form of public-sector governance in history, and the universal form of private-sector governance (all corporations have CEOs). Any private-sector firm could operate as a republic or other oligarchical form. None do. There are no senates, assemblies or supreme courts in the private sector — let alone anything like the administrative state. Monarchy —ideally accountable monarchy, with a board of directors or some other safety mechanism — just works better.

So either the whole public sector today is mad, or the rest of human history was mad, and so is the entire private sector. As an American monarchist, I choose the former. But in Britain, how should you feel about it? You already have a monarchy. Not monarchy as a form of government — but as a theatre of government. It’s a sort of official soap opera, one that has been on-air a long time — about 300 years, by some counts.

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As even its defenders would surely admit, the British monarchy is not a functional organ of governance. It is a living monument of history. The German for “monument” is evocative — Denkmal, meaning “an occasion to think”. To ask questions, perhaps. Simple questions. Dangerous questions.

Yet in this year of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, few Englishmen will stop to ask the simplest, most dangerous form of question that history can ask: to ask the past for a judgment of the present. One insanely dangerous way for you to ask is: what would Elizabeth I think of Elizabeth II?

Leopold von Ranke, not a Nazi Panzer commander but actually the inventor of modern history, wrote: “Every age stands equal before God.” Ranke’s law does not deny any era the right to judge any other. But it must allow itself to be judged in return.

At the birth of Elizabeth I, England was a minor power. At the death of Elizabeth II, the UK will be a minor power. In between, Britons ruled the world for a century and a half. In Elizabeth I’s time, England was a rising power. In Elizabeth II’s time, England is a fading power.

How would Elizabeth Tudor feel about all this? Petrified? Blimpish? If she had to characterise Elizabeth Windsor’s perspective of monarchy and government, what adjectives would she use? The term roi fainéant (a do-nothing monarch) is a millennium older than the Tudors — invented for the hopeless Merovingians.

How would the Tudors not find the comparison of the Windsors to the Merovingians obvious? Especially when they heard that the Windsors, unlike the Merovingians in France in the 5th century, had reigned over a palpable national decline? At least the Merovingians had the good grace to give way to the frankly much more badass Carolingians. The Windsors have given way not even to Parliament, but to a bunch of bureaucrats; to a gang of foundations, quangos, media conglomerates and university administrators. At least the early Merovingians won and held their crowns by the sword. Perhaps: once a costume dynasty, always a costume dynasty.

It is easy for Elizabeth II to judge Elizabeth I. For example, diversity and inclusion are among Elizabeth Windsor’s core principles whereas Elizabeth Tudor was a racist. But we need not accept Elizabeth I’s prehistoric racial theories to find her political insights relevant. The past, without being perfect, can usefully criticise the present.

It was Bagehot, the 19th-century theorist of the English Constitution, who best described the difference between Elizabeth I and II. Bagehot divided sovereigns into the effective (actually in control of the state) and the dignified (a crowned Kardashian, a long-haired Merovingian man-doll). A more modern version of these labels might be operating and ceremonial. Elizabeth I was the operating Elizabeth. Elizabeth II is the ceremonial Elizabeth. A costume Queen.

It is true that the binary is not absolute. In Bagehot’s day, Parliament was effective and Victoria was ceremonial. But Victoria certainly mattered much more than Elizabeth II, if much less than Elizabeth I. In our day we might say that both Parliament and Queen are dignified —the operating power lies in Whitehall (if it is in England at all).

Moreover, a really critical Tudor historian might question whether the decline of working absolutism in the English monarchy did not precede Elizabeth II. The Stuarts, alien in nation and suspect in religion, were never secure on the throne. James I ranted about divine right and absolute power, because he knew he doesn’t have it. Charles I seriously tried to be a limited monarch — resulting in the judicial murder of Strafford; Charles II was restored only as a limited monarch; don’t even start me on the “Glorious Revolution”. But surely Elizabeth I was peak England?

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But was Elizabethan England really Elizabeth’s? To what extent was this woman actually the CEO of the government? Was she in charge — or was it “Leicester’s Commonwealth”? Was it really the Cecils who invented the Deep State? And Walsingham the intelligence community?

We do get a sense of the increasing importance of an early “deep state” as the Tudor dynasty boots up. Henry VIII was a kingly king, but his attention did seem to wander, and his policies did often seem driven by his advisers. I know of no indication that his father, Henry VII, meant anything but business — as anyone would expect of a chad rebel who seized the throne on horseback with his sword. For there were true kings on Earth in those days. But let us treat the Tudors as a homogeneous monolith and history as binary. Tudors both reign and rule; Windsors only reign, but do not rule. (Cromwell, also a monarch, ruled, but did not reign.)

One way to identify a ceremonial or dignified institution is to detect a situation in which a seeming organ of power is vestigial. An organ or organisation in a larger regime is vestigial if the regime could continue operating as usual without it. When Elizabeth I kicked it, that was the end of Elizabethan England. What followed was still very cool, but it was not Elizabethan England.

An objective political change can change the lives of everyone in the country — think of everyone who used to be an East German — and always somehow disrupts or replaces the governing elite. If Elizabeth II passes away tomorrow, the trash in London will still be picked up. If the monarchy did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual. If Parliament, the Cabinet, and the voters did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual.

What this “Elizabeth test” teaches us is that it is obvious to even the dogs in the street that democracy has gone the way of monarchy, becoming ceremonial or dignified. The 20th-century removal of politics and politicians, and hence voters and elections, from actual authority over the government, was the century’s great changing of the guard.

The Trump administration did not disrupt the elite. Disruption can be measured by number of jobs destroyed. How many elite jobs did Trump destroy? He annoyed and energised the elite. He was the best thing that ever happened to the New York Times. Thousands of public-spirited Ivy graduates must owe Trump their jobs to this day.

Brexit did not disrupt the elite. If anything, Brexit gave power back to some purely British institution — such as Whitehall (for Yanks, the British deep state). But Whitehall would much rather implement directives from Brussels — freeing the native mandarins from responsibility, the bane of all bureaucrats. The only possible recipients of power in Brexit did not even want it. The voters? They voted for Brexit, accepted a few weird bureaucratic complications, and went back to their fish and chips.

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As Bagehot explains, putting a fake power in front of the real power has tremendous benefits. It is even better to have two layers of fake — both monarchy and democracy. This double panel acts as a perfect bullet-absorber for the civil-service oligarchy, which, though young, was already building its strength in Bagehot’s time.

The working Queen, Elizabeth I, must feel that her fancy-dress successor was in some way tricked out of her rightful power. Elizabeth I will judge Elizabeth II for investing in this trick — rather than exposing it, rising up and restoring the monarchy. For the people, too, were tricked — out of their right to a real monarch.

How did monarchies even become ceremonial? Usually not in one step. Rather, their first step was to become constitutional. It turns out that as soon as a monarchy loses any power, it very soon loses all power — and often its head as well.

Ultimately, the purpose of a ceremonial monarchy is to prevent the existence of a functional monarchy. Where a puppet reigns, no one else can reign; so no one reigns at all. So a murky, distributed oligarchy can rule — unchallenged by the clear, clean sunlight of irresistible central power.

The Whig oligarchs of the early 18th century installed the Hanoverians, a dynasty with no inherent support base in England, in place of the dangerous Stuarts. Any Stuart revolt — and there were two — would have to go through the Hanoverians first. But it is a long time since the early 18th century.

We can look at the UK today and ask: what would Elizabeth Tudor do? When we imagine Elizabeth Tudor waking up in the rejuvenated body of Elizabeth Windsor, it makes little difference that their actual roles in government have changed. Nothing at all has changed about the English constitution. The Queen reserves all her royal prerogative.

It is customary for the British monarch to use prerogative power only under her ministers’ advice — except in an emergency. While monarchy is nothing without a deep respect for custom, unfortunately it is an emergency. And has been, Elizabeth Tudor will tell you, for at least the last half-century.

The new old Elizabeth declares martial law and puts the police under her direct orders. She never considers the possibility that she has anything less than absolute power. Bobbies everywhere are shutting down the oligarchy — padlocking the buildings, imaging the servers, freezing the accounts. All state, media, quango and university employees are retired. Even primary schools are closed for the reset. Only essential productive workers still work — for now, everyone else can chill, and still get paid. As we learned under Covid, the paycheck is the essence of the bullshit job.

Of course, this day is only the start of the renewal of Britain. “The revolution was first in the mind of the king.” The truth about the revolution is that, in nations with a surviving monarchy — even a purely ceremonial monarchy, like Britain’s today — the revolution remains in the mind of the monarch.

A modern monarch who chose to be not a costume-king in the school of the Windsors, but at the very least a Patriot King in the school of Bolingbroke, would not have to work hard at all to regain monarchical control of the state. At least, regaining full control is much easier than regaining a tiny bit of control.

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The essence of the modern coup d’etat is the use of popular enthusiasm to gain stable, unified, direct control over the security forces. Everything about this transition must feel completely natural, inevitable and irreversible — in retrospect. This is exactly how it could feel — it won’t, of course — when Charles III finally takes the throne.

All agencies other than the army and police can be retired. This cannot be done with the security forces. No one wants anarchy in the UK. But also, no one actually needs the Ministry of Defence — what is it defending? Just bring everyone home already. At least temporarily.

Under direct royal command, military and police leadership must undergo a rapid purge and reshuffle. Staff who can show their (prior) commitment to the new regime are rapidly advanced; those known to be sympathetic to the old are sidelined. It may not be fair. What is? What ever was?

And power is a shark. It has to keep moving. Power for power’s sake is a dead fish. What does Charles III want to make of his Britain? What does he have the power to change? After executing this manoeuvre — anything. The Patriot King is the nation’s gardener; his goal is to make its lovely human flora burgeon and blossom. Obviously, his first job is building a new government — but the problem goes far beyond this. He has to build a new society and a new economy. Everything is a ruin.

If there is any set of people who need to be challenged the most, it is the highest elites. An aspect of the Elizabethan court which is almost impossible to explain to the modern world is that it is the centre of excellence in everything. In the early Elizabethan era at least, the best plays and poems in England were by courtiers. In the modern era, a royal court in the Elizabethan style would be surrounded by the country’s best scientists, filmmakers, mountain climbers. Not only would royal sponsorship select and fund the best people; it would even lead them stylistically. The style of the king would become the fashion of the country.

As opposed to — where does style come from, nowadays? Centres of excellence are hidden to those not in the know; they are widely spread across fields; sometimes they are taken over by bad people, and become centres of badness. But elites benefit from concentration; concentrating the elite of an elite around one centre is the way to create the most awesome elite. Such is the job of a royal court.

Of course, it all depends on the right king. In the history of kings, which is most of human history, there are awesome kings and not-so-awesome kings. But if we accept Elizabeth II’s responsibility for the condition of England, and try to hypothesise Elizabeth I’s reaction to that same condition, “not so awesome” doesn’t cover it. Imagine her inspecting some of what you chaps call “council housing”.

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Yet as an American I must face the fact that London is the last city outside America which still has the right to call itself the capital of the world. “Though much is taken, much abides.” It will probably keep falling. It could rise again.

A proud, renewed and independent royal Britain, a based Britain, could easily create elite institutions and cohorts that challenged and surpassed the aging titans of the American world. Because of London’s legacy of world domination, anti-American nationalists everywhere would naturally become Anglophiles.

And even we Americans could easily throw off the vast carcass of our 20th-century regime by appealing to a higher power to restore order — were there any such power. One day we may elect a President with a mandate to peacefully cede sovereignty to our rightful king, Charles III.

The King is right there, on the inauguration podium. The President hands him the Bible and the nuclear football. He takes command and the President calls an Uber. From the river, a deep roar — a corps of Royal Marines, on enormous transatlantic Hovercraft, is cruising in formation up the Potomac…

He was right — or seemed to be. Only a few weeks earlier, the same paper had reported “panic at the palace over the lack of street parties”. The official Golden Jubilee website, exulted the Guardian, “bears a forlorn look. So far it lists a golden jubilee snooker and pool tournament in Plymouth, the planting of an oak in the village of Oxhill, Warwickshire, the planting of a jubilee garden at Cranmore infants’ school in Shirley, Birmingham, the placing of small fountains all over London — and precious little else.”

And then — what a comeback! When the Queen’s Jubilee weekend finally rolled around, it turned out that the Royal Family was only too fashionable after all. Two million people applied for tickets for the classical Prom at the Palace. A further million people packed into the Mall to see the handsomely coiffured Brian May kick off the Party at the Palace, while another 200 million watched on television. And although the Sex Pistols re-released “God Save the Queen” for the occasion, their hearts weren’t really in it. As a youngster, admitted the erstwhile Johnny Rotten, he had taken exception to the Queen’s “Mother Superior” tone. But “they’ve mellowed that out. Charles is a really good-natured bloke who talks to plants. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

There have been eight jubilees since the first, held for George III in October 1809, and the story has always been the same. For months everybody predicts a humiliating fiasco. Nobody cares, and nobody bothers to organise anything. Then at the last minute, to the horror of university lecturers and Twitterstorians across the land, millions of strange people come crawling out from beneath their rocks, waving their Union Jacks and openly daring to feel good about their country. This, of course, is how Nazi Germany started.

Like all great British institutions, the first Jubilee was basically an exercise in sticking it to the French. The Napoleonic Wars were in full swing, the British campaign in Flanders had become badly bogged down and Wellington was slogging his way across Spain in the Peninsular War. So the country needed cheering up, and the beginning of George III’s 50th year on the throne provided the perfect opportunity.

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Although there was virtually no central organisation, most towns were happy to plan their own celebrations, with local landowners footing the bill. There were ox-roasts and fetes, feasts and fireworks. People staged sword-fights and fired muskets, while the elderly king went to a service of thanksgiving. And there were special pardons for debtors, deserters and prisoners of war — though not, of course, if they were French.

For poor George himself the Jubilee was something of a last hurrah, since a year later he succumbed to madness. He spent the rest of his days endlessly weeping and tying and untying handkerchiefs, which is how most Guardian columnists are planning to spend the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee next week. But the success of the event set a precedent, and in 1887 Lord Salisbury — not exactly an obvious party-going Prime Minister, but appearances can be deceptive — decided that Victoria should have a Golden Jubilee too.

At first the monarch was less than keen, fearing (ironically) that people would think a national celebration rather too Napoleonic. But Salisbury prevailed, and the result was a huge success, with vast crowds lining the streets of London to cheer Victoria on her way to Westminster Abbey.

There was, however, a remarkable twist. To mark the occasion, Salisbury decided to organise a false-flag terrorist plot, his agents encouraging a group of Irish-American Fenians to cross the Atlantic with some dynamite, purportedly to blow up both the Queen and Salisbury himself. Obviously the PM never intended the bomb to go off: the plan was to roll up the Fenian network in Britain and discredit sympathetic Irish nationalist MPs. Even so, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s “secret department” advised his own children not to attend the Jubilee service, just in case. Has Boris Johnson planned something similar this year? Given his organisational skills, let’s hope not.

All this was merely a curtain-raiser for the Woodstock of royal blowouts, the very acme of patriotic knees-ups, the Diamond Jubilee of June 1897. Not for nothing does this provide the centrepiece of Jan Morris’s great book on the apogee of imperialism, Pax Britannica, since it was explicitly conceived by the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, as a “Festival of the British Empire”.

There were Jubilee events in every corner of the earth, from Ireland and India to Singapore and the Seychelles. And the London parade was the most spectacular the capital had ever seen. In Morris’s words: “There were Hussars from Canada and Carabiniers from Natal, camel troops from Bikaner and Dyak head-hunters from North Borneo… There were Malays, and Sinhalese, and Hausas from the Niger and the Gold Coast, Jamaicans in white gaiters and ornately embroidered jackets, British Guiana police in caps like French gendarmes, Cypriot Zaptiehs whose fezzes struck so jarring a chord that some of the crowd hissed them, supposing them to be Turks, and a jangling squadron of Indian lancers led by a British officer in a white spiked helmet.”

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Not surprisingly, Fleet Street’s finest were in a state of patriotic ecstasy. It was “a pageant which for splendour of appearance and especially for splendour of suggestion has never been paralleled in the history of the world”, reported Her Majesty’s Daily Mail, with “every man such a splendid specimen and testimony to the GREATNESS OF THE BRITISH RACE that there was not an Imperialist in the crowd who did not from the sight of them gain a new view of the glory of the British Empire”.

And equally unsurprisingly, do-gooding citizens of the world hated it. “Imperialism in the air,” Beatrice Webb lamented in her diary, shuddering at the sight of “all classes drunk with sightseeing and hysterical loyalty”.

Even over this greatest of all Jubilees, though, there was a shadow. Britain might have been Top Nation, but foreign rivals — the United States, Germany, even Russia — were catching up fast. When Joseph Chamberlain organised an imperial conference a few days after the jamboree, the other colonial delegates rejected his suggestion that they should form a permanent imperial federation, with a special council to coordinate their policies. And when Rudyard Kipling was invited to publish a Jubilee poem in The Times, the result — “Recessional” — read more as a prediction of imperial decline than a celebration of imperial glory:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!

Kipling was right, of course. By the time of the next royal binge — George V’s Silver Jubilee of May 1935 — the tone was very different. Royal houses had crumbled all over Europe, Communism and Fascism were in their pomp and Britain was only just emerging from the Depression. The previous autumn, the Nazis had held their most spectacular Nuremberg rally yet, filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for Triumph of the Will. But George’s Jubilee could hardly have been more modest. There was plenty of bunting, of course, and there were thousands of street parties. But the imperial fervour was much reduced, and nothing better summed up the mood than the advent of the ancestor of coronation chicken — a concoction called Jubilee chicken, made with mayonnaise and curry powder.

It was a Pooterish dish for a Pooterish king, an unassuming, unexciting man who had never knowingly said an interesting or clever thing in his life. The Germans had their Führer, the Russians had their General Secretary, and we had our King-Emperor, who liked stamp collecting and had very strong views about where you should crease your trousers. Quite rightly, though, people admired him for it. “I’d no idea they felt like that about me,’ said George, after crowds cheered him in the East End. “I’m beginning to think they must really like me for myself.”

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If 1897 was the peak, the nadir was probably the Silver Jubilee of 1977. Most ordinary people actually had a tremendous time; and with record sales of Jubilee-themed jewellery, t-shirts, beer mugs, jeans, even egg timers, thermometers and ashtrays, Britain’s tat merchants were in dreamland. Even so, the fact that it rained for most of the day rather summed the whole thing up. Inflation was rampant, Jim Callaghan’s government had just cadged a record bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and the newspapers were generally full of doom and gloom. “The popular imagination can no longer feed on the glories and wonders of empire,” lamented The Times. “Nor, it has to be admitted, does the Britain of 1977, relieved of almost all its imperial baggage, present the sort of spectacle to light in the mind the bonfires of national rejoicing.”

Musically, the lowlight wasn’t the Pistols’ punk anthem, but the truly terrible “unofficial” Jubilee single by the former Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member Neil Innes (sample lyrics: “Sailing in the yacht Britannia / Nowhere in the world would ban ya’ / Or your Royal Family”.) And while Kipling’s “Recessional” had at least been printable, Philip Larkin’s Jubilee poem, which he showed only to a few friends, is unlikely to feature on too many university reading lists today:

After Healey’s trading figures
After Wilson’s squalid crew
And the rising tide of niggers
What a treat to look at you!

By these standards, the Jubilees of 2002 and 2012 were positively joyous. And no doubt next week’s party will be fun, too. My 10-year-old son reports that his schoolmates are all very excited about it. Each class is going to dress up as a different Commonwealth country, and his own class has chosen Mozambique. As long as they don’t get Justin Trudeau to provide their costumes and make-up, what could possibly go wrong?

But what if, like Beatrice Webb and similarly miserable drips throughout history, you can’t stand the monarchy and aren’t looking forward to the Jubilee? Well, I have a consolation for you. Even if, God forbid, Prince Charles succeeded tomorrow, it’s statistically very unlikely that he’ll be around for a Silver Jubilee of his own. Even William, who is now almost 40, will probably do very well to mark his 25th year on the throne.

So this may very well be the last Jubilee most of us will ever see. Unless, of course… we change the rules and have them every four years, like World Cups. It would drive the Guardian mad, of course. Let’s do it.

Wholly forgotten amid the Jubilee celebrations was the fact that, when the Queen acceded to the throne, she became sovereign not only of the UK, but also of a Muslim nation from which a million Britons like myself hail. The caption, for those who don’t read Urdu, translates as: “Elizabeth II, Queen of Pakistan 1952 – 1956.” It is the most remarkable detail in the chronicle of the Queen’s reign which began in February 1952, just as my father was born in a village in East Pakistan that through the strange meanderings of history was located in her dominions. My family’s fate has, ever since, been twinned with Her Majesty’s.

Of all the titles Elizabeth Windsor acquired on her father’s death, “Queen of Pakistan” would be the shortest-lived. The monarchy of Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s down-trodden Muslims, was quickly abolished. In time, so was the country itself, most of its population seceding to form a new country (Bangladesh). Although a rump state still claims the name Pakistan, the country of my parents’ birth no longer exists. Yet its sometime sovereign, Elizabeth II, miraculously lives on — the only remnant of the original Pakistani state as it existed before its collapse in civil war and genocide.

That national failure led to my parents’ emigration to the UK, and so my family fell once again under Her Majesty’s reign. They were “New Commonwealth immigrants”. But my father was truly a New Elizabethan, among the first subjects to be born under the new Queen — and born British, since the Nationality Act of 1948 established, with astonishing magnanimity, a common citizenship for the whole British Commonwealth. Three generations of my family have been born subjects of the same Queen, while a full five generations have lived under her reign, in the UK or the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan.

In all this time, the monarchy has been the dominant political fact in our lives. The labels on our passports — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK — have changed more than once; with the potential break-up of the United Kingdom they may do again. But while countries and their borders, governments and their ideologies, come and go, the one unfathomable fact that endures is the monarchy, whose legal subjects British-Asians have been ever since India was annexed more than a 150 years ago. And this legal relationship stretches back even further for those of Caribbean heritage, as far back as the 17th century.

No-one can claim the relationship began consensually. But whatever the iniquity of our initial subjection to this crown, it is that same crown that now guarantees our equality in this land. The Proclamation of 1858 that made my ancestors British granted them the exact same rights as all other subjects. It was Queen Victoria herself who had insisted on Indians “being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown”, words that would be recited by Indians at political gatherings. The principle was frequently ignored, but it was, as Gandhi put it, our Magna Carta, an assurance of equal treatment, decreed by the highest possible source, that still holds true today.

Monarchy, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. There’s something strangely celestial about that description, but he was onto something. As Shakespeare observed, “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king”. Elizabeth II is Dei Gratia Regina (“Queen by the grace of God”) and as even the imam of Cambridge mosque preached on Friday, “she is a servant of the Almighty Allah”. If, in our secular age, there can no longer be God-given rights, the monarchy’s pompous charade of divinity makes it the closest thing we have to an absolute — and that is what I’d like my rights to be.

Minorities don’t trust the “human bustle” — which is all we would have without a monarch. From history we learn that wherever a throne is eliminated, in due course so are ethnic minorities. Consider the multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa under the Habsburgs or of southeastern Europe under the Ottomans. A dozen languages were spoken in the imperial parliament in Vienna, while on any given day in an Istanbul cafe conversations could be heard in Turkish, Ladino, Greek, Armenian, French and Kurdish, at least. But since republican governments replaced these monarchies, the fate of every 20th-century cosmopolis on the continent has been one of merciless homogenisation through ethnic cleansing, population transfers or socio-economic strangulation.

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There’s a kneejerk association of monarchy with nationalism. But the two have mostly been pitted against each other since the imperial age in which European monarchies transformed into continent-spanning empires characterised, especially in the British case, by free trade and free movement. Nationalists opposed the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of these empires, eventually corralling their multiethnic populations into new nation-states, republics in the main, which now struggle to cope with a fraction of the ethnic diversity that their territories previously boasted under imperial rule.

Conservatives today won’t own up to a truth of which they should be proud: the original basis of our multicultural society was the imperialist, royalist ideology of High Toryism. This becomes clear from the debate around the Nationality Act of 1948 that enabled my father’s emigration. It was then the Conservatives who worried about Labour reforms destroying “our proud boast of the open door in this country to people from all the colonies”. The parliamentary statement by Lord Kilmuir, as Shadow Home Secretary, deserves quoting at length:

We deprecate any tendency to differentiate between different types of British subjects in the United Kingdom. We feel that when they come to the UK there ought to be an open door and reception for every type…We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone, from every part of the empire.

What united — and still unites — all these disparate people is the Queen, mere loyalty to whom makes us all British. Our oath of allegiance is to “Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors” — no more, no less. The symbolism of that is profound. It means my mother, a hijab-wearing Bengali Muslim woman who speaks little English can be unimpeachably British in a way she could not be unimpeachably French (even her clothing would not be deemed in keeping with “Republican values”). The simplicity of our oath is one of our constitution’s forgotten jewels, its tolerant spirit generally diffused throughout the state — a state that isn’t truly a nation-state since it claims four different “home nations”. Apart from Scotland, all have an underwhelming sense of nationality. As Daniel Defoe’s ditty scorning English nationalism went:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

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By contrast, the nation-states born of decolonisation in the last century demand of its citizens fealty to a nation, that nation commonly being defined in ethnically exclusive terms. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the Roma minority that once had only to express loyalty to the emperor is under pressure to become Hungarian. These are societies at the mercy of ethnonationalism and xenophobia, lacking that impartial light of monarchy which, at its best, allows people of all races and religions to appeal to something beyond their differences from one another.

These unstable political forces haven’t been totally absent even in our tolerant monarchy. In 1968, targeting East African Indians, the Labour government consciously restricted dark-skinned British passport-holders from entering the country, legislation which even the anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell considered, in some of its clauses, to be comparable to the Nuremberg Laws. Still, shortly afterwards, Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that made him the biggest name in UK politics.

Powell envisioned a renewed English nationalism, which arose from a disillusioned critique of imperialism not unlike those taking place in former colonies. He came to believe that the foreign adventure of empire — Powell was a veteran of the Indian Army — had suppressed English identity. Decolonisation was an occasion to rediscover it, as if it were an old oak in an abandoned garden. He railed against the “bogus mythical self-consoling invention of the British Commonwealth”, against the Queen’s new role as its Head, and of course against Commonwealth immigrants. The irony is that Powell could have made the same arguments as an Indian, say, and been regarded as a fairly standard postcolonial polemicist.

Queen Elizabeth deserves credit as probably Powell’s most successful adversary in those turbulent decades. She single-handedly preserved the old imperial High Toryism which Powell and later Tories had turned against, using her charm to launder out of it the darker stains of imperialism. Whereas for Powell, the nation-state was “the ultimate political reality”, for Elizabeth it was the British Empire in its new, egalitarian guise, the Commonwealth. In her famous broadcast on her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth pledged her life to serving “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.

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Of course, the Queen never addressed him directly, but she was shadow-boxing against Powell’s English nationalism. Powell’s ravings grew more virulent. “It is truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land,” Powell would bellow. But all the while, Elizabeth would reaffirm her own commitment “to that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races”.

Eventually, Powell’s decorum yielded. In 1984, he attacked Queen Elizabeth — from a family of immigrants herself — using a phrase that would later be invoked, knowingly or otherwise, by Theresa May: “citizen of nowhere”. She was, Powell claimed, more concerned for “a vociferous minority of newcomers than for the great mass of her subjects…threatening the place of the Crown in the affections of the people” — a prediction that was utterly refuted by the jubilant Union Jack-waving of millions over the holiday.

Like most, at times I found myself chafing against the kitschier aspects of the spectacle. But then, when I saw the circle of saffron-robed sadhus from Gujarat at Neasden’s Hindu temple ignite a sacred flame in honour of the Queen, I remembered all over again what the lighting of all those beacons truly symbolised: a celebration by our motley, many-hued human bustle of the light that shines above it.

But such is the nervousness that hangs over the monarchy’s future, in any rendition of the national anthem there is a palpable charge on the words, “long to reign over us, God save the Queen”. In that moment, one can sense a shivering fear that the Queen’s death may open the path to a troubling future where the forces stacked against the British monarchy, from outside and in, begin to overwhelm it — without there being any unifying idea about what could come next.

The Queen’s being was not always fused in this way with a near ideal form of British monarchy. The joyful festivities for the Silver Jubilee bank holiday in June 1977, for example, felt as much about a country needing to remind itself that one purpose of a monarchy is to create such a national occasion, as a celebration of the Queen herself.

Since Victoria’s reign established the idea that the monarchy’s legitimacy had, in part, to rest on public affection, the British have not continuously loved quietude in their monarchs. There was nothing austere about Edward VII: he ate excessively, smoked too much, gambled, and had a string of mistresses. Queen Victoria feared her son would bring down the monarchy. But after Edward VII died in May 1910, throngs of people waited through the night under a deluge of rain outside Westminster Hall to see the coffin of a man who appeared, at least, rather to enjoy being King. When it came to his funeral procession, the crowds were much larger than they were for his mother.

But the present Queen is a successful part of a continuous story about duty that began with the monarchy her grandfather George V established. She is the last of a family trio. Although Edward VII did as much for the modern monarchy as his parents, his reign belongs to another world, one in which the British monarch still had real political influence. During the constitutional crisis of 1909-10, Edward VII successfully demanded a general election before the Liberal government could pass its budget after its defeat in the House of Lords, and then another before it could expect to legislate to remove the Lords’ right of veto — although he did not live to see that vote.

In Europe, he sought to check German power, leaving the Kaiser convinced his uncle was “Satan”, standing between Germany and its world destiny. By visiting Paris in 1903, against the advice of British officials, and transforming in just four days French public opinion of him, he played his part in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Working his other nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, while influencing the appointments of the British ambassador in St Petersburg and the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James’, he was also instrumental in realising the 1907 Anglo Russian Entente.

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As the pre-1914 European world approached its dissolution, Edward VII, as elder statesman of a continent-wide royal family dominated by Victoria and Albert’s descendants, appeared a peacemaker. A popular song in 1909 proclaimed “as long as there’s a King like good King Edward there’ll be no war”. On the King’s sudden death, the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky declared: “We have lost the mainstay of our foreign policy.” In France, Edward was mourned in the republican corridors of power in Paris and in provincial towns. When the moment of crisis arrived in August 1914, leaving the Kaiser to contemplate the terrible necessity for Germany to wage war against both Russia and France to achieve any of his ambitions, he complained bitterly that “the dead Edward was stronger than the living one”.

No European monarch could ever have such hope and dread projected onto them again. By the end of the First Word War, Edward VII’s second son had turned Prince Albert’s House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha into the Windsors, surrendered the use of all German titles, and refused asylum to the Tsar and Tsarina, both his first cousins, to protect the British monarchy from the sins of association. Instead of continental leadership, George V ­— who had become heir on the death of his older brother from the Russian flu — offered Britain the idea of a monarchy based on dutiful, quiet service and a largely domestic royal family.

Of course, the Windsor monarchy was still bound to the empire in the Twenties. George V wanted to be an imperial king replete with imperial ceremony; before the war, he had insisted on travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India. But, whatever its creator’s imperial emotions, the post-1914 monarchy had, in a world where European decline was inescapable, to be detachable from empire. A good part of the Queen’s achievement has been to facilitate that imaginative separation while, through the Commonwealth, preventing the monarchy falling into British parochialism detached from the wider world.

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Above all, the emotional rituals of the new Windsor monarchy were tied to the rituals of remembrance created by the losses of the First World War. These liturgies were reinvigorated by the Second World War both in its national mythos of virtuous sacrifice and the imperial mobilisation of the Indian Army as the largest volunteer force in history. On 11 November 1920, George V unveiled the Cenotaph as part of a procession to Westminster Abbey for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. On entering the Abbey two-and-a-half years later for her wedding to the future George VI, the then Duchess of York – the future Queen Mother – laid her bouquet on the tomb in honour of her brother who fell at the Battle of Loos, beginning a tradition for royal brides, upheld by the Queen and later the Duchess of Cambridge. At her own request, the Queen Mother’s funeral wreath was placed on the grave. The fusion of the seasons of monarchical life with the national remembrance of war is why the Queen’s absence from last year’s Cenotaph service was such a watershed moment. Nothing could state more potently that her reign is coming to an end.

In its post-1914 casting, the monarchy was far from constitutionally irrelevant. George V played his part in normalising Labour governments, and effectively demanded that Ramsay MacDonald form the National government when MacDonald came to the Palace to resign in August 1931. Until the Conservative party changed its leadership rules, the monarch had the formal discretion to choose a Conservative Prime Minister on the departure on an incumbent, a power the Queen exercised when she chose Harold Macmillan in January 1957 and Lord Douglas-Home in October 1963. But during George V’s reign, a great deal of constitutional service became passive: dealing with boxes without active responsibility for their content and performing the constitutional ceremony of the opening of Parliament.

In this requirement for quiescence lay a problem that would haunt George V and perhaps does the Queen. It is not only the monarch who must accept an inert role, but the heir after years of waiting for the Crown to be theirs. In George V’s case, his eldest son’s temperamental constitutional unsuitability was thoroughly compounded by his unwillingness to make a conventional marriage and have children.

But Edward VIII’s short reign paradoxically strengthened the Windsor monarchy. Once George VI acceded to the throne, he was helped by the very fecklessness of his older brother. What story could more demonstrate the idea of necessary duty than one where the stammering second son had to take the Crown from a once-idolised brother and remake himself as a public man? During the Second World War all aspects of the Windsor monarchy became one when that King and his Queen partook in the national experience of aerial assault by working in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz and refusing ministerial advice to send the young princesses to Canada.

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The Queen’s inheritance of George V’s monarchy was complex. As was the case with her grandfather and father, the duties of the Crown should not have fallen upon her. But by the time she was born in 1926, her father had, given his brother’s attitude towards marriage, good reasons to suspect they eventually could; and her grandfather hoped, while she was too young really to comprehend what was happening around her, they would. If she shares with them an ability to accommodate duty foisted by circumstance, her temperamental dislike of excess has had to work, not in an age of war but amid rapidly rising consumerism and then a turn to performative public displays of grief. To heighten the dissociation, the appetite for communal expressions of emotion began in the days after Princess Diana’s death, when the Queen’s self-containment was the very opposite of the new aesthetic.

Given this divergence between the monarch and the times, it is perhaps unsurprising that the wholehearted affection felt for the Queen has only come in the second half of her life. This is in part the effect of the sheer duration of her endurance. But it is a function, too, of her character. She has absorbed change she had little reason to like, and so reinforced the story of duty to which the House of Windsor laid claim. Precisely because the country is significantly more secular than when she came to the throne, her Christianity is also an asset. Where the religious rituals of national life might appear hollow, she plays her part blessed by faith. Since some of the symbols are complex in a multi-national Union that was never a spiritual union, she also appears at ease in the ambiguity, seen at worship as she is at Sandringham in a church of which she is head and at Balmoral at Crathie Kirk, a church where she is not. As the United Kingdom has become more divided, she has simply carried on as head of state, as if as long as she performs her duty, the country will be more than it seems on the surface to be.

But the idea of the domestic royal family has been a greater burden for the Queen than it was even for her grandfather. If, on the other side of her reign, lies a great unknown, it is one she has played her part in bringing about. What she has given of her own qualities to the kingdom coexists with mishaps with her heirs. In marrying her third-cousin for love, she inserted the Windsors back into the part of Victoria and Albert’s continental diaspora that had made it back to Britain through the wreckage of the First World War and its aftermath. But no more European royal weddings would materialise. Instead, Prince Charles was left caught between the idea he could marry for love and the eventual necessity of a near arranged domestic aristocratic marriage he was ill-equipped to tolerate. Meanwhile, the Queen’s longevity means that there have been three generations of spares to pain and embarrass her. Like George V before her, the Queen will not to live to see where the story of her life as royal parent of Prince Andrew and grandparent of Prince Harry ends.

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For a moment, the future can wait, as it did for George V. His Silver Jubilee in May 1935, six months before his death, turned out to be an emotional occasion. After the crowds had lined the streets to see him and Queen Mary process to a service at St Paul’s, he took to the radio to declare: “I can only say to you, my very dear people, that the Queen and I thank you from the depths of our hearts for all the loyalty — and may I say? — the love which this day and always you have surrounded us.” After driving through the East End, he said, “I’d no idea they felt like that about me.”

The problem he bequeathed the monarchy as a father had an unexpected resolution: Mrs Simpson was the strange grace note in the story, the contingency that spared the country a disastrous monarch during an attempted conquest. Since Andrew and Harry are not heirs who can be broken or redeemed by the Crown, there will be no resolution to the contrasting problems they cause; the Queen must pass them unabridged to Prince Charles.

Beyond his brother and youngest son, Charles will inherit a Crown that has reached a stasis by very virtue of the Queen’s remarkable success. She was sufficiently formed by the Second World War to be George V and George VI’s spiritual heir. But no child or grandchild of hers could ever have been like her, whatever kind of parent or grandparent she was. She must know the future monarchy, if it survives, will be one that has of necessity again been reinvented.

By giving unflinching service according to the Windsor character script and rituals she has emphatically answered the question of what purpose a constitutional monarchy still serves. There will not be such a sharp rejoinder to republicanism ever again. This will be Prince Charles’s burden. It will also belong to us all who are the Queen’s subjects. If we want the monarchy to continue, we will have tacitly to give our consent to leaving the Age of Elizabeth Windsor behind.