The United States has had an ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy, then, for as long as the United States has existed. But while this relationship is certainly “special” in the ironic sense, that revolutionary legacy of republican hostility often seems tempered with something warmer. If anything, the hostility more frequently seems to flow the other way. The British institutional reaction to Edward VII’s relationship with American divorcée Wallis Simpson was scorn at a perceived social inferior and gold-digger. In America, though, the response was curiosity at the American woman who had captured the heart of a king. More recently, at least to begin with, something of the same mood surrounded the marriage of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle. 

The current President of the United States, too, is known to be a fan of the British monarchy: he paid a warm tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II on her death in 2022. So today, as Donald Trump begins his first state visit since his Presidential inauguration in January, everyone around Keir Starmer is hoping that a dose of royal pomp and ceremony will pour balm on a “special relationship” that has, latterly, looked more than a little threadbare. 

Will it work? The day and a half Trump will spend in the UK is programmed like the most high-end imaginable private tour of Museum Britain, that curated subset of the British Isles popular with tourists eager to see the “typical England” of their imagination (and of the oeuvre of Richard Curtis). Should official Britain succeed in containing Trump in this museum zone, suitably diverted with guards of honor, a Red Arrow fly-by, historic carriages, lavish banquets, and a visit to Windsor, plus the undivided attention of the Royal Family, the cumulative effect will no doubt be enjoyable for Trump, if also hermetically insulated from the Britain the rest of us live in.

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Meanwhile, it speaks volumes about the restive mood of Britain as an un-curated whole that there will be no public procession; in fact, no public-facing element at all. This is reportedly because of security fears, in the face of far-Left agitation. But what if it’s also to minimize the risk of Trump seeing those parts (or denizens) of the country that aren’t part of the Museum Britain picture, and forming too accurate an impression of how the rest of us live? Worse still, what if it afforded us too accurate an assessment of our own leadership? If officials want to spare Trump the sight of (for example) Birmingham’s cat-sized rats, or indeed our thriving national business in supplying free seaside accommodation for undocumented workers, it may also be too awkward to display in public our poorly, footling constitutional King, beside the brash, bouffant, and genuinely ascendant Trump. 

This is, after all, a man who, despite being formally a president, has far closer to monarchic powers than any current British leader, either crowned or elected — and who, besides, leads the West’s foremost superpower. What if Britons looked at Trump side-by-side with King Charles, and drew the wrong conclusion about which of the two was more kingly?

I’m being a little facetious here, but not entirely. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth II, reigned during a post-war political consensus that viewed nation-states as on their way to obsolescence, and the future a bright one of internationalism. Her reign was one of dignified stoicism in the face of relentless diminishment to a cryptic cipher: the sole speck of absolutist grit in the liberal-democratic oyster. Concurrent with her death, though, that future has vanished. History is back with a vengeance, as are strongman leaders. 

And as the United States continues its tumultuous slide toward fully post-liberal governance, a corresponding aesthetic shift is afoot — of which, like it or not, Trump is a leading edge. The incumbent ruling class doesn’t like it: from the FT’s performative shuddering at Trump’s “turning the White House into Mar-A-Lagoland”, to the New York Times’ prim distaste at the way his gilded décor evokes “the crudeness of the times”, everyone who did well in the spreadsheet-brained Clinton/Obama salad days of management consultants and financialization thinks he’s ghastly. But outside Bluesky and the rarefied world of wealthy progressives, it seems, the world likes ghastly. 

And no wonder. History is well and truly back: the world is no longer borderless, or, conversely, is more borderless than electorates would like. War is back on the menu, even in Europe. The same America that dismantled the British Empire in the name of national self-determination is murmuring about colonizing overseas territories. But nor is this the old industrial age of standing armies and tanks and planes; today, it’s data cables, terrorism, liminal warfare, bot farms and drones. Biotech is proliferating: Silicon Valley mavericks are gene-editing their babies. The vibe shift is here; it’s weird, and loud, and more than a little sci-fi. 

Against this, it’s the dressed-down technocrats of the Obama era that feel obsolete, along with their sans-serif fonts and “discreet luxe”. And this plus the obvious popularity of Trump with at least a large subset of his own electorate all points to a possibility that no one but America’s progressive “No Kings” protesters (and perhaps Curtis Yarvin) wants to consider: that if any Western state today can be said to have as its leader something approximating a Royal Brute, it’s America. 

Emanations from the vicinity of the Palace suggest that His Majesty King Charles is, like his great-great-great-grandmother Victoria, not amused. Back in July, a nameless “friend of the monarch” told (of all outlets) the Daily Beast that Charles is worried Trump will use his upcoming visit to embarrass British officials on the topic of immigration into Europe. Trump has, after all, already called the inflow of migrants from Africa and Asia “a horrible invasion that is killing Europe”, a remark that the King’s unnamed friend says “appalled” Charles, after a “lifetime promoting tolerance and compassion”. 

It is of course impossible to know whether or not this nameless source spoke to the press with the King’s support or not. There have been other such suggestions of dislike, which indicate this may really reflect Charles’ views. If it does, he would only be echoing every other upper-class idealist of the boomer generation who took John Lennon’s Imagine as prophecy, and really believed that history had ended and that tolerance and compassion could now bloom forever. Even so, this naïve partiality shows Charles in an unfavorable light compared to his mother, who both had her own views on politics and nonetheless remained perfectly reserved through a lifetime of duty as Britain’s figurehead. 

Arguably, though, it shows him in a still more unfavorable light compared to Trump himself. For however ghastly Obama liberals (and perhaps also Charles III) think Trump is, the Donald’s breezy insistence on saying whatever the hell he likes is far more kingly than any amount of passive-aggressive whispering to the press via underlings, no matter how you gussy that up as royal stoicism.

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To be fair to Charles, he is in a difficult position. He presides over a skint and increasingly fractured post-imperial rump Britain. His own royal legacy is bound up with a Commonwealth whose membership includes many countries that obviously, actively view Great Britain as at best a mark to shake down for “reparations” or remittances, if not an active enemy. At the same time, support for the constitutional monarchy of which he is a head persists mainly among small-c conservative Middle Englanders for whom, in the age of mass migration, Charles’ avowed internationalism and extension of “imagined community” to the Commonwealth feels at best misguided if not, according to some more febrile social media posters, actively treacherous.

Amid all these tensions, perhaps Charles feels he has no choice but to communicate his views obliquely, in hints and whispers. But the unfavorable comparison between Charles III and Donald Trump is not just about confidence. It’s also about power, and the freedom to aestheticize power: a willingness to “just do things”, as the kids say, and to be a bit extra as you do it. The ancients framed this as a virtue, “magnificence”, meaning to spend in accordance with your rank, especially on goods of wider civic value, such as ornate architecture.

It would be a stretch to call (for example) Trump’s remodeling of the White House Rose Garden as an exclusive private members’ club “magnificent” in this sense; the logic is too commercial. But when Henry VIII demolished a thousand years of monastic history, he did so to realize their value, to fund his wars and lavish spending. Today, the bloom of gold across every White House surface speaks to a similar sensibility: one ruthlessly focused on realizing assets and then exerting power through displays of wealth and, where necessary, the recently re-titled Department of War. If Britain were ruled today by a Henry VIII rather than a Charles III, would a man known in the sixteenth century for his quick temper, unpredictability, vast appetite and, of course, numerous wives be more like our current monarch, or more like Trump? I think we all know the answer.

Many American republicans, of both the small- and large-R variety, are proud of their national origin story, in which a war of independence was fought to escape the yoke of “the Royal Brute of Great Britain”. But in a twist of fate, 250 years on they appear to have gained a magnificence-loving leader of their own, one whose mercurial, Henrician forcefulness so completely eclipses the impotent, passive-aggressive titular monarch of now much-less-great Britain, let alone its insipid, technocrat PM, as to make the old country look weirdly leaderless.

But perhaps the more accurate assessment is that Britain is not leaderless at all. Rather, we are de facto ruled as a province from imperial Washington, by something far closer to the old-fashioned kind of king. And from this perspective, the dissident agitating for independence isn’t some American Thomas Paine. Rather, it is King Charles, impotently signalling via nameless aides his resentment at the subordination of his kingdom to the Royal Brute of Greater Britain.

In the Caribbean, her government had only just ousted the elected prime minister of British Guiana, sparking angry accusations of imperial control. In Australia, a deadly polio outbreak posed a direct risk to her health. In Ceylon, Communist unrest had reached such a level the country’s premier felt he needed to warn the Queen that the visit might need to be cancelled. And in Uganda, Britain’s decision to depose and exile the Kabaka of Buganda, the traditional ruler of the country’s largest kingdom, was still causing ructions. Even in Gibraltar, the final stop of Her Majesty’s grand tour, there were demands from General Franco that the visit be abandoned.

And yet, the entire tour went ahead, millions turned out to catch a glimpse of their new sovereign, and a delighted government back in London felt a sudden rush of confidence about our international standing following the loss of India only a few years earlier.

Last week, the Gallic half of King Charles’s first foreign expedition as monarch had to be cancelled because of the rioting in Paris. And so all he will have to show for his first overseas excursion as King will be a short tour of Germany.

To those of a certain temperament, the contrast between mother and son is more than a little sobering. But rather than lamenting the timidity of modern life or the decline of our national horizons, I say we should cheer them. Charles’s first trip as King might reflect the decline of our global stature, but there is nothing wrong with this decline. It could be a very good thing.

Once you take off the rose-tinted spectacles, the 1953 tour was not quite what it seemed. The objective of the great global jamboree was to “reaffirm the durability of the British Empire”, as Philip Murphy wrote in Monarchy and the End of Empire. The problem was not that it failed in this regard — though of course it did — but that the tour was so successful in every other regard that it blinded the country’s governing elite to the reality of the post-war world.

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Following the Queen’s visit to New Zealand, the High Commissioner, Sir Geoffrey Scoones, wrote that the Queen’s mere physical presence — in her full “regal splendour” — engrained the very idea of the Commonwealth in the minds of those outside Britain. In this Commonwealth, Sir Geoffrey wrote, Britain was just one of several kingdoms bound together in their allegiance to the Crown. Britain was no longer the ruler of an empire — just another country in one great family of nations. The diplomatic idea was that while the empire was no more, the Commonwealth could still protect Britain’s global influence.

The problem was that this wasn’t true. Sir Geoffrey’s idea was that Elizabeth was just as much the Queen of Australia as she was the Queen of England (or, more accurately, the UK). But this never really stood up to scrutiny. There was even an idea at this time that she might turn her court into a kind of travelling circus, moving from realm to realm, London to Ottawa, Canberra to Auckland, to show that she was Queen of all, favourite of none. This idea, of course, bumped up against reality. Elizabeth was primarily Queen of the home country, living in England and leaving the administration of her other realms to her representatives. Underneath the pomp of Britain’s changing imperial order lay the same old country underneath. Britain had entered a post-imperial world — it just did not entirely accept that yet.

Similar delusions were on display during the Queen’s trip to Australia. Like his counterpart in New Zealand, the high commissioner in Canberra, Sir Stephen Holmes, claimed Elizabeth’s presence had ensured the monarchy would remain a central part of Australia’s emerging national identity. Until this point, remember, you could be Australian and British, just as you could be English and British. Maintaining the royal link to the home country was seen as fundamentally important because Britain’s relationship with Australia was key to protecting the country’s global influence.

Once again, though, these ideas owed more to sentiment than cold-headed reality. Much as Australia’s prime minister at the time, Robert Menzies, considered himself “British to his bootstraps”, Australia was on its way to a separate identity with separate interests, not as one of the many “British peoples” around the world, as the Duke of Edinburgh put it, but as Australians, separate from Britain and increasingly dependent on the United States for its security. No matter how many royal tours of Australia the government paid for, this basic reality was not going to change.

Today, Charles more closely resembles the other Kings and Queens of Europe than his mother, just as Britain more closely resembles the other countries of Europe than a mini America. That Charles was only due to visit France and Germany on his first trip — and that even half of this has been cancelled — only reveals the extent to which we have become normal again.

Later this week, Charles will become the first foreign head of state since the Second World War to be welcomed with full military honours at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. He will also become the first British monarch to address the Bundestag. Neither of these things should be dismissed. In today’s world, such things are far more important than some globetrotting tour that would do little to enhance our core national interest.

The point is this: being normal is good. The problem for Britain is not that we are normal, but that we have fallen behind normal in too many parts of our national life — from general levels of wealth to general levels of public service. Striving to be normal could be a liberating national mission, freeing us from the pressure to be anything more. To me, there is actually something quite uplifting about Charles attempting to make the most understated and mundane of foreign visits, quietly going about his business rather than aiming for some grand statement of global relevance or, worse, entering into some competition with his son for American approval. Touring the port of Hamburg, pointing at new green technology is just the kind of foreign visit Charles is good at.

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Earlier this month, Charles’s Dutch counterpart, the King of the Netherlands, toured Slovakia at the head of a business delegation promoting his country’s economy. “The business delegation consists mostly of companies from the waste processing, recycling, soil remediation and circular construction sectors,” read an official press statement. This is the kind of kingship Britain now needs: waste processing promotion. Forget Walter Bagehot’s idea of theatrical “dignified” monarchy. We have no shortage of pomp and ceremony to keep us going each year. And it really doesn’t matter if all this excitement and reverence becomes a purely domestic affair. The Netherlands no longer has much of an international role, but it is extremely rich. I’d take that right now.

We seem to have forgotten that, once upon a time, being a Little Englander was a good thing, a term of abuse for progressives who did not particularly care for the British Empire and wanted more focus on the welfare of those in the home country. The opposite of a Little Englander was an imperialist. Today, that meaning has been lost. Being a Little Englander is now a derogatory term for provincial yokels, many of whom, ironically, are also accused of being in thrall to some kind of imperial nostalgia. How things change.

I say let’s bring back the original idea of Little Englandism. Let’s actively pursue smallness. Let’s concentrate on the condition of England, which, let’s face it, is not great. If it helps us to send Charles on waste management promotional tours of Slovakia, rather than journeys of fancy, so be it. Let’s make England little again.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

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Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

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However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

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For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

First, an appropriate Spring date for his early coronation has been announced. And then, on Wednesday, he perhaps deliberately broadcast to the world his irritation and dismay at Truss: “Back again? Dear, oh dear. Anyway…” This incident has already exploded any notion that Charles as King will be completely apolitical. But a more political monarchy should be welcomed, both in principle and also on account of the immediate and complex danger in which our realm now stands.

In the face of this peril, King and Prime Minister represent two completely opposite possible future responses: one concerned with restoring a more natural, rooted, cooperative order under the authority of a mystical deity; the other determined to install a yet more nakedly liberal and secular regime in which order is to be distilled out of the uprooted strivings of human individuals who seek only their own further advantage.

Thanks to both new global circumstances and to Truss’s overkill, we can no longer be so sure of the inevitable triumph of the second, more obviously modern perspective as we once might have been. We can now recall that the Queen’s funeral was the sudden and gently confident rising to the surface of an older and deeper reality. What drew people to this event was a phenomenon of incarnation, in an ultimately Christian sense, which nonetheless resonated for people of many different faiths and none at all. The Queen, in her increasingly frail body, had been the ultimate locus of power and authority. She stood for the notion that legitimate power, in contrast to the Trusketeer vision, is, indeed, inherently symbolic as well as personal, because it derives from above and from our answerability to the eternally and objective Good, True and Beautiful, not from a balancing of brutally material forces.

England was once devoted to the notion of the “king’s two bodies” — the idea that when the mortal body of a monarch dies, her immortal body of authority survives. (Charles became king not through a ceremony, but at the very instant of his mother’s passing away.) This idea was ultimately inseparable from a theological one: the doctrine that Christ was, in a still more radical sense, at once both human and divine.

Yet in the case of kingship, this never meant that the monarch was a pagan semi-deity. Rather, kingship is anointed: the king is only king under God, and bound to the divinely-given law of the land and to the people who themselves belong to God. The scriptures recognise both the dangers of monarchic tyranny and the likelihood, in a republic, of aristocratic corruption. It is for this reason that they advocate what is in effect a mode of constitutional monarchy.

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We speak of ourselves too often as a mere “democracy”, as if we believe in the dominance of the sheerly aggregated will of the British people. But in reality, we live in a representative democracy, under the ultimate sway of the Crown. Political representatives are in effect a kind of “aristocracy”, since they at once guide, influence and interpret the will of the people.

It can seem as if the way forward should be further to liberalise and democratise that mixture. But do we wish to unleash the isolated wills of narcissistic individuals — or their aggregated compound, often in populist reaction against the former? In reality, a less hollow, more participatory and continuous democracy can only prevail if we cultivate a more honourable and rooted leadership at every level, rather than a self-seeking oligarchy that seeks to manipulate and control the populace as though it were a machine.

Monarchy might stand at the apex of this better “aristocracy”. Its leadership is inherited, tying it to tradition, to land, to the interpersonal and to patronage. It is naturally linked to the rural soil, to the encouraging of creative labour, and to life, as instanced by the causes that Charles III supported when he was a prince.

However, mixed government supposes a perennial sense (well known to Charles as a reader of René Guenon) that human beings tend either to be thinkers, doers or sustainers — therefore to fall into contemplative, political-military or economic social roles. A monarch is naturally drawn towards the top-down integration of these three elements, just as he tends to see the need to link the executive, judicial and democratic powers within the political sphere.

Therefore, the monarch not only enables but also counterbalances the aristocrats. His power resists their latent republican desires for purely oligarchic rule; indeed, it often depends upon a “Caesarian” appeal, over their heads, to the people, as we see in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar. The monarch can act as a counterweight to the over-confidence of the supposedly wise, whose wisdom has degenerated into mere expertise. A king is properly concerned with the inculcation of genuine wisdom and often this resonates much more with the common-sense and folk traditions of the people than the bourgeois theorising of the semi-educated.

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For this reason, there is nothing inappropriate about King Charles’s specific interest in a better pedagogy. Ultimately, a non-liberal politics exists to inculcate virtue in its citizens. Charles has often promoted exactly that, through his various trusts and projects. But at the same time, he has also attended to the popular voice with respect to architecture, family, community, land, craft and local economy. Experts have tended to deride this work, ignoring the fact that monarchy can help to render democracy more substantive, as opposed to allowing it to become increasingly hollowed-out by attention to only formal procedures.

Everything here is paradoxical: if more power is to spring from below, it needs a space shaped, crafted and protected from above. Only a king may possess a destiny sufficiently at one with his people to be relatively immune to selfish distractions and partisan influences.

That is why monarchy is never apolitical or merely “dignified” and ceremonial — but is, rather, political in a sense higher than is usually observed in our agonistic politics. Deeper than our arguments lies always our consensus, without which the arguments could not be peaceably conducted. Kings and Queens can legitimately attend to the shaping and promotion of this consensus, even though it will never, of course, be without some contestation.

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Charles as Prince was right to focus on matters of land, life, labour and education. He was right also to focus on trying to include the socially marginalised. All this is about the pursuit of the common good, and should not be controversial, or thought of as “meddling”. A Trusketeer politics that ignores the common good is not a politics at all, but an anti-politics. It is a monarch’s higher priorities that may serve to preserve the Union of four distinct peoples and a shared feeling of “Britishness”, despite an increase in federalised self-government.

We need to understand that our institutions are all in disarray because we do not understand the real principles of mixed constitution which they embody, nor their ultimate links to sacral monarchy. For it is impossible to pursue a shared Good, Truth and Beauty if one has no conviction that these things are eternally real — and can, to a degree, be rendered truly incarnate and instantiated as “harmony” here below. Congregations in churches and Hindu temples may be inspired by the priestly promise of the celestial, but the people in the queue were even more inspired by the notion that heaven might be brought down to Earth — and the hope that, one day, the Earth itself would be restored, when only “God”, or the Truth itself, is finally our ruler.

Monarchy is subordinate to a spiritual priesthood — to us, the established church, which now guards the orb and sceptre until coronation day — and yet looks carnally beyond it, to a greater integration of soul with body and of understanding with pleasure. This is why everyone was so awed and yet excited by the funeral.

But how can we renew our constitution today? Monarchy should be a key part of that renewal: it has an especially strong role to play now that elected leaders are so distrusted. Without a monarchic tempering, populism may well deliver ever-further extremism, and liberalism may deliver ever-further intolerance of those who uphold objective norms. Our hope must lie in Charles exercising the higher and more fundamental politics proper to a king.

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A very British Hajj

By Will Lloyd

He could make more of his views public, where crucial aspects of our civic life are under threat. He could reduce his household, but increase his assembly of advisers and their interactions with the Civil Service. He could meet more regularly and not just ceremonially with members of his Privy Council. He could increase his influence with the House of Lords. He could consider the exercise of the royal veto in relation to matters that obviously violate the verdict of the ages or fundamental human liberties. In the future, the Crown might also move to prevent gross violations of our constitution, such as Blair’s removal of the House of Lords’s role as our highest court, or Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament.

Above all, Charles could expand the role of Royal commissions, colleges and trusts. On the model of the National Trust, he could establish organisations operating under royal charter concerned with ecology, land use, water, energy resources, housing, education and so forth. They would both produce strong ideas and put them into practice, on land that the organisations themselves owned.

None of these measures would damage representative democracy, because elected assemblies would still generally have the last word. But by increasing and encouraging honourable virtue and wisdom — drawing at once on ancient traditions and popular instinct — Charles’s reign could truly enable more popular involvement in social and economic processes.

God is said in the New Testament to have “emptied himself” by becoming a man on Earth. Instinctively, the people of this country recently responded to the self-emptying character of royal power. They saw that the monarch is us — her body our body, her death our death — and yet, miraculously, she is not dead, not even in her fragile earthly body, which is re-embodied in Charles. They saw that real power is obedience to the Good and service to the people. They saw that they can only be people themselves if they pursue these kingly virtues and become a “royal priesthood”. It is this vision that we must now seek to realise if we are to save ourselves as a polity.

Last Thursday evening we were camped on the shores of a lough, cooking our day’s catch on a grill as the sun set. Remote though we were, there was still — unfortunately — a phone signal, so my wife was able to bring us the unwelcome news from the outside world.

“Did you hear that the Queen died?” she said.

I hadn’t heard. I had been living in a different world for a while, but now the bigger, bleaker one had broken back in. I was surprised at the sense of loss that swept over me. You have to be British to understand this — and British at this moment in time especially. For my entire lifetime, and almost all of the lifetime of my parents, “the Queen” was just there. She was on the stamps and the coins and the telly every Christmas. Technically, she owned the whole country and had the power to dismiss governments and sack prime ministers, but we all knew she would never use them. Even republicans admitted a sneaking admiration for her sense of duty and work rate. At least somebody in the country, ran the subtext, still knew what duty actually meant.

The Queen lasted: nothing else did. Come up with whatever diagnoses you please, blame who you like, but you can’t deny Britain’s downward trajectory over her reign: steep, dizzying, painful. Only the Queen stood still, or seemed to, and as she did so she represented something much older than any of the rules we live by. A monarch has sat on the throne of England for 1,500 years. The meaning of this is mostly inaccessible to our argumentative modern minds.

Now we have a new monarch, we British, and sitting by that Irish lake last week I felt both sad and, suddenly, homesick. I felt that I wanted to be back in my country to share what was happening with my people. All the ceremony that is unfolding around me as I write, leading us smoothly and impressively towards the funeral and the coronation that will inevitably follow, embodies at once both the determination of the British state to maintain itself and the strange, proud, bloody-minded anachronism of the whole business.

How much longer can it last? The republicans and the rationalists have mostly been keeping their heads down this week, as the tide of media-fanned national sentiment roars over them. But those who want to “modernise” the country still further will be back soon enough. A monarchy is, after all, an offence against modernity. It is a hang-up from an earlier, more organic age, which at its worst is a trapdoor to a particular type of tyranny (our new king’s ancestral namesake ended up with his head in a basket on this charge), but at its best is a bulwark against another: the money-power of digital modernity. A monarchy is irrational, uncommercial and inexplicably mystical. It embodies tradition passed down through time. As such, it is deeply “unrepresentative” according to the current, constipated definition of that word, and yet it manages somehow to represent the country better than any elected politician, celebrity, pundit or philosopher ever could.

For all these reasons, a monarchy in the Machine age will always be in the crosshairs. What, after all, is the point of a monarch in the modern world? There is really only one: to represent a country and its history; to be a living embodiment of the spirit of a people. As such, the throne represents to its critics more than some putative offence against “democracy”: it stands for something whose very existence is increasingly contentious in its meaning, form and direction: the nation itself.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

I recently wrote about the home, and its degradation by the culture of the Machine. We are all being levered out of the domestic sphere and sold instead a pseudo-egalitarian fulfilment “in the workplace”, at capitalism’s behest, upending our family lives and diminishing our self-sufficiency. I suggested that the home can be a place of independence and of resistance to this process — for a real home is an economy, a dwelling, and a web of mutual care. For this reason, the home, and the family which inhabits it, must be broken if the Machine is to triumph.

If this is true at the domestic level, it can be true at the national level too. A nation is, at least in theory, a home on a grander scale: a home for a people. “Nation” is one of those over-capacious words which, if not used carefully, can mean almost anything and almost nothing. A term which can be applied both to an Amazon tribe and the United States of America has to be handled carefully. The connecting tissue, though, is that a nation is a group of people with a shared sense of self, forged through time. Quite how that “people” is constituted or defined is as varied as the nation itself, which may be of the tribal, ethnic, civic or imperial variety. But a nation remains a signifier of group belonging, something which seems to have defined humans, for better or for worse, since humans have been around.

Like a monarchy, then, a nation can be hard to define, or perhaps even to justify, at least on reason’s terms, and yet it offers the human psyche something that it seems to need. It should be obvious enough at this point what our Machine anti-culture has to say about this kind of thing. It has to say: no. At its best, a nation is both a home for a people and a repository of history. At its very best, it may also be built around some spiritual or cultural story that transcends Machine values, and its laws or structures may offer its people something other than participation in the metastasising consumer globoculture. Even if our nation does not, in fact, offer us any of this, it is clear that growing numbers of people would like it to. This explains the rift between “nationalism” and “globalism”, which defines much of our current moment.

That rift is in many ways a pushback against the anti-national sentiment that has been evident amongst Western cultural elites for decades. Throughout my lifetime, a relentless deconstruction of the legitimacy of nationhood has been a constant background thrum, rising in recent years to a devouring roar. The right to national self-determination is a founding principle of international law, and yet speaking up in favour of it today is enough in some circles today to see you accused of blood and soil nativism. As for defending actual links between people and place across time: don’t even think about it, unless you fancy being labelled a white supremacist.

To understand the reason for this attitude, we need to understand that Europe has not yet recovered from the trauma of the Second World War. If the Great War laid bare the failures of the old order, then World War II, for Europeans of a certain generation, delegitimised not simply a ruling class and its worldview, but the very existence of nation-states. European nations had been battling each other for centuries, but fascism, and especially National Socialism, revealed new depths to which a country might sink in pursuit of greatness or purity. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that it was “barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”. For many Europeans, surveying the ruins of a continent demolished by fascism and then carved up by communism, it must have seemed equally barbaric to continue believing in nations.

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Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

It was in the bloody aftermath of this carnage that today’s dominant vision of a post-national world took root. The European Union, seeded in the Fifties, is rooted in this vision of national sovereignty “pooled” (read: abolished) for the greater good. The UN, the Bretton Woods settlement, and the entire structure of “global governance” constructed, under American direction, after 1945: all of it stems from this new post-war consciousness, which had no time for the jingle of spurs and the rattling of sabres. Instead, we were offered a new vision, of a borderless world of technocratic co-operation and peace.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a borderless, utopian world with no national boundaries and no national sovereignty also just happened to suit the interests of transnational capital and its enablers. It wasn’t long before universalist utopianism morphed into commercial globalism. Suddenly, “no borders” seemed less of a promise than a threat. Suddenly, those utopian elites chattering about the need to demolish the “social construct” of the nation sounded more like they were defending their own class interests than ushering us all towards broad sunlit uplands.

Years ago, when I was writing Real England, I had a strange sort of vision as I sat in a roadside cafe drinking a mug of tea. I looked out of the window, across the A-road, and saw the physical manifestation of the world this vision had built. I looked over at a couple of huge white boxes squatting on the landscape — delivery hubs, I think, for some supermarket. I saw them connected by the asphalt roads and the electric wires strung out by pylons, and by the invisible digital currents in the air. All of it was rectangular, straight-edged, dedicated to efficiency and the piling-up of riches. We were all products of this layout, I saw. It hadn’t come from here, of course. It hadn’t come from anywhere. Nothing like that even mattered anymore.

Since then, I have thought of this thing as the Grid. The Grid is a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself. It is, I think, replacing the nation, just as it is replacing culture and antiquated notions of “tradition” and the like. The Grid does not care about tradition. It does not care about anything. It demeans both time and space, and its language is geometry and profit.

It goes without saying that the Grid is also global. Like electricity or the internet, it knows no borders, and neither do its children. It manifests as an identikit globoculture of sameness, a pipeline of product and corporate-progressive verbiage, and its proponents talk relentlessly about “diversity” because the Grid produces the precise opposite. We all know the bland, correct, corporate Gridspeak we must use to get by in this new country: it is what facilitates Progress, by which we mean uniformity disguised as difference.

In the world of the Grid, a nation becomes little more than a postcode or a glorified airport lounge. Its population is from everywhere and anywhere, its people consume global corporate culture rather than drawing their own from place and history, and its ruling class would always rather be somewhere else.

When I first noticed it back in the early 2000s, the Grid seemed unassailable; the End of History in physical form. Today though, like the End of History, it appears to be mired in the escalating mess of the present. In Europe, the nation is increasingly resurgent, and not just amongst monarchists. The unpopular attempt to replace older nations with newly engineered “multicultures”, combined with unprecedented rates of inward migration has, predictably, led to a political backlash, and a resurgence of nationalism. It is unlikely to retreat any time soon, and much of it might not be pretty either.

It would be easy enough to portray the current war over nationhood, as many do, as some David-vs-Goliath struggle between plucky little nations and dastardly globalists intent on their demise. To me, it looks more like a situation in which nobody is clear quite what they want or how to get it. Proponents of corporate globalism want a borderless, frictionless world that offers minimal “barriers to trade” and movement. Nationalists want prosperous nations without the cheap immigration that fuels prosperity. Liberals want multiculturalism and social cohesion, despite the persistent evidence that one undermines the other. The Left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, and the Right wants to defend the traditional ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that ethnicity is increasingly meaningless in a globalised world.

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The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

This last point seems to me important. When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally-enabled globoculture, when you can log on to Instagram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon, what does your “nationality”, let alone your “ethnicity”, even mean? Travelling around Europe this summer, seeing this reality in several different countries, I couldn’t help thinking that Machine modernity is, in some ways, an emerging ethnicity in its own right: a global cultural identity that, for many people, seems to be replacing any older, national or regional cultural markers.

It is in this context that so many people see the nation-state as a potential bulwark against unaccountable technocratic globalism. But it is also a reality that the nation-state is what has driven that globalism forward. While some nations are ancient things, nation-states in their modern form are mostly not: their rise coincides with the rise of modernity, and today they rarely represent the actual nations they purport to speak for. Too often, today’s nation-states are a toxic imitation of real nations. They are nodes in the Grid — economic units posing as cultural ones. They pledge themselves to their “people” and then get on with the job of following the dictates handed down by the EU, the WEF, Silicon Valley, the FTSE-100 or the White House, whether “the people” like it or not.

To many, nationalism seems like a reasonable response to this, and I think it can be, under some circumstances. But there are also good reasons to be nervous about what it can do to the human mind. Humans remain human, and it is easy enough for national feeling to shade into xenophobic triumphalism. Personally, I’ve long found myself in the uncomfortable position of valuing nations but mostly being repelled by nationalism.

I’m not sure what to do about this. It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests.

What would the ideal nation look like, and could it act as a collective bulwark against the Machine rather than a driver of it? In the Dao De Jing, over 2,000 years ago, we find a beautiful vision: anarchic, localised, rooted, unobtrusive, soaked in actual, human meaning. It is also — and this is the key — very small. If it has ever actually existed, though, we are certainly a long way from living it now. Western “nations” today are vast, centralised, technocratic entities governed by oligarchies on behalf of big business. In this context, if we are going to talk about nations at all, and certainly if we are going to defend them, the only question that seems worth asking is: what are they for?

René Guénon, with whom our new king is familiar, wrote nearly a century ago in The Crisis of the Modern World that a nation without a spiritual purpose would inevitably be replaced in time by another which had one. Nationalism, he believed, was beside the point if the nation in question was nothing but a human collective in search of glory, or built around nostalgia. Either the West would rediscover the spiritual roots it had abandoned in pursuit of Machine values, or “Western civilisation will have to disappear completely”. As for those who shout about “defending the West”: they should remember that “it is the West that is threatening to submerge and drag down the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity”.

Nearly a century later, we subjects of the digital Grid can understand, perhaps, that Guénon was pointing at us. But it could be that as the global anti-culture trembles and begins to dissolve, our nations may emerge, caterpillar-like, in some new shape. As Guénon also wrote, “the passage from one cycle to another can take place only in darkness”. Perhaps the dissolution of the modern nation state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralised units is both inevitable and welcome. Perhaps then new nations will form, around a spiritual core and a love of their place, which will give to their people the kind of meaning which the nation-states of the Machine era have so successfully imitated while at the same time destroying. Perhaps we will live in real nations again. Perhaps we will build them.

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The West is homeless

By Paul Kingsnorth

Whatever happens, I suspect we will always need countries. We want to know where our ancestors came from, and where they are buried; we want to find the place that incubated our stories and our characters. Without a homeland we are always partial people; and when our homelands are taken away from us, or we are forced to leave them, the sense of loss can span generations. How many Americans call themselves “Irish” even when they’ve never visited the country? How many Europeans of Asian heritage are still unsure quite where home is? How many Brexit voters felt their country was changing in ways they didn’t understand and couldn’t control? Why are people furiously battling in the ongoing culture wars about the meaning of history and who gets to write it? For now, we are living through the high age of cosmopolis, and the Grid is its image laid out across the hills and the fields, like the Roman roads before it.

But change is coming. As it does, we might heed the words of the French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat who, writing before Guénon, offered his own warning about the consequences of facing in the wrong direction for so long:

“When misguided public opinion honours what is despicable and despises what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

Or, if we prefer, we can take our guidance from Leonard Cohen, a more contemporary prophet — guidance which, I think, comes complete with the only hope worth having:

“I’ve seen the nations rise and fall,
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all,
But love’s the only engine of survival.”

***

The death of the Queen might eventually invite more sceptical and wide-ranging reflection. Georges Clemenceau said of the French Revolution that it was a bloc — to be accepted or rejected as a whole; the same is true of the British royal family. Any individual monarch is the product of an institution that revolves around the hereditary principle. Real monarchists must ask themselves whether they believe in this system enough to accept all its potential consequences. Remember that if Prince Charles had broken his neck playing polo in 1976, we would now be awaiting the coronation of King Andrew.

Curiously, a “successful” monarch and, especially, a long reign weakens the monarchy as an institution. During such a reign, loyalty comes to focus on a person, rather than on the Crown as an institution. Note how frequently, in recent years, politicians have answered questions about their views on monarchy with some anodyne remark about their admiration for the Queen. The cult of an individual sovereign increasingly overshadows all other members of their family, including their eventual successor.

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The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

That heir, waiting in the wings, will have accumulated a great deal of baggage by the time that they get to the throne — whether that baggage means actresses and obesity (as in the case of Edward VII) or an unsuccessful marriage and a history of publicly expressing political views (the case of Charles III). The problems of a long reign are exacerbated when the monarch is a woman. Partly because they were comparatively rare in British public life until recently, Queens lend themselves to mythologisation.

There are two striking and worrying precedents for what happens when a long-serving monarch dies. The first is Elizabeth I. Her death was followed by an unsuccessful king (James I), a catastrophic king (Charles I), civil war, regicide and, for a time, republic. The second is Victoria, whose death was also followed by a period of turbulence for the monarchy, culminating in the abdication crisis of 1936. I am not being entirely flippant when I say that the First World War was, in some ways, a civil war within Victoria’s own family — in which the English branch came off much better than the German or Russian ones.

Their long reigns served to occlude problems that then came back to haunt the next monarch. Elizabeth I — who refused to “open a window into men’s souls” — was careful to cultivate a useful ambiguity over religion. But that ambiguity was linked to her personal idiosyncrasies — her refusal to marry, for instance, avoided the question of whether she would take a Protestant or Catholic husband — so that it was hard for the monarchy to sustain after her death.

The ambiguity of Victoria’s reign was less deliberate. Her long period on the throne and, particularly, her partial withdrawal from public life after the death of her husband, helped to conceal the extent to which (much to Victoria’s own distaste) the monarchy had lost its political power during her reign. It was significant that politicians did not consider it necessary to call a general election when she died: they had done so as a matter of course after the previous monarch’s death. Still, the monarchs that came after her did not really reconcile themselves to the institution’s loss of political power until the accession of George VI in 1936.

The central ambiguity of Elizabeth II’s long reign revolves around Britain’s relations with the wider world. Before her accession, she pledged herself to serve “our imperial family”. But the empire went in the early years of her reign and was replaced by the Commonwealth — Enoch Powell, always attentive to the precise meaning of constitutional terms, believed that the most important speech he ever made concerned the addition of the letter “s” after “realm” in the Royal Titles Bill of 1952. Elizabeth’s death has now raised awkward questions, long suppressed, about what the Commonwealth itself means and, in particular, whether the British monarch will remain its head.

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The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

By Mary Harrington

In some ways, the personalisation of the monarchy is more marked now than it was in 1901 or 1603. This is partly because of other changes in the British state. It is often suggested that every aspect of the constitution hinges on the monarchy. But in some ways, the reverse is true: the institutions of the British can get along perfectly well without a monarch — as was shown during the interregnum of 1649-1660 — though the monarchy has, in the past, been sustained by its relations with an infrastructure of ancien regime institutions.

In 1953, I suspect the Queen herself would have said that being head of the Church of England was the most important of her duties. Now the idea of a state church seems peculiar — most vicars would give you a blank look if you point out that parliament has not sanctioned the prayer book used in most churches. As for the House of Lords, it is now, for the most part, an assembly of retired, middle-ranking politicians — not a single one of the six surviving former prime ministers has bothered to take a peerage. The institutions that have long propped up the monarchy are ailing.

She was also always held to be above politics and often presented as representing an integrity that elected politicians lack. Yet the briefest glance at the register of members’ interests or parliamentary expense claims reveals that MPs most interested in personal enrichment tend to be fervent admirers of the Queen — and keen collectors of honours. One might also point out that two of the most important figures at the court of King Boris (the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, and Lord Geidt, advisor on ministerial standards) had previously worked in the royal household.

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The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the monarchy being “apolitical”, no serious observer doubts that the monarchy serves the interests of the Conservative Party — often, as when George V promoted “National Government” in 1931, serving those interests by going along with the Conservative claim that their own policies were “apolitical”. A group of MPs closely associated with Thatcherism, including Norman Tebbit and Nigel Lawson, wrote an interesting document in 1978. They were struck by the show of affection for the Queen during her Silver Jubilee; they recognised that it might reflect “a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past”, suggesting that they needed to be careful with calls for radical change. All the same, they concluded that the spirit of the Jubilee would work to their advantage: “People will be more attracted by a promise … to restore some of the valued things they have lost than by promise of a vague, bright tomorrow.”

But Conservatives are not quite the royalists they sometimes make out. They are heirs to a political tradition that looks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (when James II was abruptly ejected from the throne) and emphasises the pre-eminence of the parliament — especially the House of Commons. Churchill paid ostentatious deference to the young Queen Elizabeth and took the side of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. All the same, Churchill was blunt to the latter: “When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.” He also, as First Lord of the Admiralty, once tried to name a ship HMS Oliver Cromwell.

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The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

Conservatives found it easy to be loyal to Elizabeth II because her public statements — in favour of family, nation and the armed forces, and prone, in recent years, to evoke a certain memory of the Second World War — fitted with their own political vision. It will be interesting to see how they get on with a monarch who recently, albeit unintentionally, let it be known that he disapproves of their asylum policy and who has devoted much of his life to drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

King Charles will, I suspect, not have an easy time. His reign will be relatively short and he will spend much of it in the shadow of his mother. The historian Peter Hennessy recently wrote that his generation (he is more or the less the same age as the King) found it hard to imagine any monarch other than Elizabeth II. Like many remarks that sound conservative, this is, when you think of it, profoundly subversive. Saying a monarch other than the present one if unthinkable is, in effect, saying that the continuation of monarchy is unthinkable.

And, while we are on the subject of unthinkable things, consider the dramatic constitutional rethinking likely to be brought about by, say, the break-up of the union, an attempt to re-enter the European Union, or the creation of a written constitution — all things desired by a significant minority of the population and all things that might raise questions about who should be head of state. For all the talk about centuries of continuity, I doubt if any realistic observer is sure the monarchy will survive for another 70 years. If it is to do so, it needs to get away from an emphasis on the supposed personal qualities of any individual King or Queen and rest once again on the abstract quality of the Crown. Perhaps one day historians will recognise that the most important constitutional commentator of the period was not Sir Simon Schama or Lord Hennessy but Johnny Rotten, who marked the Silver Jubilee of 1977 with the words: “She ain’t no human being.”

While most of us have spent the week praising the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II, she has been denounced by those who claim to speak on behalf of truth and justice. She wasn’t a benign monarch, these people say. She sponsored a system of racist division, and any black or brown person who mourns her death is a stooge of Empire and white supremacy. A House Negro. Self-hating. A coon.

It is indisputable that the British Empire committed many atrocities, and many of its advocates were motivated by racism. But the idea that Queen Elizabeth II’s international legacy can be reduced to colonial oppression and violence is a perverse distortion of history. When many West Indians moved to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, their claim to a British identity and equal status with native white Britons was on the basis of being subjects of the Crown. Should they have rejected this? Is any black or brown person who accepts a knighthood a traitor to his race? Are all those nations where they are now flying flags at half-mast — from India to Nigeria to Jamaica to Ghana to Trinidad and many, many more — governed by self-hating coons? Every single one of them? Were all the postcolonial leaders who either decided to stay in the Commonwealth or join it motivated by profound self-loathing? This is not just an offensive argument: it’s patently absurd.

Rather than being a symbol of white supremacy, Queen Elizabeth II devoted much of her reign to fostering amicable relations with those countries which used to be a part of the British Empire. In April 1947, Princess Elizabeth spent the afternoon of her 21st birthday recording a filmed message to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”. Elizabeth calmly outlined her dedication to the colonies and countries that linked through Britain like a daisy-chain across the world: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise she would keep.

By the time of her coronation, in June 1953, the Commonwealth, which had emerged after decolonisation, only had eight countries. They wanted to rule themselves, but they didn’t want to completely sever their relationship with Britain. It would be tempting to describe the Commonwealth as Anglophone, a continuation of the countries Britain conquered and subjugated, and imposed their language and customs upon: the pink splash across old maps of the world. But this is a simplistic way of looking at this mosaic of nations.

The picture is a complex one. Canada is a majority English-speaking and minority French-speaking country; Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country and minority English-speaking country, colonised by the Germans before it was handed over to France. Both Canada and Cameroon are part of the Commonwealth. The official language of Mozambique is Portuguese — and when it joined the Commonwealth, in 1995, it became the first country to do so that was never a part of the British Empire. Togo and Gabon, two former French colonies, have joined the Commonwealth this year. They are the 55th and 56th members. It is a club that people want to join, not a union imposed by force.

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By Mary Harrington

If it’s not language, then what unites these nations? To a great extent, it was that quietly-spoken young woman, who, five years after giving that speech on her 21st birthday, became the Queen of Britain, and assumed the ceremonial position of managing the loss of an Empire. She didn’t bestride these newly independent countries like an aggrieved dictator. Nor was she a passive caretaker. She listened, and learned, and exercised her inquisitive mind. She was devoted to internationalism, and many nations warmed to those qualities. Elizabeth was the greatest diplomat of the 20th century.

Her diplomatic qualities were crucial in 1961. By that time, the Commonwealth had grown from eight to 12 members. That year, she would have to visit one small but profoundly consequential country in west Africa, and make sure it didn’t leave the club.

Ghana was the first black African country to gain independence, and it soon became the first African country to join the Commonwealth. The president was a charismatic firebrand called Kwame Nkrumah. He spent the Thirties studying sociology and economics in Pennsylvania, and selling fish on the streets of New York. After he moved to England, in 1945, he was often in Camden cafés chatting amiably with communists and anti-imperialists. When Nkrumah moved back to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and threatened the status quo by launching a mass strike, the governor-general Sir Charles Arden-Clarke described him as a “thoroughgoing communist”.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

1961 was the white heat of the Cold War: five years after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the year the Berlin Wall went up. Africa was decolonising, and many of these new nations were being courted by the Soviet Union. The Queen was scheduled to arrive in Ghana on 9 November 1961. The month before, Nkrumah had visited Moscow. Closer to Ghana, five days before her visit, a bomb exploded in the capital city of Accra which damaged a statue of Nkrumah.

The Queen was undaunted, telling Prime Minister Harold MacMillan: “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth — and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children”.

The trip was a peach. She landed first in Accra and met several government ministers and dignitaries. These diplomatic endeavours were followed up by meetings with the chiefs and kings of Ghana. According to Nkrumah’s personal photographer, the Queen was genuinely interested in the people she met, asking incisive questions, for instance, about the cultural significance of native dress.

She was introduced to High Life music — a fusion of the native Akan musical rhythms and Jazz — and danced with Nkrumah. The revolutionary pan-Africanist leader, the chum of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, danced happily with the Queen of Britain; the Commonwealth was a model of tolerance. (This, at a time when any black man who stared at a white woman for too long could be lynched in the United States.)

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Ghana never left the Commonwealth. And by the Seventies, with revolutionary fervour ramping up across the developing world, the club had more than doubled its membership to nearly 30 nations.

If the legend of Elizabeth as the silent, passive doll Queen were true, the Commonwealth never would have worked. Her public inscrutability belied a deeply engaged person. Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, and the so-called Iron Lady of the Caribbean in the Eighties, said of the Queen that, “it’s obvious that she’s not just talking pieties. She’s interested, definitely interested, in what is happening in each of those countries”.

The Queen of the Commonwealth was not the mute Queen of postage stamps. She was articulate, she argued, she cajoled. The former Prime Minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara, put it like this: “If you don’t know what you’re talking about she’ll soon let you know that you’re not quite fully versed in what you’re talking about because she’s so knowledgeable.”

Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, knew this Queen, a version largely hidden from the rest of us: “Every prime minister, every president, and I’ve been up against some pretty radical ones, militant ones, ones that you might think probably don’t care too much for this all monarchical thing.” Even they, according to Ramphal, placed maximum importance “on those 15-20 minutes when they can sit down with the Queen and talk about their countries, their problems, because she knows them very well”.

Her ability to approach internecine conflict with wisdom and knowledge was never on greater display than in her attitude to the nation where she was staying on her 21st birthday: South Africa. A year after that speech, South Africa started introducing a series of laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; forced people of certain races to live in certain areas; and reinforced and expanded all pre-existing discriminatory practices in the country. These laws institutionalised the inferior status of black people. The word Apartheid entered the lexicon.

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In 1961, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth. The Afrikaner government saw the Queen as a symbol of British imperialism, and they wanted to be free to pursue their racist policies without hindrance. In 1986, Commonwealth leaders all decided, with the consent of the Queen, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Queen later developed a strong relationship with Nelson Mandela. He called her Elizabeth, and she called him Nelson. He was the only non-royal to call her by her first name. In 1994, four years after Mandela was released from prison, and in the year of its first ever democratic and multiracial election, South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth.

The Queen’s decades of service within the Commonwealth display a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the British empire and the postcolonial world. This is a story that is about more than conflict. To have the Commonwealth — that legacy of the Empire — embraced by leaders who also embraced Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx illustrates the complexities of the post-colonial relationship to Britain. These leaders detested white supremacy and brutal economic exploitation. But they also loved the Queen. Through the dignity of her character, she transcended hateful divisions.

Many of these post-colonial leaders, like Nkrumah, later degenerated into corrupt and authoritarian despots. Others, like Mandela, are universally acclaimed. But for most of them the Queen was a genuinely popular figure. A source of unity rather than oppression. An embodiment of the greatest virtues in a divided world: curiosity, compassion, grace and knowledge.

King Charles may not possess exactly the same qualities as his mother, but he is the custodian of a magnificent legacy. Despite the fact Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state last year, it is still a part of the Commonwealth. And I predict many more countries will want to join. And despite the bitterness of parochial diaspora activists, we have this to console ourselves with: our head of state, for 70 years, was a unifying figurehead across the world.

There is one Commonwealth realm, however, where republicanism is anathema — at least among the establishment. Canada’s dominant political culture descends in large part from loyalist exiles who fled the American Revolution in the late 18th century, and so it is no surprise to see their contemporary heirs, the present political establishment, expressing support for the monarchy. (It is a different story for the general population who usually lie somewhere between lukewarm and “unaffected”.)

This runs contrary to the widespread image of Canada’s elites as post-modern cosmopolitans who despise their own history and traditions. But the recent outpouring of personal homages paired with pro-monarchy sentiment led by the likes of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, and the editorial board at the national newspaper of record, is indicative of where the Canadian ruling class stands.

Unlike in other parts of the Commonwealth (and discounting the special case of Québécois separatism), there has never been a properly pan-Canadian republican movement of any significance, much less a prime minister who avowed republicanism (the closest was a high-ranking cabinet minister in the 2000s, but his was an isolated case). More than a convenient way to distinguish Canadians from Americans, the monarchy has become an unlikely object of affection for those who govern Canada.

Trudeau himself is, of course, a hereditary monarch who would have never risen to the top were it not for his surname. In fact, Trudeau first met the Queen as a child in 1977 when his father was prime minister. Their personal history became the subject of a humorous exchange in 2015, when the Queen remarked: “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister … for making me feel so old.”

Historically, the Trudeau Liberals have often been regarded as either indifferent or outright hostile to Canada’s imperial heritage. It was this party, after all, that retired the Union Jack and Red Ensign in favour of the Maple Leaf Flag in 1965, while one of the most iconic images of Trudeau Sr. is of him doing a pirouette behind the Queen, noted as a gesture of irreverence. More recently, a Liberal government dropped the adjective “Royal” in the name of Canada’s navy and air force, only for it to be restored by the succeeding Conservative government.

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Yet such stylistic changes belie the fidelity maintained by Canada’s liberal establishment towards the Crown. Trudeau Sr. and the Queen, by all accounts, actually had a warm and fruitful relationship, which is exhibited in two more iconic photos: one in which the prime minister is peeking under the monarch’s umbrella, and another featuring the two presiding over the “patriation” of the constitution, in which Canada severed the last colonial links with London and became a fully sovereign state. For the final act in this constitutional saga, in 1982, the Queen came to Ottawa to personally grant royal assent to what had been the elder Trudeau’s life’s work: the pillars of today’s progressive Canada — the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, official bilingualism, multiculturalism — were codified.

Against charges that Pierre Trudeau discarded the history and values of the Old Canada, the Queen’s presence at this pivotal moment in the country’s evolution highlights not the disjuncture but rather the continuity between the Old Canada and the New. For the nation-building project begun in 1867 with declarations of fealty to Queen Victoria reached its maturation under the gaze of her great-great-granddaughter. The motto of the province of Ontario is thus an apt descriptor for Canada as a whole, no less under its current liberal and multicultural Trudeauvian regime: Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet. (“Loyal she began, so she remains.”)

So perhaps it is understandable that Canada is not as eager as its Commonwealth cousins to leave the royal embrace. When a newly-elected Justin Trudeau was asked by the BBC if he was sympathetic to republicanism, he replied: “We’re perfectly happy with our Queen of Canada.” No doubt he will be just as happy with the new King of Canada. As Jacobin correctly pointed out in its denunciation of this modern-day liberal monarchism inherited from the nation’s counterrevolutionary forebears: “Canada’s elites and its governing class admire the royals and evidently want their legacies to endure … [they] see in the monarchy a reliable ‘last resort’ to maintain ‘stability’ and prevent potential major upsets resulting from popular will.”

What is notable these days is not so much how Canada’s centre-left elites have lent their support to monarchy, but how the Right-wing opposition to those elites has increasingly drifted into anti-monarchist territory, almost seeming to converge at times with voices on the Left. The opposition Conservative Party is officially devoted to the monarchy; indeed, the mood at the election of their new leader last Saturday, the pro-trucker populist Pierre Poilievre, was subdued in the wake of the Queen’s death. Poilievre opened his speech with a tribute to the late sovereign and expressed allegiance to her successor with the words “God Save the King”. However, the highly online Right-wing base that bolstered Poilievre has begun to see things differently.

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Scrolling through the Twitter replies to coverage of the King’s first speech by the conservative site True North Centre reveals how its Right-wing audiences view the new monarch: “An irresponsible globalist”; “Please don’t put his face on our money”; “All hail King Klaus”. As these responses suggest, Charles III’s record of speaking up on climate issues or taking the stage with Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum has not endeared him to the Freedom Convoy.

It is also notable that one of the most active media supporters of the convoy had previously come out in support of abolishing the monarchy in the conservative National Post, while revolutionary republican imagery of the 1776 variety was a very prominent feature in those demonstrations. Aside from the Stars and Stripes and the Gadsden flag, the truckers and their sympathisers waved the Patriote flag of the 1837 Lower Canada rebellion against the Crown, and the Eureka flag beloved of Australian republicans (and lately used by anti-lockdown protesters in that country).

Meanwhile, across Canada’s Western provinces, particularly in oil-rich Alberta, a new kind of separatism has reared its head in response to the perceived abuses of the same Central Canadian liberal elites. The intellectual currents fuelling this movement have long-harboured the fantasy of seceding from “the bureaucratic despotism of Ottawa” and carving out a libertarian republic in the prairies. Even with the potential elevation of a premier running on a platform of de facto secessionism, this is admittedly a distant possibility but one that nonetheless highlights the synergy between Right-wing populism and the republican ideal.

As the Trudeaus and the Carneys can attest, the monarchy has stood as a symbol of order, stability and continuity in Canada, as it has in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But it remains to be seen if this ancient inheritance can continue to resist the hyper-politicisation of institutions that has become so ubiquitous in this era of culture war and populist ferment.

John Osborne, the world’s principal Angry Young Man, was incensed by that sort of talk. There was a “trough of Queen worship”, he raged, “the National Swill”. And he described monarchy as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay”. His attack was only to be expected, of course — there’s no point in having Angry Young Men unless they’re working themselves up about something or other.

But other isolated voices of dissent were beginning to be heard, and some were harder to ignore since they came from within what had recently been dubbed “the Establishment”. There was, for example, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP though later a disciple of Margaret Thatcher. “Mooning about the Royal Family is one of the main contributory factors to Britain’s plight,” he complained in 1956. “It saps our dynamism. It makes us dwell on the past.”

Or there was John Grigg, who could hardly have been more Establishment: Eton, Grenadier Guards, Oxford, Tory parliamentary candidate, latterly the 2nd Baron Altrincham. So when he said rude things about the Queen in his 1957 article “The Monarchy Today” — published in the magazine he edited, the National and English Review — it proved especially controversial.

He was no republican, Altrincham insisted, he was merely seeking to reinvigorate the monarchy, which was too remote, surrounded “almost without exception by people of the ‘tweedy’ sort”. But at the centre of his criticism was the Queen herself. Five years into her reign and she really needed to buck her ideas up. Her public persona was that of “a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation”, while her “style of speaking is frankly a pain in the neck”. What was to become of her “when she has lost the bloom of youth”?

The article didn’t win him many new friends. It was roundly condemned by pretty much everyone, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who hadn’t read it), down to the leader of the Conservative group on Altrincham Council in Cheshire, who wanted to distance the town from the man who bore its name. Nor did the abuse stop there. “Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in,” said one of the many letters he received. “You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen.” It was signed: “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”.

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Nothing came of that threat but he was thumped in the face by the Deputy Chairman of the League of Empire Loyalists (a far-Right group that went on to co-found the National Front). The assailant was 64-years-old and didn’t pack much of a punch, so he got off with just a one-pound fine, together with the sympathy of the magistrate: “96% of the population were disgusted and offended by what was written”.

A couple of months later, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — still then in his incarnation as iconoclast — joined in with his own article, “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, written for the Saturday Evening Post. His analysis was hardly startling. “The British monarchy does fulfil a purpose,” he wrote. “It provides a symbolic head of state transcending the politicians who go in and out of office.” But as he made his way to his somewhat obvious conclusion, he dropped in some wonderfully scandalous titbits of upper-class gossip. “It is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,” he revealed. The whole thing had become “a kind of Royal soap opera”.

Like Altrincham, Muggeridge found himself under severe and sustained criticism. Angered by the distorted, misquoted accounts of his article, he consulted a lawyer on whether he could sue for libel, but was told that, while there undoubtedly was a case, “in view of the circumstances, and the particular matter at issue, I could not count upon a jury or a judge taking an unprejudiced view”.

What these early critics demonstrated was that in a world of sycophancy, there was a good deal of media mileage to be made from thumbing one’s nose at the royals. Played right, there was a career in this.

The man for the job was Willie Hamilton. He was a Labour MP from 1950 to 1987, yet the only national coverage he ever received was in his role as an outspoken republican, “the Hammer of the Windsors” as the press liked to call him. He complained about the cost of the monarchy, describing the royal family as “scroungers”, but there was a deeper complaint that sometimes surfaced: the Queen represented a class that had “deeply hurt the class to which I belong and which I represent in our sovereign Parliament”. For years he was Fleet Street’s go-to guy for a bit of outrage on a royal news story; a happy event such as a wedding wasn’t complete without Hamilton carping about the cost. His autobiography was titled Memoirs of an Anti-Royalist, because this had become his identity; effectively he’d been subsumed into that great royal soap opera, the pub cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Others were drawn in as well. Come the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham (he’d renounced his title in the interim), returned to the storyline. This time he praised “her exceptionally steady character” — which was pretty much what he’d condemned her for back in the Fifties. “She looks a Queen,” he now wrote. “She behaves decently because she is decent.”

The Silver Jubilee also saw the soap opera acquire an alternative theme-song: “God Save the Queen” (1977), the second single by punk band the Sex Pistols, sneering about a “fascist regime” and how the Queen (who “ain’t no human being”) “made you a moron”.

It was incendiary stuff, and would have been so at any time, let alone when the Jubilee was reaffirming the nation’s love of monarchy and providing a desperately needed moment of unity in the midst of strife. The promotional artwork, picturing the Queen with a safety-pin through her lip, added visual injury to aural assault. The record was banned by radio and television; it was deplored by MPs; leading retailers declined to stock it, and pub chains refused to have it on their jukeboxes. Meanwhile members of the group were assaulted on the streets by the contemporary equivalents of the “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”. But the single still shifted 200,000 copies in Jubilee Week alone.

Punk now being associated with anti-monarchy sentiment, others followed, from the underachieving — the Exile’s “Jubilee 77” and the Drones’ “Corgi Crap” (both 1977) — to the over-ambitious: Derek Jarman’s movie Jubilee (1978). But it was the Sex Pistols who became so closely associated with the moment that they got dragged into the soap, not as regular characters, but always there or thereabouts at special times. When the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002, it was marked by a band reunion, accompanied by yet another greatest hits compilation (inevitably titled Jubilee), and a re-release of the offending single, now seemingly part of the ceremonial trappings.

The single was back 10 years later for the Diamond Jubilee, with excited talk of it getting to #1 in Jubilee Week. (It didn’t.) This time, singer John Lydon disowned the whole thing: “I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” The band also declined an invitation to appear the opening ceremony of the London Olympics that year, though a snippet of “God Save the Queen” was included. It didn’t upstage the Queen’s double-act with James Bond, though.

As the Sex Pistols’ rebellion faded into the warm haze of nostalgia, the problem for others was that there was nowhere much further to go, short of summoning up the spirits of Oliver Cromwell, Madame Guillotine and Yakov Yurovsky. And there was no call for that.

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In any case, republicanism had rather lost its forbidden allure. This was apparent even before the martyrdom of Diana in 1997. Five years earlier, Alastair Campbell, then the political editor of the Daily Mirror, denounced the royal family as “the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s ‘classless society’ for the slogan that it is,” and called for Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be elevated to the monarchy: “Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.”

The same year, Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate. The Queen and Princess Anne are sufficiently practical to adapt to their changed circumstances; Prince Philip not so much. Less seriously, there were books such as Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor and A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (both 1993).

And then in 1994, the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour of the abolition of the monarchy. We needed an elected president, the paper declared, and it asked its readers who that should be. Again, Betty Boothroyd won support, coming in second, ahead of Jarvis Cocker, the singer with Pulp, but behind the people’s choice, Tony Benn. (The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson.)

In such a climate, it was hard to make a mark, though many continued to try. In his first book, God Save the Queen? (2002), Johann Hari, then writing for the New Statesman condemned the Queen’s “cruel neglect of her children”, and said the abolition of the monarchy was necessary “for the mental health of those involved”. The book helped launch Hari on a career that saw him win the Orwell Prize for political journalism (even if that was subsequently withdrawn), but it was incapable of generating the same notoriety as Lord Altrincham or the Sex Pistols had managed.

And maybe it was all grist to the mill. The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.

This is partly why, just a few months ago, the ARM issued a celebratory statement titled “Australians reject King Charles”. According to the ABC survey the ARM was referring to, 53% of Australians did not want Charles to become king, while only 35% were in support. Today, then, despite the fact that the government’s flags are flying at half-mast and Parliament has been suspended for two weeks, the republican cause in Australia seems in strong shape. Indeed, the newly elected Labor Party government is the first to appoint a Minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job is to prepare the grounds for a future referendum on Australia becoming a republic.

Such a vote will be necessary, as any change to Australia’s system of government requires a constitutional amendment, which can only be done via referendum. Yet the government is currently preoccupied with its proposed referendum on enshrining an indigenous voice to parliament. Senior ministers have therefore suggested that the republic referendum would likely have to wait until the government’s second term, which will be in 2025 if the ALP is re-elected.

Despite this delay, republicanism is clearly back on the political agenda and is enjoying substantial support at the highest echelons of government. An unpopular King now sits on the throne in Britain. What could possibly go wrong?

While the circumstances are certainly propitious, if the ARM believes that a favourable result would simply fall in its lap, they could end up bitterly disappointed. Let’s not forget: we have been here before. In the Nineties, when Australia was gearing up for its first referendum on the republic, a majority of Australians supported the change. Successive polls showed the margin in favour of a republic was roughly two-to-one. Yet in the 1999 referendum, the republican cause lost by 45% to 55%.

Of course, the circumstances today are not entirely similar. Whereas the current Labor government and its leader, Anthony Albanese, is in favour of a republic, John Howard, who was Prime Minister at the time, was a staunch monarchist who put forward an unpopular model, in which the Head of State would be elected by parliament, not by voters. Malcolm Turnbull, a future Liberal prime minister, who was leader of the “yes” vote, later told Howard that he had broken “the nation’s heart” by manipulating the referendum to get the result he wanted. This was largely true, though the republican defeat was also enabled by a split within the movement over the preferred model for electing an Australian Head of State.

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Still, the Nineties would turn out to be the highest point of support for the republic. Recent polling has shown that more Australians do not support a republic than those who do. At 34%, support for the republican cause is at its lowest ebb since 1979. Perhaps surprisingly, only 26% of voters aged 18-24 said they would support a republic, the lowest of any age group. A large share, over a quarter of all respondents, said they were uncertain how they would vote. If many of those decided to vote “yes” the republic vote could still win, but they would need to be won over to the cause. The biggest challenge facing the ARM, then, appears to be a debilitating one: public apathy. The republic just does not seem to excite Australians anymore.

This in itself is surprising, given the way the monarchy and its unelected representative in Australia, the Governor-General, have significantly intervened in Australian politics. Only this year, newly released documents showed how Governor-General John Kerr corresponded with the Queen’s Secretary throughout the dismissal of the ALP Whitlam government in 1975. The letters revealed how Kerr railed against the Whitlam government, attacking its policy decisions, and even asked whether the monarchy would consider using its powers to dissolve it. And more recently, it was uncovered that Australia’s current Governor-General, David Hurley, secretly swore in former prime minister Scott Morrison to several ministerial roles during the pandemic. These appointments, which could have had a monumental impact on government operations, were not recorded anywhere on Hurley’s publicly available schedule, again raising questions about the powers vested in the Governor-General’s office.

And yet so many Australians, including younger citizens, just don’t seem to care about introducing a republic. In part, this reflects the ARM’s firmly middle-class characteristics. The Movement was established by prominent journalists, academics, lawyers, corporate figures, and some politicians in 1991. The same professions dominate today. Although these individuals undoubtedly bring a wealth of relevant expertise and knowledge, one negative consequence is the ARM’s heavy emphasis on the symbolism of becoming a republic and on designing the perfect selection process for an Australian Head of State, while paying relatively little attention to articulating precisely how a republic would benefit ordinary Australians.

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This is the most important issue because the fate of the republic will not be decided in meeting rooms. For the constitutional amendment to take place, Australians need to vote “yes” in a referendum. And symbolism and identity, seen as self-evidently important to the ARM, don’t appear to be vote-winners. Absent a stronger positive case, many Australians might just vote to keep what they know.

To make matters worse for the ARM, the debate for a republic is now happening in a context of serious decline in Australians’ trust in their public institutions and democracy. A spike in trust in democracy during the early stages of the pandemic swiftly fizzled out, and was followed by the second biggest recorded decline in 2022. This explains Queen Elizabeth’s remarkable and enduring popularity. Many viewed the Queen as dutiful and publicly minded, a source of continuity and stability in contrast to their feckless politicians and globally oriented elites. Irrespective of King Charles’s personal standing with Australians, their declining faith in democracy makes this a difficult moment in which to argue for the inherent benefit of elected office.

Queen Elizabeth’s death should therefore be a moment of collective reflection and debate for Australia. The end of her 70-year reign represents a major fork in the road — a time to assess where we came from and, perhaps more importantly, where we would like to go. Tragically, there seems to be little appetite for this: republicans seem to expect the transition to happen almost by itself, while monarchists are also counting on inertia to keep things as they are.

Neither side seems capable of, or interested in, mounting a compelling, positive case for their cause. And given the void left by the Queen’s passing, the monarchists’ job appears to be the easier one.

It was her fate to preside over perhaps the fastest and most dramatic decline of any nation’s wealth and power in recorded history, a bitter function she fulfilled with compassion, quiet dignity, and a sincere Christian devotion to her duty. She oversaw the creation of 21^st-century Britain, and if she felt the same ambivalence over the results that we all do, she kept it to herself. Through it all, she kept a fractious nation united in turbulent times, the one calm and steady certainty we have all known through lives of constant, and unsettling change.

Listening to the BBC radio news reporting her last great task of state, the appointment at Balmoral of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, I noticed that our state broadcaster made a point of explicitly recording that the nation had undergone yet one more smooth transition of power. Not every nation is blessed with such orderly transitions: no wonder the reaction from quarters of less happy realms, where such peaceful continuity can only be dreamed of, has at times been as bitter and jealous as we have seen. A nation is a family writ large. As Orwell wrote, Britain is “a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.” And as at any time of loss and change, it is in moments like this we are shown who mourns with us, and who does not, who our family and friends are, and who they are not.

For these are solemn mysteries, not readily understood by other tribes. Anyone who meets a member of the Royal Family remembers the occasion for the rest of their lives. The encounter is shared, brought out in conversation over decades. And in the same way, anyone who has lost a parent will feel a part of themselves sharing this moment of our King’s loss: witnessing the Royal Family’s grief we remember our own loss, an entire nation joined in a collective act of remembrance and contemplation. For as the Austrian political theorist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote: “a monarchy involves all the troubles, problems and joys of family life, on a large and public scale.”

My mother was born in London, two years into our late Queen’s reign, to a family of strong Irish republican sympathies with little love for the Royal Family. Yet even so, the collective rituals of our state, embodied in the Royal Family, would come to envelop her, as she lived and died under one Queen’s long reign. Just as we all remember that strange, disordered time, I remember, as a callow and cynical teenager, my late mother respectfully attending the crowds that watched Diana’s cortege pass down the M1 motorway through Hertfordshire towards London and her funeral. The collective act of sympathy and commemoration that reinforces the nation as a unit had brought her too, with no inherited links of blood or sentiment, within the British family fold.

And in the same way, this liminal moment of transition from one way of life to another will live on in my own family story, just as it will in yours or in any other British family’s. On Thursday evening, I went to pick up my eldest son from Scouts just after the news broke; we strolled along the harbourside to get fish and chips from a chippy where the radio played national anthem and we heard the Prime Minister paying her respects. At six years old, he will remember this moment for the rest of his life: what he was doing, what we said, what we ate together sitting, as we never do, in front of the television, watching the state broadcaster like every other British household. In such a way are nations strengthened and maintained as a collective body by the family unit around whom our state’s rituals revolve.

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But all things must change, and the nation our new King has inherited is not a happy one. There is much for him to do to keep our collective family together, and we must hope that he will play a more active role in governance than his mother felt her due. Our constitution grants our monarch greater political power than the Queen chose to exercise, and we are fortunate that our new King possesses a willingness to intercede in public life that has at times tested the patience of Prime Ministers. He must be encouraged to continue: whatever his personal foibles, his instincts are good and just, and his decades-long critiques of globalisation, of our despoliation of our natural and built environments and our pell-mell rush towards the mythical horizon of progress have been tragically borne out by events.

What do we know of how our new King intends to rule? He is, after all, a man, like the nation he now rules, of strange and esoteric depths, both progressive and conservative in ways our party system does not adequately reflect. In his little-discussed 2010 book, Harmony, Charles remarks in a “call for revolution” that “it is very strange that we carry on behaving as we do. If we were on a walk in a forest and found ourselves on the wrong path, then the last thing we would do is carry on walking in the wrong direction. We would instead retrace our steps, go back to where we took the wrong turn, and follow the right path.” For, as he writes: “I cannot stress the point enough: we are travelling along a very wrong road.”

A follower of the Perennialist philosophy of René Guénon, and an admirer of the great American writer and farmer Wendell Berry, King Charles III has observed that: “Just as natural species, once lost, cannot be re-created in test tubes, so traditional, so-called ‘perennial’ wisdom, once lost, cannot be reinvented. This is the real damage being done by our disconnection, which is fast becoming all but complete in the modern world, all the while proving that the great experiment to stand apart from the rest of creation has failed.” A Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time.

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For Charles III, inspired by the Orthodox Christianity of his fathers, believes sincerely that “we need to escape the straitjacket of the Modernist world view” and has for decades shared his “concern from the very start… that Western culture was accelerating away from values and a perspective that had, up until then, been embedded in its traditional roots.” As he writes: “What I could see then was that without those traditional ‘anchors’ our civilisation would find itself in an increasingly difficult and exposed position. And, regrettably, that is what has happened. This is why, ever since those disturbing days, I have expended vast amounts of energy to help save what remains of those traditional approaches. I knew they would be needed for a ‘rainy day’ which I fear is now close by.”

What is our King’s vision of a just and rightly-ordered realm? As he writes, “in the 21st century we desperately need an alternative vision… a future where food production and its distribution will have to all happen more locally to each other and be less dependent, certainly, on aircraft; where the car will become much more subordinated to the needs of the pedestrian; where our economy will have to operate on a far less generous supply of raw materials and natural resources.” It is of a land “where the character of our built environments once more reflects the harmonious, universal principles of which we are an integral part”. A King moved to write a book in which he condemns the poisoning of our seas and rivers will have much to advise a Tory government that has overseen our disastrous, squalid water system: our one-time anti-monarchist leader Liz Truss will be fortunate in such an example of what true British Conservatism, of every field and hedgerow, actually means.

In practice, King Charles has done more than anyone living in this country to promote humane and people-centred farming and architecture, and to preserve as a living tradition the historic arts and handicrafts of not just our own culture but of man’s patrimony as a whole. And as King, there is more that he can do, and must be encouraged to do. It is right and just that both the Communication Workers Union and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers have called off their planned strikes for next week in honour of our late Queen, but the bonds of respect that bind state and sovereign, ruler and ruled must go both ways. It is, for example, beneath the dignity of our state that the Royal Mail, founded by Henry VIII in 1516, be parcelled off and sold to foreign investors at the behest of EU directives, a course of action that 96% of CWU members opposed. A state must guard and protect its assets and its workers just as it does its great rituals and ceremonies: the Royal Mail is no less a part of our history than Windsor Castle and the Palace, and the accession of Charles III must bring into being the revival of the British state, or else the British state, our shared home, will be lost entirely.

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For there is still much for us all to win, just as there is still much for us to lose if we continue further down our wrong path. Consider the one last great infrastructure project of our late Queen’s reign, the Elizabeth Line, and imagine what we would gain from a revival of the British state’s power and glory under her son and successor. Imagine His Majesty’s Railways, linking the beautiful and humanely-planned new towns our King could oversee on the Crown Estate, just as he has expressed his own philosophy in warm brick and stone in Poundbury and Nansledan on his Duchy of Cornwall lands. A benign and thoughtful King can do much to guide an inexperienced Prime Minister at a time of crisis. As he wrote: “I wonder if we might see wisdom in the Chinese word for ‘crisis’, which also means ‘opportunity’? It is almost a knee-jerk reaction to try to put things back as they were when we hit such a crisis, but we could be more positive and forward-looking and consider another approach that could create something different — a framework that is more sustainable; an approach to economics that is more proportionate, balanced and connected; an economics that recognises the need for harmony.”

Queen Elizabeth was fated to reign over a British state in sharp and calamitous decline, and it may yet be our new King’s unhappy fate to preside over the dissolution of our United Kingdom. But we must be thankful that our King understands there are great opportunities to be found and utilised in our current time of crisis. An unpopular Prime Minister taking office at such a dangerous and turbulent period will be naturally inclined to lean on the continuity and legitimacy only our monarchy affords, and a King equally inclined towards politics and a guiding role in our nation’s development must surely make use of the rare destiny he has been granted, for which he has prepared for his entire life. There is time still to save our struggling family unit, and rebuild our shared home towards the humane vision both our King’s faith and instinct guide him — a great Carolean restoration that will mark his place in our national history.

At those points in my life where someone close to me has died, the hours and days afterward felt heightened, timeless and liminal: as though the world has grown thin, and unimaginable truths or possibilities might hover just out of sight. When that mood governs your every waking moment, and that of others too, going about the ordinary business of living feels absurd.

Why would I go to Tesco and buy butter, when death walks abroad? Why would I hang the washing out, when someone who mattered so much is gone? And she did matter that much. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s death is a shattering event, infinitely beyond those who knew her as mother, grandmother, great-grandmother or friend.

In her single person, and in her dedication to a selfless life of public service, our late Queen embodied continuity across nearly a century of seismic change. She sailed serenely through the dismantling of the British Empire, accepting without demur its transmutation to a “Commonwealth” and her role as figurehead of that entity.

In this way, more than any other single individual, she both guided and personified Britain’s transition from the most sprawling empire in history to… whatever it is we are now. In her calm and stalwart presence, Great Britain managed to act as though nothing had really changed, or if it had it was all for the best.  We could ignore the fading carpets, and the Russian oligarchs buying up grand country estates. We could ignore the ugly buildings where beautiful ones used to stand. We could ignore our apparent inability to build new infrastructure, or to agree over whether or how to defend our borders, or what our history means.

With our Queen still soldiering on, at some level it all felt like the same big story, and we could argue in relative emotional safety about what the next century of “Modern Britain” might be. A great global soft power? A hub of financial corruption? A geopolitical has-been juggling the demands of European and American empires? A great nation dormant and ready to rise again? However you answer that question, we could put off coming to any firm conclusion, as long as she was there to hold it all together.

Now she’s gone. And once the interval of grief passes and the world stops feeling thin, we’ll all still be here. Life will have to go on. And that means we can’t put off answering the questions that have been lurking below the surface on which our Queen sailed so serenely. What happens next? Who will lead us? And, more importantly, how?

No doubt alongside the inevitable ghouls loudly rejoicing for the hate-clicks, we’ll hear renewed calls from the ever-present (and, to date, mercifully unpopular) republicans, to dispense with the monarchy in favour of something more “democratic”. This is an irony given that the very presence of a constitutional monarch has served, for some 334 years, as our guarantor of democracy: the autocratic grit in the democratic oyster. That, at least, is what I wrote after seeing the quiet dignity with which the Queen sat alone at her husband’s funeral, carefully following pandemic-era rules on social distancing.

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It was Victoria and Albert who first embraced monarchy as a form of moral leadership, pioneering the sober stoicism we’ve come to associate with our Queen. But it has been Elizabeth who most fully embraced that duty, and led by example – as at Prince Philip’s funeral. In her reign, this symbolic monarchy has taken on ever more intense meaning: for if Victoria still wielded a measure of direct power, as Empress of an immense territory, so the Queen’s moral leadership seemed to become more important, and weighty, as that territory evaporated.

The result has, for those who still treasure that grain of autocratic sand in the English democratic oyster, a sense that it really isn’t just about her office, as Queen, but also about her. Can anyone else fill those shoes, and represent the Crown in Parliament now she’s gone? Even staunch anti-monarchists of my acquaintance are talking of the gap she leaves behind. There’s no one left now to connect us, as a nation, to the age when we still seemed able to get things done.

But we should perhaps worry less about the Crown in Parliament, than Parliament itself. For if our Queen served selflessly for more than 70 years as guarantor of this form of democracy, today that settlement feels threadbare too. The stories pile up: notoriously, for example, as our Queen sat alone in her pew, mourning Prince Philip, we now know No 10 staffers were throwing parties. A relatively minor blip in our ever more dyspeptic news cycles, but it dealt another blow to our collective faith, such as it was, in the fitness of our elected leaders — a failure that stood out with especial clarity when contrasted with our Queen’s calm stoicism and commitment to duty.

But the stories are everywhere. It’s not just that news items relish in painting our ruling class as  venal, mendacious, incompetent, ignorant, nepotistic, or just hopelessly detached from everyday life in the country. Faith in our democratic institutions has been waning for some time. Voter cynicism is not new. But scepticism toward the democratic process is getting worse. Our loss of faith in the very form of our government is chipping away at trust in the electoral process, and this is happening across the political spectrum.

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A growing proportion of politics seems to happen somewhere other than in the democratic process; the youth are growing more authoritarian; I worry that for profound structural reasons, we’re no longer forming the kind of citizens for whom that type of government was self-evidently the best. And as that becomes clearer, it’s my suspicion that so, too, will it become clearer that inasmuch as we still live in a democracy at all, it’s no longer one that functions in anything like the fashion first made possible by the events of 1688. And that we can’t go back.

We’re staring now into an incalculably vast void, left behind by the longest-serving monarch in our history. She dedicated her life to serving as the anchor for a liberal democracy. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that more is passing with her death than an unimpeachable life spent in public service. She held in place an entire order. She stood throughout a convulsive century, as our shield against far greater and darker convulsions. And with the passing of our last anchor to a bygone Britain, her successor will need to find his own way to help the current one flourish.

What kind of leadership will her son be called upon to provide? There will be those who would see that role diminished further, or eliminated altogether. This is a mistake. For if I’m right, we are effectively already under unaccountable technocratic rule. And this is here to stay: the modern world is so complex that we’re likely stuck with at least some technocrats.

And if this is true, the critical factor isn’t electoral politics but the moral fibre, public ethic and aesthetic outlook of whoever is set over all. If we must have unaccountable rule, it should be by someone with as few vested interests as our late Queen, as great a concern for honour, order, beauty, and the natural world, and as deep a respect for leaving things as they are unless there’s a compelling reason for change.

And on that front, I’ll take the man who built Poundbury, over either a faceless swarm of bureaucrats or indeed the woman who can look around three decades of smoking post-Thatcherite rubble and still insist the answer to everything is simply “freedom, low taxes and personal responsibility”.

Let there be no effort to weaken the monarchy still further, by re-running the Glorious Revolution. Far better to do the decent thing and reverse it. God Save the King.

In its defence, the magazine could point to a multitude of other media outlets that had similarly been caught out by the sudden death of the Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997. And, more than the event itself, caught out by the public response.

Because the week that followed — between the fatal car crash in the early hours of a Sunday morning and the funeral the following Saturday, 25 years today — was an extraordinary moment, a week of all-consuming grief or hysteria (depending on taste), when nothing else seemed to happen, and nothing else mattered. There was only one subject of conversation, certainly in the media: radio phone-in shows experienced record numbers of calls, newspaper sales soared, and rolling news really came into its own.

There were two poles of attraction that week; two households, both alike in dignity. There was Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived. It became the centre of the people’s mourning: flowers costing an estimated £50 million were laid at the gates in a rising (and rotting) tide of tribute. And then there was Balmoral, where the Royal Family, including Prince Charles and his young sons, was on its annual visit. No visible expression of grief was forthcoming from that quarter, and even if that was understandable — after all, two children had just lost their mother and might wish for some privacy — the public was not in an understanding mood.

As the shock of the news began to recede in those days, the sorrow turned to anger, directed at the perceived failure of the royals to lead the national bereavement. “It is as if no one in the Royal Family has a soul,” raged The Sun, anxious to direct attention away from the paparazzi from whom Diana had been fleeing, and on whom the tabloids relied so heavily.

And since this was a time when flags were important to us, the anger focused on a third site: Buckingham Palace, where there was no flag flying at half-mast. The reasoning for this was protocol: only the Royal Standard flew over royal palaces, and then only when the monarch was in residence, and never, ever at half-mast. But that was precisely the sort of inflexible convention that Diana, the rebel daughter of an 8th Earl, had stood against. “I do things differently, because I don’t go by a rule book,” she’d said in her 1995 Panorama interview, “because I lead from the heart not the head.”

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That was the division that Diana Week exposed: head vs heart, duty vs feeling, the stiff upper lip vs the trembling pout. The Royal Family, wrote Daily Mirror columnist Tony Parsons, were stuck in the past, “undemonstrative, buttoned up, reluctant to show their emotions in public”, while the multitudes outside Kensington Palace were “very much a part of new Britain – emotional, passionate, willing to show their feelings. Just like Diana herself”. And if the nation was divided, the battle of the flag seemed to show who had the upper hand: on the Thursday, a Union Jack was duly hoisted to half-mast over Buckingham Palace.

There was much speculation that week about the end of the monarchy. Indeed, even before Diana’s death, republicanism had been on the rise. The year had started with an ITV show, Monarchy: The Nation Decides, filmed before a 3,000-strong audience at the NEC in Birmingham (more familiar to viewers as the arena for Gladiators). Less a debate than a forerunner of reality TV, it broke the record for Britain’s biggest ever phone-vote: 2.6 million calls were taken, with a third supporting the abolition of the monarchy.

A more orthodox poll by ICM in mid-August produced the same result: 30% said Britain would be better off without royalty, up from 13% a decade earlier. The upheavals of Diana Week seemed to have accelerated that trend.

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What halted the forward march of republicanism was the deployment of Princes William (aged 15) and Harry (12). They were carefully shielded from the media for the first days, but the pressure grew too great. On the Thursday, they appeared before cameras at Balmoral; on Friday they looked at the flowers and tributes outside Buckingham Palace; and on Saturday they walked behind their mother’s coffin in a funeral procession, the broadcast of which attracted a near-record of 32.1 million viewers — just shy of the 1966 World Cup Final. And the country felt better for having wept over the poor motherless mites. A poll by MORI immediately after the funeral showed just 18% in support of Britain becoming a republic.

It was, though few were prepared to say so, a bit ugly. A large part of Diana’s appeal had been her identification with the vulnerable. “I understand people’s suffering, people’s pain,” she’d said, in a leaked phone conversation. “It’s not only AIDS; it’s anyone who suffers. I can smell them a mile away.” Now, in her name — and in the interests of showing that we were a kinder, gentler nation — we demanded that her children parade their suffering on our behalf.

Then came the comedown. On Sunday there was nothing to do or to see, but still three million people found their way to the royal parks in London, seemingly reluctant to let go of the sense of a shared experience. And on Monday there began the process of forgetting just how bizarre that week had been, the sheer enormity of the public display of emotion, the “Latin American peasant hagiolatry”, as Boris Johnson called it.

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“We live in an age where feminism is a fact,” concluded Johnson, “where giving vent to emotion in public wins votes.” And that seemed to be the lesson. Tony Blair, who’d been elected just four months earlier, was the big winner of the week. He was convinced that his mantra of “New Labour New Britain” was in tune with the country that Diana symbolised. “In temperament and time, in the mood she engendered and which we represented, there was a perfect fit,” he wrote in his memoirs. And he might have been right; in the aftermath of her death, the opinion polls showed him with an approval rating of 93%, the highest ever recorded for a prime minister.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, were nowhere. Already reeling from their worst election defeat since 1906, they simply couldn’t fathom the mass mourning at all. “I walked through the crowds,” reflected one Tory ex-cabinet minister, “and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.” In due course, the party decided to put that right with the election as leader of David Cameron, a man who, as a 14-year-old, had camped out on the Mall to witness the wedding procession of Charles and Diana. The assumption was that Diana had won. We’d finally shed the Victorian values championed by Margaret Thatcher. We were all emotionally literate now.

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Except that it doesn’t really feel like it. The clash of values that made such an impact in 1997 hasn’t been resolved one way or the other. It’s become more intense, more bitter, so that we now talk of a culture war, a conflict in which the two sides are pretty much the same as they were then. It’s still about heart and head, the subjective vs the pragmatic. The injunction to “be kind” still comes with an element of emotional bullying, and those who dissent are still, as John Redwood wrote of Diana Week, “well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves given the surge of public sentiment”.

And since this is Britain, the Royal Family is expected to play its part. So Harry is the champion of the Kensington Palace tendency, albeit transplanted to California. He’s prepared to tell anyone who’ll listen about his “genetic pain and suffering” and about his wife’s “lived experience”, in terms more Spencer than Windsor. (“I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either,” snapped Prince Philip, back when Diana was still alive.) Harry is not reluctant to share his truths. But every time he does so, he comes under increasingly heavy fire, and sheds more support. A YouGov poll in May this year showed just 32% seeing him in a positive light; even among those aged 18 to 24 — supposedly his constituency — this only rose to 42%.

William, on the other hand, is the heir to Balmoral, though with better PR advisors. There’s no radical departure from tradition here, just a steady adaptation. And the result is that he’s polling second only to the Queen as the most popular royal, with his wife in third place. The month after the funeral, the Queen mused: “I sometimes sense that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones.” But she’s still with us, still quietly adapting.

Over the last 25 years, the noise from those rolling news channels, amplified by social media, has given the impression that society is in a state of frenzied change. Technology may be, but human beings are not. There is a generational evolution, as there always is, but what appeared to be a major step-change in 1997 was deceptive. Diana Week turned out to be an exception, not the making of a new rule. “Papa doesn’t embarrass me,” William was quoted as saying in 1995. “Mama does.”

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.

Charles’s guest of honour, on her birthday, was his long-suffering mistress. She was then the crossroads where all national snobberies meet: a tabloid had recently printed a picture of her next to a horse, then asked: “Which one would you rather go to bed with?” The party was widely interpreted as an insult, but it was more of an apology to Camilla Parker Bowles. No other Royal attended.

A quarter of a century on and Camilla’s 75th birthday presents are the guest editorship of Country Life magazine, and a television special on ITV. The documentary reveals that she has shared a fag with Jeremy Clarkson, and her approach to life is to “just get on with it”. Through the cameras, and on the pages, she appears unaffected. Is this Camilla an actual person? Or a spit-and-polish construct designed behind-the-scenes to fill a vacancy when the Queen dies? 

Suspicions about her have lasted. Only 13% of the public believe that Camilla should be Queen. (It will happen, regardless.) In the run up to her birthday next week, newspapers wonder how Camilla has “won everyone round”, but she remains, in tabloidese, a “controversial figure”. The public are persistent Diana partisans. They do not get on with it. Like some of our politicians, for them it is eternally 1997, and Diana’s car will always be heading towards a smash. Against this sentimental legend, Camilla has nothing to offer but her Jack Russell terriers, being “nice” to photographers, and that time she laughed at some Inuit throat singers. She becomes a mirror of her mother-in-law — a quiet enigma.

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Still, the essentials are not at all mysterious. War hero father becomes a wine merchant, and a mildly amusing writer. Mother: knitting, wealthy, and deb of the year 1939. School friends remember Camilla’s ability to stand in the cold for longer than normal. (This will prove useful later in her life.) There is nothing to suggest the formation of an unusual character.

She passes fewer O-levels than Jeremy Corbyn. (Similarly, Diana Spencer’s most notable academic achievement is to win a school prize for best-tended guinea pig.) She likes hunting, and blowing cones of smoke between tokes of her Marlboros. Camilla Shand is of her class but slightly before her times. She is tomboyish and funny, consequently perfect for the men in the Polo scene, with their frighteningly monosexual educations.

Camilla was brought up to be a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. Today Camilla, if the pages of Country Life are anything to go by, is a rose-pruning, novel-reading, fox-hunting county lady. What Virginia Woolf called “tweed-wearing, sterling dull… with grim good sense”. Dog hairs deeply woven into clothes, the first G&T a little early; silly nicknames and beef on Sundays. Solid lives that have scarcely changed since the days of Pitt the Younger. In Country Life and Camilla’s vanishing England, it’s possible — even encouraged — to forget the passage of entire centuries.

The first marriage is described as a “major social event” by all the future biographies — because Princess Anne is there. Camilla Shand becomes a Parker Bowles. Her fast London days slow to a manor in Wiltshire, where she gardens and hunts. Her husband, known as Andrew “Poker Bowles”, is one of those libertine Catholics. He behaves badly, confesses, then throws his chips on the table again. He is prouder to be the inspiration for a character in a Jilly Cooper novel than of his marriage.

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This might have gone on until the grave. Camilla might have planted peonies in her garden for decades, might never have had to give up her pack a day, might have read the Sunday Telegraph next to Andrew at breakfast last weekend. But for Charles.

When they first met, he was not exactly Bond. In front of a white pavilion, amid billowing elms, across from a vividly green grass pitch. It was a civilised, convivial, and slightly alarming scene — polo at Smith’s Lawn. Camilla in 1972 was at the height of her sensuousness. Young Charles was the most magnificent job-seeker in a land filling up with them. He slept with his teddy bear. He believed the way to a woman’s heart was to play practical jokes on them — his favoured aphrodisiacs were exploding envelopes packed with rubber bands. Suavity was distant.

The relationship began. From the start, disdain wrapped itself around Camilla like a bag over a head. The Queen praised her for her lack of guile and ambition, without realising she was praising Camilla for what she most admired about herself. The sinister Lord Mountbatten (Charles’ male mentors are always sinister) called her a “good learning experience”. At this height, in this society, people and ponies are easily confused. Senior figures in Charles’s life believed, archaically, that she was not “pure” enough for him. He did nothing to challenge them.

Though he knew as early as 1972 that he loved Camilla, Charles married Diana. A binary emerged; one day the country would be invited to take sides. Where Camilla was unoriginal and unimaginative, Diana was theatrical and neurotic. Camilla was stage scenery, Diana was Othello. Camilla didn’t feel things; Diana would weep at the sight of a bracelet. Charles literally had one job: marry well. He blew it. “Is it possible to love two women at the same time,” he asked, the night before his blockbuster marriage. The answer, unhappily enough, will forever be: yes and no. By the late Eighties, pictures of the prince show smoke signals wafting from his eyes. His hours of happiness seemed burned through.

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Raised by a coterie of what Prince Philip delicately called “nannies, nurses, and poofs”, the Prince of Wales was not prepared for a constitutional position that demanded epic stoicism. He was dimly aware of this mismatch between role and temperament. Battered by alternating gusts of public hatred and public reverence, he forgot himself. Once asked by a boy in Malaysia, “Who are you?” He replied: “I wish I knew”.

His solution was Camilla. When the public discovered this, and his first marriage ended, Charles’s mistress became as fascinating to the world as a goat with four heads. Typically, the world then asked the wrong questions about the relationship. Philip had told Diana that he could not imagine anyone in “their right mind” leaving her for Camilla.

The Duke’s words echoed throughout the Nineties, and they still echo today. Camilla was called an old boiler and a trout, fat and gaunt, a witch and a vampire. Mohammed Al-Fayed nastily said she looked “like something from a Dracula film”. Against this, the press compared Diana’s generational beauty. Camilla became the most hated woman in England. Like Anne Boleyn, she was considered a schemer, an opportunist, and a sexual predator. If there were still chopping blocks, Camilla would have graced them as Boleyn did. Instead she faced the stocks. In an eccentric (and rather late) attempt to regulate the nation’s extinct moral verities, women pelted her with rolls in a supermarket car park. Camilla went into hiding and did what Elizabeth II would have done. She said nothing. Charles’s approval rating was lower than Prince Andrew’s is today.

The supposed mystery of Charles and Camilla invited speculation. What exactly did Charles see in her, demanded the British public. A backwards question. The better one was: what did Camilla see in Charles? He might have been heir to the throne, but the throne wasn’t what it had been a century before. That is the real enigma. The answer is the one word the British flee from fastest. Love.

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Admittedly, it was not the most straightforward kind. Camilla’s love for him has been compared to a mother’s — a love smothered by fear. Nicky Haslam told the New Yorker: “It’s like a rope attached to her. There’s something very, very strong from her to him — almost umbilical.” When Diana left Highgrove, Charles purged his estate of all traces of his wife. Gone were the pink sofas and soft toys in favour of red curtains and tapestry covers. The interior designer Dudley Poplak saw the new rooms, and said Charles was withdrawing into the womb. He was going back to Camilla.

​​Charles is technically related to a divinity. He is said to be descended, via Alfred the Great, from the Saxon god Woden. But being Prince of Wales invites stasis, and semi-permanent adolescence. The woman he ended up with was always going to be a mother, not a whirlwind. This is what the public has never understood, and why they are wrong about Camilla becoming Queen consort. The closest replacement available for Elizabeth II — sane, steady, consistent — is Camilla. It might be a bit unconventional on Charles’ part. But it is good for the country.

Contemplate a day in her life. Hours of public ceremonial. A voice in your ear telling you who you are meeting and what to say. Half a dozen fixed smiles in every freshly painted room. Speeches and remarks heavily rehearsed. You can’t even smoke anymore. Next Tuesday you will open a new hospital ward in Northampton. Prince Harry calls your husband a “tit” in a podcast interview. This trends on Twitter. He is suing another newspaper. It rains.

But like her mother-in-law she goes on. Old structures are resilient. It is hard to conceive that anyone as publicly wounded as Camilla could also retain a sense of humour. Even in the artificial world of guest editorships and documentaries, though, you can see it. She is the only Royal who doesn’t seem fantastically annoyed by The Crown — she’s had so much worse.

Wrapped in royal tinsel, Camilla might be the last hard kernel of an Englishwoman left. History would have made most people in her position a fool, or sent them mad. Instead it has given her a gift, albeit a rather tainted one: being our Queen. It’s the least she deserves.

In premodern England, processions were mostly connected to the liturgical calendar: events often both celebratory and of deep moral significance, marking saints’ days and Holy Week, accompanied with chanting, song or enactment of Bible stories. Perhaps the first monarch to use public spectacle as a political tool was our reigning Queen’s namesake, Elizabeth I, whose annual Queen’s Progress would see her take the whole court on the road over the summer, passing slowly and in great splendour through every part of her kingdom, where her subjects would put on pageants and feasts in her honour. She embarked on 23 in her 44 years as Queen, extending the glamour of her reign well beyond the narrow circle of her immediate court.

But what does a procession mean in the 21st Century? And who is it for? If Elizabeth I used pageantry to project her image and soft political power across her kingdom, the time between her reign and the arrival of her namesake, Elizabeth II, has delivered technologies that — in theory at least — render such efforts obsolete.

What’s the point of taking your entire court on the road, at vast effort and expense, when you can broadcast images of yourself everywhere with little to no effort? Meanwhile, for participants, the idea that your procession is being watched by journalists or TV cameras gives it a whole different set of meanings and potentials. No longer something you do with the other participants, it becomes something you do for an imagined audience, and whose meaning is outside the event itself.

If that sounds abstract, think about the idea of “peaceful protest”. This has been extensively used by progressive movements throughout the 20th Century, to effect political change with minimal violence by inspiring public sympathy for a cause. The Indian independence campaigner Mahatma Gandhi was a trailblazer in the format: between March and April 1930, he led a 240-mile march across India to collect salt from the coast, in protest against the 1882 Salt Act, a British colonial law which prohibited Indians from gathering or selling salt.

Gandhi was joined by thousands of his fellow-countrymen, some 60,000 of whom were arrested for their involvment. The march helped tilt public sympathy in favour of independence both on the subcontinent and – via newspaper reports – elsewhere in the world, and contributed to the movement for independence that came to fruition in 1948, four years before our reigning Elizabeth was crowned. Barely over a decade after that coronation, in 1963, Martin Luther King led some 250,000 sympathisers in another historic political procession in Washington, this time for racial equality: the scene of his “I Have A Dream” speech.

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Both these peaceful mass protests changed the course of history. But their political force relied on the presence of journalists to report on them. Before the mass-media age – that is, well into the 18th Century – any crowd of people with a political grievance was less likely to be treated as a noble political protest than as an incipient riot, not least because in most cases that’s what it was. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt didn’t sit about with placards waiting for the world to sympathise with their dislike of wage caps and the poll tax. They marched on London, where they massacred Flemish merchants and demolished John O’Gaunt’s palace.

By the same token, who cares about some people walking 240 miles to get salt, unless the world at large reads about it in the papers and understands the symbolic meaning? And as for 250,000 people gathering near the seat of government in a country of (then) 189 million people, unless the press is there to record the stirring speeches and report on its orderliness, that’s not a peaceful protest, it’s merely a public order problem. As it was, these events proved pivotal at a time when mass media was becoming increasingly important.

The digital age has changed the calculus again, though. On social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, you can get a sense of which ideas, causes or moods are swirling across the collective consciousness by seeing which hashtags are popular. Meanwhile, protests like those led by Gandhi and King have increasingly given way to something more nebulous and feel-good: the physical manifestation of a trending hashtag.

These such events may gesture at concrete political change but (like the clicktivism they mirror) often land instead on something far more nebulous: emotional gestures of “standing with” some oppressed group, or “raising awareness” of the most broad-brush issues, with very little in the way of concrete policy attached.

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In this view, political voice isn’t something individual; it’s weilded collectively, by a swarm. That is: if you want to be heard, you need to make sure the imagined observer can see that there are lots of you. And to achieve that, you have to ensure the hashtag trends, and add your body to the physical swarm of people all gathered in one place to support that cause.

But the trouble with trending-hashtag approach to mass politics is that, much like hashtags themselves, such physical gatherings are markedly less connected with concrete political action than their 20th-Century forebears. Gandhi wanted an independent India; King wanted equal legal standing for all Americans regardless of skin colour. Both achieved their aim. But since the turn of the century and rise of the internet, this has steadily broken down: in 2003, a million Not In My Name marchers did nothing to deter Tony Blair from invading Iraq.

The 2017 Women’s March, meanwhile, took place across some 600 locations and 81 countries – itself impossible without social media – and had an estimated 3.2 million participants in the US alone, making it the largest single-day protest in US history. It was hailed as transformational; but it’s far less clear what the march as a whole was for, let alone what it achieved.

It swiftly became roiled by anti-semitism scandals, and saw participants falling away to more issue-specific campaigning. And if 3.2 million Americans in pink hats marched in outrage at the election of a pussy-grabber to the White House, it appears the weight of their numbers has had little impact on The Donald’s reported determination to have another crack at the US Presidency.

For what might such a swarm campaign do after its collective voice has been heard? This reflects, maybe, the parallel rise of an ecosystem one commentator has called the “NGOcracy”: a body of non-governmental agencies concerned with driving social change, in line with how they have chosen to interpret popular opinion as seen in trending-hashtags. That is: in the digital age the job of mass processions is simply to emote.

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Processing alongside my flag-waving daughter on Thursday evening, though, I found myself wondering: is that all it can be — an emotional pressure-valve for a politically defanged public square whose claim to agency has been colonised by professionalised NGOs? One of the most striking criticisms I saw of the Jubilee celebration seemed to me to map nationwide Jubilee events, large and small, onto this social-media-age paradigm of hashtag activism. Based on the turnout of supporters at the Mall, this commentator suggested, the Queen is not popular nationwide. And, furthermore, anyone who really cared about the monarchy could easily make the journey into London to add their body to this single swarm in the Queen’s honour.

Implicitly, in this view, none of the local processions was meaningful unless it added to the royalist body-count visible in drone footage of Central London. But does this make sense? I struggle to imagine another cause that could turn out a thousand small-town citizens of Bedfordshire, of all ages, after dinner on a Thursday night. I also know that other processions of a similar kind took place all over the country. I imagine very few of them were filmed by drone, so their body-count couldn’t be evaluated by media commentators for trending-hashtag status.

Does it follow that each of these events was meaningless? Only if you believe that the value of a gathering, event or procession lies in its ability to make a contribution to the trending-hashtag emotional life of the nation as a whole. But what I found hopeful and heart-warming about my modest local celebration was the reminder that great swathes of the country really don’t care much about what’s happening on the internet.

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For me this was salutary. Especially in the face of in-person interactions mostly banned or tightly constrained during lockdown, and ever more of our public life accordingly forced online, it can feel difficult to escape an increasingly noisy, divisive and overheated digital public discourse. And it’s this discourse that prefers to emote en masse, whether online or in the real world, via the kind of hashtag-protest we saw in the Women’s March. Last Thursday reminded me that away from all the shouting, plenty of communities still gather with and for one another, and with only the faintest of nods to the noisy and increasingly self-absorbed parallel universe of digital-era mass politics.

It’s too early to tell whether such events will persist once Her Majesty is gone, and with her, our last national tether to the 20th Century. As for those ritual moments of collective moral communion that are all we have left of the political protests of yore, perhaps we need to stop thinking of them as protests. Instead, we can call them what they are: liturgical events more akin to the medieval processions that pre-dated Elizabeth I than anything between her age and Tony Blair. Religious gatherings, in praise of new (or perhaps long-forgotten) gods whose outlines we’re only just starting to discern.

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.

I dare say a fair few families will be instructed to hold back over the coming weekend, as Britain gears up for four days of Jubilee celebrations. My small Shires town is revving up: covered in bunting, with a marquee and events planned all weekend. But there’s an odd lacuna at the heart of the celebration — something brought into focus for me by an official Jubilee book my reception-age daughter brought home from school last week.

The book sets out to explain the Jubilee, the monarchy, and its history to primary-school pupils. It takes in the Queen’s duties, her family tree, royal residences and activities, and much besides. For anyone with a basic grasp of English history, though, the book has a striking narrative gap — one with considerable bearing on the form of bourgeois downward mobility that results in “FHB”.

The book devotes a double page to the Commonwealth, along with many other mentions in passing. But the question of how the Commonwealth came to exist is briskly despatched. “Its roots go back to the 16th century, when Britain began to expand its Empire,” we learn. The following sentence fast-forwards straight to the end of the story: “During the 20th century, countries that had been part of the British Empire began to gain independence”.

That’s all it has to say about the British Empire, directly at least. “Civil War” gets two mentions in the index; the Commonwealth gets 14; the British Empire doesn’t merit a single one. An immense narrative spanning four centuries, in the course of which Britain shaped the modern world, is relegated to prequel status for the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, traces of empire are present throughout the book, not least in the framing device of a dialogue between a Jamaican great-grandmother and her dual-heritage great-granddaughter. And in reality, as in the book, empire is also everywhere — but like in the book, mostly indirectly. For there are few more awkward topics in modern Britain.

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Much of Britain’s imposing architecture was built with the wealth of empire: the Royal Societies, the museums full of now-controversial exhibits taken (often forcibly) from conquered peoples around the world, and many of the royal residences themselves. Even the union with Scotland is a by-product of empire, a kind of pragmatic merger after Scotland’s failed attempt at founding its own colonies.

But perhaps the defining feature of Elizabeth’s reign has been the disintegration of the colossal empire held by her predecessors: a process that began in earnest a few years before her coronation, with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1948. Then 1956, four years after she was crowned, delivered the first brutal lesson in Britain’s enfeebled post-war condition: the Suez Crisis. After that the empire crumbled rapidly: the Caribbean colonies were mostly independent by the early Sixties, and Britain’s remaining African outposts were independent by the end of that decade. By 1981, the process of decolonisation that began after the Second World War was largely complete.

And this, in turn, triggered the decline of that old British bourgeoisie now sliding from grandeur toward bulk-buying at Costco, and hissing “FHB” at a greedy teenager behind the kitchen door. This is the class that once earned its wealth and status running that empire but lost such opportunities over the long slow decolonisation of the 20th century.

Subsequent changes in the world’s distribution of power and wealth can be seen in ongoing alterations to our imperial-era architecture. Many Regency and Victorian frontages now exist only as a facade on modern steel-and-glass structures that house the international media and financial services companies of the modern age. Something analogous has happened, too, to the old imperial bureaucratic class: its scions have pivoted to leveraging their cultural capital as refined concierges to modern international billionaires.

Further down the food chain, this class has either adapted by shoving its children into law, estate agency or finance, or else slumped back into suburbia, with only a few bone-handled knives to recall the past. In most such cases, this is borne in silence: for no one is permitted to mourn the passing of so ambivalent a thing as the former source of Britain’s wealth and glory.

Throughout this transformation, the Queen has carried on serenely as though the loss of the largest empire in history were a matter of no great concern. The grand pageantry has continued, within a little ring-fenced zone in which we all pretend not to notice Britain’s loss of stature. But despite being treated as ceremonially exempt from Britain’s collective post-imperial FHB, the Windsors are prime figureheads for this England: chief exponents of a class that would sooner die than cause the family to lose face by gorging a limited supply of some treat reserved for honoured guests.

My hunch is that, in reality, royal lifestyles are, behind the scenes, quite drab in places: all gilt and splendid rooms up front, but with bathrooms in need of updating and central heating that doesn’t always work. Many photos of the royal family’s private living spaces have the characteristic aesthetic of a once-ascendant British ruling class: good-quality chintz wearing in places, dark mahogany, dog hair on the carpet. (I privately suspect Meghan Markle disliked her new life as a princess not because of media pressure, but because being real English royalty turned out to be not nearly as swanky as being the figurative Hollywood kind.)

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In this sense, Queen Elizabeth’s reign is profoundly representative of the collective British post-war condition: rattling around in draughty halls that are a source of pride, a disproportionate drain on resources, and sometimes also an embarrassment. For while there was beauty and grandeur, we can’t weigh the cumulative significance of the British imperial age without taking into account the violence, looting, displacement and sometimes staggering cruelty that also formed part of that story.

What’s less clear, though, is how to reconcile these facts while retaining a sense of ourselves as a whole nation. When Oxford professor Nigel Biggar argued that we should feel a measure of pride as well as shame in our imperial past, 60 Oxford academics wrote an open letter furiously dissociating “Oxford scholarship” from Biggar’s stance.

Given this acute sensitivity, it’s understandable that my daughter’s commemorative Jubilee book would swerve the whole messy business by simply leaving it out. Is this right, or a dishonest erasure? Does our monarchy even make sense if we can’t talk about the empire?

From a purely abstract point of view, I have some sympathy with those who argue we should wrestle openly with the complexities of our national past. But in this specific context, I try to imagine my daughter’s multi-ethnic class taking home either a rabidly jingoistic Jubilee book, or else a full-throatedly condemnatory one, and how they would respond. Whatever historiographers may argue, at ground level it’s not easy to see how we can build a shared story from fierce partisanship on such a contested and often still-painful past.

It’s also true that this doesn’t have to matter. Small schools, like small towns, push against the modern urge to balkanise on identity lines. It’s infinitely more difficult to be identitarian when you can’t muster the numbers. Small-town life relies, to a large extent, on ignoring disagreements in the interests of rubbing along together.

This is perhaps the particular gift and genius of our reigning Queen: she has served, for 70 years, as the ceremonial embodiment of this sometimes grim willingness to pretend everything is fine, and to focus on what we have in common even when everything is falling apart. And she may yet prevail: if Elizabeth II spent her reign presiding over a national feast that’s grown steadily sparser, her Platinum Jubilee has a chance to leave children of my daughter’s generation with a wholly different picture of Britain to the one my grandmother saw at her coronation in 1952.

My daughter, born into a different century to the one that saw the British Empire fall, has no understanding of the history and politics that attended its rise or collapse. She won’t grow up with her grandparents saying “Keen-ya” and her mum saying “Ken-ya”, and awkwardly piecing together the emotional and political payload of that single vowel change.

For her, and her classmates, the Dorling Kindersley book really is accurate in its representation of what the Queen stands for now. The DK Queen is all multi-ethnic pluralism, charities, and a neutered and heavily devolved Union. It’s a carefully pruned version of what past Kings and Queens have represented, and a willingness to look past the bloody and difficult bits, at least while children are little. We might read this as aggressive political correctness; or we might read it as taking a cue from the Queen. No Prince Harry-esque headline-generating controversy, no cringy efforts to “open up” with the attendant probability of riling someone up. Just sailing on as though the difficult bits aren’t there.

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And there’s a case for this. It’s probably true for every family alive that some subjects are best not broached at big family gatherings. We don’t always resolve differences, feuds or ancient offences by talking about them. Sometimes the wiser course is to grow scar tissue around the wounds, and get on with needing one another.

I’ve argued before that, politically speaking, a constitutional monarch is something like the authoritarian grit in the political oyster, whose paradoxical result is not less but more democracy. Perhaps the contradictions and discomforts of our post-imperial condition are another impossible circle our monarchy can help us square — by determinedly representing the idea of a unified nation, in the hope that we might eventually manage to become such a thing.

I hope my daughter’s class grows up remembering the Jubilee as a moment where we set aside the uncomfortable stuff, so the celebrations could belong to everyone. And I hope this serves as at least one memory to hold, against the corrosive narratives of unshakeable moral taint and oppression that increasingly permeate at least the progressive account of our common life.

It’s probably too early to tell whether this is possible, or even wise, on a topic so immense and sensitive as a collapsed empire in whose ruins we now live. But among all the other things families can hold back is the temptation to stir up old quarrels.

And that’s the example Elizabeth has offered us for seven decades: an individual willing to hold back nearly all of herself, in order to serve as a sufficiently neutral figurehead for Britain’s rapidly changing national family. She has spent her 70-year reign as a living emblem for the hope that we might find a way of living together, with dignity, amid those ruins. I may be terminally idealistic, but watching my daughter and her classmates singing together at the school’s Jubilee picnic, I think it’s possible her effort has not been in vain.

So when the Archbishop this week suggested Prince Andrew is “seeking to make amends” and encouraged people to be more “open and forgiving”, he was not going out on some fashionable theological limb. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing: proclaiming the faith.

But however often Christians say the word in church, forgiveness has always been a profoundly unpopular idea, and is increasingly so in a post-Christian society. Look at the reaction to the Archbishop’s comments. People are aghast and angry. Why? Because the very idea of forgiveness can be extremely hard to reconcile with the much simpler and more popular idea of justice.

Justice means people getting what they deserve. Wrongdoers facing punishment: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Punishment has to be proportionate to the wrong done. The scales of justice cry out to be balanced. It is a debt that has to be paid. Yet the greasy and featherbedded Prince Andrew has obviously not paid his debt — so how dare the Archbishop speak about forgiveness? Bloody establishment, they all look out for each other.

This is where justice can take us. It was Nietzsche — no friend of the Christian faith, of course — who famously suggested that even the justice of the courtroom can have a highly persecutory tone, a mob desire for the blood of the perpetrator camouflaged by wigs and gowns. Consider also that common set-up at the beginning of the trashy American revenge movie: a crime is committed that allows us to see the various acts of response, however gruesome, as a form of moral restitution. The idea of justice allows violence to be understood as morally acceptable, unavoidable even. Justice becomes the moral word for winning. And Americans like to be thought of as winners. It is, of course, their least attractive side. And their most foolish.

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At its worst, this logic of justice can perpetuate violence ad infinitum. It can create an unstoppable cycle of vendetta — one act of justice/violence inviting another. Feuds between families can perpetuate this drama over generations. Justice is the engine of revenge. Violence is mimetic. What most frightened Desmond Tutu about post-Apartheid South Africa was the prospect of justice driving a death cycle of violence — with some never-ending response and counter-response sending his beloved country into perpetual civil war. “No future without forgiveness,” he wrote. Forgiveness was a way of breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Peace could only be established by holding back on the justice bit. Forgive your enemies. That, for all its faults, is what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was seeking to model.

In complete contrast to Tutu’s “No forgiveness, no peace”, Black Lives Matter protestors regularly chant “No justice, no peace”. One way of reading this is that we won’t give you peace unless we have racial justice. It can be heard as a moral justification of ongoing violence.

As well as perpetuating discord, the justice tradition has another related weakness: it invariably imagines that the person calling for justice is in the right. When Hamlet appeals to Polonius to treat others better than they deserve, he observes: “Use every man after his own desert and who [of us] should escape whipping”. Or in other words: if we all get justice, we are all in trouble. In the same vein, Martin Luther came to realise that he hated the phrase “the justice of God” because all of us — sinners that we are — are condemned. Only through God’s forgiveness can we be saved. OK, this is church speak. But the equivalent secular point is that all of us require forgiveness. Justice language — unqualified by mercy — points the finger at us all in the end. This is why social justice warriors end up consuming each other in an orgy of recrimination.

The Jubilee is a perfect time to think about forgiveness. This is when we try and think of ourselves as a national community, reconciled for a few hours of cake-eating and tea-drinking. The street party is a powerful way of neighbours, who may have fought for years over the garden fence, to put “being right” aside. I am an enthusiastic monarchist because I think of the crown as holding the community together in a way that is beyond political contestation. The Queen has sought to do this for 70 years. It’s part of her priestly role as it were, it’s what she was anointed for. Thank God for her.

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Jubilees seek to restore something broken or lost. At the turn of the millennium, many of us came together to lobby for the forgiveness of the financial debts that the developing world had built up over years. Jubilee 2000 asked that we wipe the slate clean. It drew upon the Biblical idea of the Jubilee — that every 50 years debts would be redeemed. It is very telling that the Judeo-Christian tradition often uses financial language – debt, redemption – as ways of talking about salvation. Back then it was the right that complained about the forgiveness of debts. These days it is often the left. Both insist upon the iron logic of pay-back, justice.

Forgiveness is not sentimental slush. It’s not being overly nice or gullible. Properly speaking, it is about the refusal to respond to wrongdoing in kind — those last two words being very important. It is not a refusal of the criminal justice system. It is a recognition that you do not get punishment proportionate to the crime — a murderer does not get murdered, a perpetrator of sexual violence does not get molested. Even more, it is a denial of the satisfaction that comes with payback. As Tutu was right to point out, forgiveness is a way of giving the community back a future, a strategy of restoration.

The reason being the Archbishop of Canterbury is the most impossible job in the world is that he has to try and say something like this within a public culture that believes forgiveness is fundamentally mistaken and wrong. It requires messy compromises. It might let people off the hook, smirking as they slink away. It might leave some victims unsatisfied, bitter that justice has not been properly dispensed.

But the alternative is a kind of endless cultural war. “No justice, no peace” is a terrifying slogan. For often, justice is the desire for revenge by another name.

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.

When has she come closest to peril? That’s easy, in your royal pub quiz: the death of Princess Diana. But why did she come so close? Because the royal family were not emotionally responsive when Diana died? Because they did not lower the flag, or leave the castle to meet their desolate people? Nonsense: this was an act of projection, of guilt buried under the anti-Jubilee of a death.

We understood why the monarchy shook when Diana died: because she died, because she married into a family that is dysfunctional, because we like it that way. Diana was not gilded by her status. She was killed by it. Her marriage was arranged when she needed a love match, and in that brief burst of understanding was our grief. Or it should have been.

Now Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is here, and it adds detail to the groaning library of royal biography, which is an odd genre prone to be read not with understanding but with glee. Because if you understand you can’t go on with the game. Brown divides the royals into functional and dysfunctional: good and bad. I am more cynical: I divide them into victims and survivors.

The victims pile up with their awful testimony: who survives this family? Not Edward VIII, possibly a Nazi-sympathiser. But he wanted something less suffocating than a crown and married a woman who gave him less. The Queen Mother responded to his gift by telling people Mrs Simpson was a prostitute and denying her the title HRH. She was a sore winner but for some people nothing is ever enough. Brown speaks the party line here. The family, “always believed that it was the excess public attention that had promoted Edward’s delusion of outsize significance and the coddling of dangerous emotional needs”.

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There is Margaret, denied the man she loved, and by her sister, who then deceived herself about the cause of Margaret’s depression: because the Queen is a survivor. “Once,” writes Brown, “when one of Margaret’s inner circle called her to say her sister was threatening to throw herself out of the bedroom window the Queen replied, ‘Carry on with your house party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor’”. That’s a cold response to suicidal ideation. Margaret married a monster on the rebound and filled herself with fags, Famous Grouse, and nothing. When it was suggested to the Queen that a therapist might help her sister, the Queen replied, “Perhaps when she’s better we could consider that”. “It was one of her lifelong dreams to ride on a bus,” writes Brown sadly of Margaret, but I doubt it would have saved her, even if she had become a conductress. Margaret’s desire to be cremated at Slough was her personal elegy, made with apt disgust.

There is Charles, who lacked the words and the expectation of sympathy to tell his mother what he wanted — a wife he loved. There was Diana, a corpse, and Fergie, a tabloid headline, who cannot leave and cannot stay. She is trapped in the carpeted purgatory of her ex-husband’s home Royal Lodge, a dystopia with a vast TV on which they can watch the news that consumes them.

Both Andrew and Harry are victims of monarchy too: of Elizabeth’s dedication to the Edwardian style, which is tight-lipped, hierarchical, and filled with superficial morality. I suspect we need a more casual style of monarchy — that is what Harry howls for from California — but perhaps they think we will not accept a monarchy without the suffering that we impose on it? There are reasons why Elizabeth has been a successful queen beyond longevity: she placed it first, and not all the children thrived. One lost second son is a misfortune. Two is a pattern.

Andrew grew up to know that he is not as important as his older brother and the Queen, when she was present — she often wasn’t, she once returned from a royal tour and went straight to the races, not her children — presided over this. That’s male primogeniture for you. Winner takes all. It must be a canker unless you are peculiarly mentally healthy, even before you meet your mad acolytes.

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If you feel yourself aggrieved, you may give yourself permission to behave as you wish. You will not open your own curtains. This is the testimony of a maid who hated Andrew because he made her climb the stairs to open his curtains. (It is impossible to believe that he is not addressing his mother.) You will call your wife, as Brown relates, “a fat cow”. You will have a collection of teddy bears, carefully arranged by the maid that hates you, even in your fifties, and yet imagine that you are really a naval officer. (Charles travels with a teddy bear according to Brown, but just the one). You will think, at best, that a trafficked 17-year-old will want to have sex with you because you are the Duke of York.

Then there is Harry. I used to think he left for privacy. Now, as he wades through autobiographies, Netflix deals and self-deception, I don’t think he left at all. Like Edward VIII, monarchy obsesses him; he can’t leave any more than Margaret or Sarah could. Attention without merit is addictive. Brown is fascinating on Harry and Meghan. “So why,” she asks, “didn’t Harry help navigate palace culture for his future wife?  He didn’t want to. Their complicity required Meghan to fight all the norms she had kicked against for so long. She was now his comrade in arms”. On Suits, she notes, Meghan was sixth on the call-sheet. In the royal family, Harry is sixth on the call sheet. They meet there, thwarted.

The two things that threaten the Jubilee — Andrew’s self-absorption and Harry’s rage — are entirely self-made. I know it isn’t kind to call a witch-goddess a bad mother, but perhaps you can’t mother a nation and your real children too. I wonder if they acknowledge it themselves. Charles’s plan to “slim down” the monarchy to himself, William, a middle-class woman and three children under nine, looks less like policy than testimony: a moment of self-knowledge and self-preservation before it all ends.

The Queen must have known. But she did it anyway, because though few people have any doubt that he is a total wrong’un (I don’t doubt it one bit), he is still family. Many families have rotters in their midst. And one of the most valuable things about family is that virtue is not a condition of membership. A mother can love her children, even if they have done terrible things — indeed, that is precisely the sort of dogged love many of us celebrated last Sunday. Besides, this was Prince Andrew’s father’s memorial service. Shamed or not, of course he had to be there. (Though, over in sunny California, the more virtuous members of the Royal family didn’t quite see it that way.)

In truth, I don’t much care for memorial services. The purpose of them is to speak well of the dead; literally, to eulogise. Such events work well for the powerful, the famous and the righteous. “A man of rare ability and distinction, rightly honoured and celebrated, he ever directed our attention away from himself,” said the Dean of Westminster of Prince Phillip. Memorial services don’t require much religion either, which is part of their popularity in a secular age. They are sandwiches of hymns and readings and speeches — and songs can be easily substituted for hymns, poems for Bible passages.

In my time as a priest, I have buried a number of men (always men, as it happens) about whom no one has a good word to say. I have buried paedophiles. I have buried murderers. No one wanted to come to their service. The funeral was just me, an empty crematorium, and their coffin. The weakness of the memorial service is that it doesn’t work in such circumstances. There is no eulogy to be had here because there are no good words. Memorial services exist for upstanding members of the community.

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But alone in the crem, undertakers having a fag outside, and armed only with the words of the Mass, there exists a kind of encounter with death, and with the evil that some people do, that for me at least is the absolute core of priestly ministry. Of course, most of us haven’t committed such crimes — but nonetheless, this still feels like the business end of the human condition. This is death as total desolation, without applause, without consolation. And of course, I pray for forgiveness, no matter what the crime. And for the victims of this person’s wickedness too. Which is why I often cannot myself forgive — that stuff is seriously above my pay grade. No, I will leave that bit to God.

There wasn’t a prayer of confession at this week’s memorial service for Prince Philip. Many would have loved to see Andrew perspire his way through that one. “We have done evil in your sight,” said my congregation together on Mothering Sunday. Some of us have more to confess than others. But confession and the search for redemption exists for those who have done great wrong as well as for those of us seeking reassurance as to the eternal consequences of our daily peccadillos.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” My church in South London has long been a black-majority church. Yet one of the most popular hymns we sing is one written by a former slave trader, John Newton. Had the memorial to him been in stone, no doubt we would have been asked to take it down, just as Jesus College Cambridge have been petitioning — unsuccessfully it now turns out — to have a memorial to a college benefactor, Tobias Rustat, taken down because of his links to the slave trade. Some months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury unwisely got involved, supporting its removal.

I have no problem with removing bits of old stone in churches and chapels. But I do find it problematic that we might do so on the basis of the virtue of those being memorialised. The church is not a house of moral virtue but a place for those seeking redemption — and that means a place for the wicked as well as for the just. “I once was lost and now am found,” wrote Newton.

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I am absolutely not arguing that we ought to see the good in people who have done great wrong, that somehow, deep down, they have within them a spark of goodness. Nor am I naive about the possibility of change. Priests are generally much more sceptical of human nature than many people expect. We have listened to so much self-justifying bullshit over the years — how could we not be? No, this is not about thinking people are better than they are. It is about God’s capacity to forgive in a way which exceeds my own.

The possibility of forgiveness is awkwardly related to morality. Secular versions of evil generally invite a kind of retributive logic in which wickedness deserves punishment. Forgiveness sticks in the craw of moral reasoning. Which is why, without God, morality inevitably becomes a kind of cancel culture — a righteous anger that responds to injustice with punishment. And such a culture will have no truck with what might look like attempts to rehabilitate wrongdoers — sweaty nonces, whether princes or not.

But fundamentally, Christianity isn’t much interested in morality, it’s interested in love. At its core, it’s about how to love the intrinsically unlovable. As a mother might love her unlovable child. As God might love us. Allowing Andrew to support her as she walked into the place where she made vows to support the Christian faith might just be one of the most obviously religious things the Queen has done. And when Christianity gets enacted at this level, we should expect to be scorned for it, not applauded.

And yet, at the same time, my heart sinks. You see, this isn’t just any royal tour — it’s a rescue mission. The itinerary takes in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize — all countries where Her Majesty the Queen happens to be head of state. But for how much longer?

Last year, Barbados declared itself a republic — and so it looks like Kate and Wills have been dispatched to shore-up the remaining monarchies in the region. Officially, the tour is about environmental issues, but no one’s fooled. This is very obviously a royal version of Operation Save Big Dog. And I’m not sure that’s at all wise. 

For a start, it raises the temperature. One moment, you’re a Bahamian or a Jamaican getting on with your day, the next a British Prince turns up and suddenly you’re forced to question why you have foreigner as a head of state.

Meanwhile, back home, all the wrong people will be milking the issue. That small band of fervent Remainers who take unwholesome pleasure from any hint of British humiliation will be overjoyed. Last week, they enjoyed a cheap thrill when the Russian foreign minister monstered Liz Truss in Moscow; so imagine what they’ll make of Prince William begging for his granny’s job in Jamaica. The spectacle of the Queen getting the sack from multiple countries would suit the declinists down to the ground. So much for Global Britain, they’ll chirp.

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By Helen Thompson

The solution, of course, is not to rise to the bait. That isn’t to say we should applaud the end of monarchy in Her Majesty’s far-flung realms; but we must accept that any such decision is none of our business. Indeed, Brexiteers, more than anyone, should support the right of a country to assert its independence in whatever way it deems appropriate. 

Besides, there’s nothing new to see here. Most of the nations that have gained their independence from Britain opted for their own heads of state. Some of them took their time getting around to it. The Maltese waited ten years, the Sri Lankans 14 and and the Mauritians 24. When Barbados became independent in 1966, the island’s first Prime Minister warned against “loitering on colonial premises after closing time”. But, in the event, the Barbadians waited 55 years.

I don’t blame them for hesitating. Having a head of state is an awkward business. Do you go for a powerful, but potentially polarising, figure like the Americans? Or do you go down the purely ceremonial route and end up with some has-been politician or boring academic? It’s no wonder that monarchy retains its sparkle. 

However, if you haven’t got a royal family of your own, where do you get one? Newly sovereign nations used to borrow minor royals from other countries. Today, Harry and Meghan might fancy a crack at Canada, but sadly the royal transfer window has long since closed. And so, for fourteen countries — from Antigua and Barbuda to Tuvalu — the default option is to carry on with the same monarch as the British. 

Which is fine, I’m sure we don’t mind sharing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this isn’t an deeply odd arrangement. In fact, it’s very nearly unique. Apart from Elizabeth II, only one other person in the world today serves as head of state in more than one country: Emmanuel Macron, who by virtue of being President of France is also a co-prince of Andorra.  

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So if any or all the remaining realms opt for a more conventional arrangement, we shouldn’t take it personally. Replacing the Queen with someone who actually lives in the country is part and parcel of expressing sovereignty.

Yet sorting out a local head of state isn’t the only piece of post-imperial paperwork to be dealt with. The constitutional relics of the British Empire can be found across the world. Take the Union Jack, which can still be found on the flags of four sovereign nations besides the UK, not to mention several Canadian provinces and Hawaii. It would be understandable if these nations and territories wanted a flag of entirely local design. In fact, that’s what the New Zealand government proposed in 2016, though it was rejected in a referendum.

But if they ever change their minds, then, again, we Brits shouldn’t take it personally. One of the things that most annoyed Brexit voters in 2016 was the EU’s fatuous habit of stamping its flag where it wasn’t wanted — on our passports, on our number plates and on public works built with our money. I’m delighted that other countries have freely chosen to make the Union Jack their own; but should they come to think differently, then a redesign wouldn’t just deserve our understanding, but our respect. After all, we didn’t mind when the Canadians changed their flag in 1965.  

Indeed, contrary to the ravings of progressive ideologues, the British are far from obsessed with the Empire. It is the contemporary Left — not the Right — that can’t let the past go. Yet there is one thing that both sides still fail to understand, which is that the post-imperial era is also heading into the rear view.

As we’re discovering with Brexit, breaking free from a deeply embedded political order takes place suddenly in some respects and gradually in others. But while a transitional phase is inevitable, it is not interminable. Sooner or later, the new order is complete. From that point, it is time to look to the future.

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We therefore need to think about our post-imperial institutions — and especially the Commonwealth. The organisation was created as a successor to empire, a way of fostering relationships with and among newly independent nations. But in the years and decades ahead, the living memories of that time are destined to dwindle away — a fact that will be painfully underlined when our Queen’s long reign comes to an end.

So while there’s every good reason to cultivate friendships between nations tied together by family, language and common values, basing that community on a long defunct empire is going to become irrelevant. If it is to survive for longer than the monarchies of the Caribbean, the Commonwealth will need to move on. The membership of Mozambique and Rwanda, neither of which were ever part of the British empire, should be taken as a precedent not an exception. 

George VI was the first head of the Commonwealth. His daughter was the second; Charles will take over when the time comes. It is an extraordinary thing, based on nothing more than the continued respect of 54 independent and equal nations for one family. How long will that respect endure? There’s something for William to think about while he plays with his son on the beach.

And that’s why people worry about Prince Charles. Our future king threatens to be a politically active monarch. “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself,” he told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. The Black Spider Memos were the most worrying of his interventions to date; they revealed him successfully pestering ministers for changes in policy and spending. It is impossible to imagine the Queen sending 27 notes to ministers in just over a year asking for, among other things, specific items of defence expenditure. Perhaps Dimbleby is right to say, “a quiet constitutional revolution is afoot.”

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The last monarch to have a major influence over modern politics staged a few vital interventions. As Jane Ridley, author of a new biography of George V, told me: “George’s role was not to change things politically, but to react to events and crises, which he did with aplomb. He enabled the appointment of prime ministers at times when, through war or through political realignment, the party system was not functioning to produce agreed candidates.”

The political system has matured and stabilised since then. But it’s certainly showing its age now. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, in the coming years, it will become so dysfunctional that a monarch must stick his nose in. And if he is obliged to be a more political monarch than his mother — long may she live — Charles ought to read Ridley’s account of his great-grandfather’s life, which provides a blueprint for how a monarch might effectively and acceptably involve himself in politics.

But it could also help Charles learn from his great-grandfather’s mistakes. For one thing, he needs to keep his voice down. George was notorious for blurting out his country-squire opinions. (“Of course you said it, George,” his wife, Queen Mary, admonishes him at one point, “we all heard you.”) Neutrality did not come naturally. He was so obviously a Tory. Just after he became king, when the Liberal Party was in power, he told the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, “I don’t know how you can go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.” These ministers weren’t exactly thrilled to be working with a rude, reactionary king who they thought was “a dunderhead”. Especially because the nation was in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

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The House of Lords had voted down a budget for the first time in centuries, and the Liberal government was threatening to neuter their lordships with the Parliament Bill, which would abolish the Lords’ veto of legislation. The Liberals prevailed — by manipulating the naïve new king. The PM, Asquith, bounced George V into a promise to create hundreds of new peers to vote through the Parliament Bill, if it didn’t get through the first time, by threatening a “King and Peers vs The People election”. George’s private secretary, Knollys, advised the king to make the promise — having not told him that if the Liberals resigned, the Tories would take over, avoiding the threatened election. (Knollys was rightly sacked for this low-grade duplicity.)

When the bill went to the Lords, it looked like Tory peers would defeat it. George couldn’t let that happen. If the Tory peers voted the Bill down, he would have to make good on his promise. And a supposedly neutral constitutional monarch would be in terrible trouble if he created hundreds of peers to favour one party over another. Talk about interfering.

His other private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, sprang to action. Ridley has been much praised for rescuing George from his reputation as a dullard. She ought to be celebrated, too, as a political historian: she has discovered that Stamfordham asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the bishops in the Lords to vote for the bill. A former Viceroy of India was summoned from Scotland to do the same. Lord St Aldwyn was “encouraged” to vote the right way, while Lord Rosebery was outright asked to do so. He did — and took 20 others into the lobby with him. The bill passed by 17 votes. There we have it: the palace’s interventions were decisive in a parliamentary vote.

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This is, supposedly, unthinkable. So strict is the non-interference principle, the monarch isn’t even allowed to go into the House of Commons, let alone have their flunkies tip the balance in a legislative vote. Imagine the uproar if it was revealed that Charles had persuaded enough of his aristocratic friends to squeeze a bill through Parliament. But George was dragged into politics by Asquith, and if the palace hadn’t interfered in the vote, he’d have ended up doing something even worse: making a load of new lords. Charles’s second lesson, then, is to keep out of things unless strictly necessary.

This was sharp work, especially from Stamfordham, one of the many supporting characters expertly handled by Ridley, who makes the page fizz, bristle, and shuffle with figures like the fantastically waspish Lady Geraldine Somerset, the heart-breaking Prince John, and the blinking but quietly effective Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead (you can practically hear him cough politely). Stamfordham is the best of them though: the king’s loyal retainer, darting around London, corralling politicians and producing clear, effective memos that kept the king better informed than his ministers. Like Jeeves, he always appears at the right moment with a solution to George’s woes.

Stamfordham’s advice kept George on the right side of the constitution. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, George drafted a crude letter threatening to veto a bill unless it was put to the electorate — something no monarch has done since 1708. The accepted wisdom is that the royal veto no longer exists. But Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert, has said that the use of the veto in similar situations remains an open question. Imagine Parliament sent Charles III a bill to abolish civil liberties. We might well prefer him to copy his great-grandfather’s threatened intervention than his mother’s scrupulous impartiality.

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It was the very real threat of civil war in Ireland — a threat the complacent Asquith met with endless rounds of champagne and bridge — that drove George to meddle. Sounding a lot like Charles in conversation with Dimbleby, he wrote to Asquith in 1914, “I cannot help feeling that the government is drifting and taking me with it.” And without George, Ulster might have been bloodier: he organised a non-partisan conference, for instance, and told Bonar Law, the Tory leader, to restrain his practically seditious rhetoric — which is more than we expect of the Queen, but less than we might get from Charles.

Although he liked to flex his fading prerogative — like when he outrageously tried to refuse Lloyd George an election in 1918 — George turned his role into an enabling one. When he was asked to open the new Parliament in Belfast, he insisted on giving a speech in favour of peace. The speech opened the way for talks, proposed by that quiet hero Lord Stamfordham, leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty. The palace were arbitrators, not partisans.

It took the same role when Bonar Law resigned as prime minister in 1923, he was too ill to nominate a successor. Commotion ensued. The choice was between the unknown Stanley Baldwin and the experienced Lord Curzon. Curzon was the obvious choice to almost everyone, especially himself. But he was a peer. And it was increasingly obvious that having a lord for PM was unacceptable in the new age of democracy. The Conservative party chairman was inundated with letters for Baldwin, but it took a royal intervention to sort out the kerfuffle. George, in consultation with the party’s biggest actors — including Balfour and Salisbury — picked Stanley.

Nowadays, the Queen waits for the party to appoint a leader, taking a purely ceremonial role (imagine if she’d weighed in on the choice between Boris and Hunt). But the systems we use for selecting leaders will be challenged on day. Charles might have to do what George did and make a neutral intervention to keep the system running. We might be grateful.

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But Charles will have to learn to moderate himself. Ridley’s portrait is a of a deeply Tory, reactionary man, who learned from experience to rise above politics and intervene without prejudice. The same king who bellowed at a footman who dropped a tray, “That’s right, break up the bloody palace!”, sharply admonished a coal rich aristocrat who was bad mouthing the unions to “try living on their wages before judging the strikes.” When the government wanted to stop banks paying Russian money to unions during the General Strike, George intervened, furious at this attempt to “touch the pockets” of strikers. He had come a long way since the 1911 railway strike, when he wrote to Asquith proposing legislation to stop strikes spreading. At that point, he and Mary were worried about “encouraging socialism… and pandering to the Labour party”. Like our Queen, he moved with the times.

Unlike previous biographers, Ridley takes no superior pleasure in painting George as a philistine. She combines a historian’s rigour with even-handed admiration for George’s gruff and prickly character. He wasn’t cultured or metropolitan, but he well understood the way the country was changing and how politics needed to follow, despite the fact that he didn’t appreciate Cezanne.

It’s not uncommon for people to mock Charles, either. He’s no philistine, but he is a crank. There may be more acceptance of his views, but like George he seems to belong to another world. While the Queen is timeless, Charles is old-fashioned. Where she is restrained, he is amateurishly enthusiastic, passionately gathering causes. He isn’t known for his temper (George was almost constantly in a foul mood), but he has the air of being high maintenance. Let’s hope he finds himself a courtier as good Lord Stamfordham.

What might be more important, though, is Camilla. George’s Queen, the redoubtable Mary, has, until now, been undervalued as an effective consort; but Ridley shows her at George’s side, an essential part of the process. “George always used to tell me everything first”, Mary said as a dowager. If Charles has to be a politically active monarch, his success may well rely on his famously enduring bond with Camilla.

But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

I wonder how many times she has done this? 10,000 people a year? For 69 years. Round up a bit. That’s three quarters of a million. A YouGov poll in 2018 found that 31% of the British public said that they have met or seen the Queen. By a long distance, she has been the most met monarch in history. Which is extraordinary given how shy she is. “You were so shy” Prince Philip recalled, thinking of their first meeting. She once told a friend that she was “terrified” of sitting next to strangers “in case they talk about things I’ve never heard of.” She soldiered on anyway. 

Fewer people will meet her now. Rest, withdrawal, and slight diminishments are her future. After all, she is 95. More audiences on Zoom, which she won’t like. Back to her Tupperware packed lunches and jigsaw puzzles by the fire. No more gin in the evening, on doctors orders. Her troublesome children to worry about. And now a widow. Her vulnerability only underlining once again how central she remains to this nation.

But this vulnerability has long been a characteristic of her reign. Just 5ft 4, she walks among suited and uniformed men towering over her. The only Prime Minister to ever look her directly in the eye was Margaret Thatcher. She was just 25, little more than a girl, when she acceded to the throne, and 27 when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the responsibility of the crown upon her head. 277 million people worldwide were gathered round their small black and white television sets.

What they didn’t see was the central moment of the whole ceremony. Then the Queen was disrobed of her crimson cloak and her jewellery removed. Here she sat in a simple white dress on a wooden throne to be anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury with holy oil, a mixture of ambergris, civet, orange flowers, roses, jasmine, cinnamon, musk and benzoin, ladled from a 12th century spoon. This is when the choir sings ‘Zadok the Priest’, its words extracted from the first Book of Kings, sung at every English coronation since 973 AD. These echoes of the Hebrew Bible are deliberate. She, like Solomon, was dedicated to God. Kings and Queens are supposed to be servants too. In Christian terms, like the servant king who emptied himself of power in order to achieve His most important work.

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This bit was too raw for the cameras, the daylight of technology threatening to cheapen the magic of sanctity, to paraphrase Walter Bagehot. The monarchy, he wrote in The English Constitution, was the “dignified” branch of power. Romantic, awesome, sublime. The government was merely “efficient” — cabinet ministers and civil servants chewing pencils and pushing paper.

Monarchy is a religious business — or else it would be nothing more than a technical constitutional necessity that sits at the intersection of money and class and power. And the essence of this religious business, the unseen holiness as it were, is a kind of vulnerability that places one’s life in the service of other people and of God. This is why all these headlines we now see about the Queen being “tired” and “exhausted” reflect something of the heart of her ministry — for that is what her role remains.

In theological terms, the crucial word is kenosis, which means self-emptying. Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” is how Paul’s letter to the people of Philippi puts it. What is being described here is a process by which the ego is set aside for the fullness of God’s love to enter into a human life. The less of me, the more of You. In this way vulnerability is regarded as the defining feature of precisely the sort of holiness that was there in that moment of the Queen’s anointing. A ‘tired” Queen is an exemplification of just this sort of kenotic servant monarchy. In other words, a “tired” Queen is the perfect sacrificial embodiment of what a monarch should be. And demonstrates why the well-being centred virtue-signalling showiness of some of her relatives is such a grotesque parody of the role.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

But to put this in more secular terms, vulnerability is the means of connection between people. Our vulnerability is how we are open to the other and the other is open to us. Which is why — and I don’t think I am just imagining this — the present vulnerability of the Queen is establishing a renewed kind of intimacy between the Queen and her subjects. Given the formality within which she is encased, it is entirely inappropriate to say this — but I want to give her a hug. We don’t need the handshakes or the curious peering into a familiar woman’s face to try and work out what is going on behind all that well-rehearsed small talk. The more vulnerable she becomes, the more human, and so also the more fully a Queen in the theological sense.

Such public defencelessness is rare, at least in leaders. The last one I can remember achieving anything like this was Pope John Paul II. His last few years — and these may well be the last few years of the Queen’s life — were marked by a reduced physical capacity, while at the same time he became a more intense version of what he was called to be. To be a Pope is partly to perform a certain function. But when ill health robbed him of the ability to perform that function, all the job description utilitarian bits of being Pope dropped away and his, as it were, symbolic role was more fully exposed.

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Give the Queen a break

By Sam Leith

A tired dying Pope turned out to be a beautiful example of what a Pope should be. In his pain, and specifically in the dignity of his final years, he expressed a kind of solidarity with the suffering of the world. That, in turn, modelled the solidarity of God with human beings as expressed in the final hours of Jesus, a king, a man crowned with thorns. In this vulnerability, he became most fully the Pope as saint.

Thankfully, the Queen is not yet this ill. But she is 95 and easily the longest serving monarch in history. Her Christian faith has long been a comfort to her. And this is especially evident now, in the twilight of her years. Indeed, the version of the Queen that we are now seeing is the greatest of her roles as our monarch. It is not important if she misses COP26 or other political talking shops. She is doing something much more important now.

This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.

Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.

There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”

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But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.

Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes”; Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy.

Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. This isn’t just bluster. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”.

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And yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. (He gives thanks that he inherited the “long, flat Lascelles thighs.”) His main interest as a young man — just like Edward VIII’s — was to be active. A series of possible careers — Foreign Office, stockbroker, journalist — were tried, hated, failed or simply never started. Without the war, he would have been edging towards becoming a drifter. Instead, despite a somewhat inactive war, he was awarded the Military Cross.

After the Armistice, he worked for his brother-in-law, the Governor of Bombay. Writing to his uncle Adolphus Liddell (another slightly lost soul) he said: “there is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.” We might be surprised at this lack of admiration for imperial flummery. This is, after all, Alan Lascelles: reactionary, establishment stalwart, slayer of marriages, arch defender of the old order. But it was precisely this slightly detached view that made him such a good courtier.

Lascelles believed in the substance of royalty, not just the display. The day after George V died, nearly 20 years after that complaint about imperial flummery, the King’s body was taken to a little church at the end of the garden at Sandringham for a small private ceremony ahead of the large, public spectacle:

“The guardsmen, with scarcely a sound, slung the coffin on their shoulders and laid it before the altar; and there, after a very brief service, we left it, to be watched for thirty-six hours by the men of the Sandringham Estate. I daresay when all the tumult and shouting dies, that little ceremony will remain in my mind as the most impressive of all.”

Lascelles was not the sort of Royalist who was in it for the memorial plates and days out at the park. He was a genuine believer. He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration. He was burying the head of his tribe. This is why there was such a kerfuffle with the new King. Edward VIII wanted to run a very different sort of tribe.

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Lascelles’s history with Edward VIII is essential to understanding later events. When he returned from India in 1920, his friend Letty Elcho brought him a letter offering a job with Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales. Lascelles was attracted to the job partly because St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but mostly because “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince, and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual”. Remarkably, had this job not come along, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm.

This deep admiration would not last, and Lascelles’s ability to see the ridiculous in the Royal was important to his role as a courtier. After nine years of watching the Prince drink, gamble, womanise, neglect his duties, be rude to members of the British establishment, and — shockingly for the feudal Alan — show very little interest when there was a scare that George V might die, he stormed out in 1929, in the sort of resignation so many of us have dreamed of making:

When he asked me why I wanted to leave him, I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.

Most of us, after such an exit, would never go back. And Lascelles had only drifted into the role. Quitting it, he called himself “an inverted Falstaff” (because he was thin, just as thin in middle age as when he was young), leaving Prince Hal to “work out his own damnation”. But, after two years of reading and gardening with his family in the country, and a stint working for the Governor General in Canada, he was asked to re-join the Royal staff.

At first, he refused. The job was with George V, who he once described as “the godhead” — but Lascelles had said in his resignation letter: “Very few men can go on being private secretaries all their lives, and I am not one of them.” And besides, he pointed out, when the king died, he would be in a very difficult position, to put it mildly, having told the next-in-line exactly what he thought of him. Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary — who was hiring Lascelles to be his assistant — told him not to worry. The King was in splendid health and had years left in him. Lascelles wrote to his wife Joan saying he was going to take the job: “It is no use going about the world singing ‘God Save the King’ if one isn’t prepared to assist the Deity when called upon.”

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The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

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And so, in January 1936, he travelled to Norfolk to start his new job. He had found a first-class carriage reserved for him at Liverpool Street. Once the journey was underway, “a young man appeared in the doorway of my carriage. I was about to tell him to go away when I recognised him as the Duke of York.” It was a good thing he recognised him. The young man would accede as George VI within 12 months, and Lascelles would become his Private Secretary in 1943. The Duke of York said to him halfway through the journey, “What’s all this about the King not being well?” George V died within four days. The soulless Edward was king.

And so, from a combination of lassitude, duty, and blue-blooded patriotism, Lascelles ended up as Assistant Private Secretary to a man he was morally repulsed by. Gentlemen do not just drop out of Royal service because they dislike the new King. It is perhaps surprising that Edward kept Lascelles on. But it seems obvious from this distance — as it seemed to Lascelles then — that Edward had never planned to make it that far and wasn’t going to stay long.

The royal family is meant to bring spectacle to our lives by displaying theirs: a glittering pageant of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. As the monarchy lost power through the nineteenth century, they replaced it with performance. Public engagement became Queen Victoria’s way of maintaining her relevance. And this new mode of royal existence is part of what made Edward VIII such a star as Prince of Wales: his tours of America, Canada, and South Africa were massive successes. But by the end of George V’s reign, British royalty had consolidated a new covenant with the people: “private probity, public spectacle.”

Lascelles was the high priest of the Georgian model and had seen first-hand that Edward was all public spectacle and no private probity. A courtier out of duty (and because he found nothing else to do), he realised that unless the royal family stuck to its principles — to the principles forced on it by a changing world — it would suffer. To the extent that he was a propagandist, an enemy of Edward VIII, a reactionary, and everything else he is claimed to be, it was because he realised the royal family had very little choice. Much of what Lascelles is said to have brought about may well have been inevitable as monarchy adjusted to democracy.

He had always been a slightly unwilling courtier. (He told his daughter long after he retired that, if he could have his life again, he would breed horses. “Racehorses, or cart-horses: any sort of horses.”) He was good at it, though. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually be remembered as the last of the old school who helped the monarchy transition to its modern function — or as a crusty old reactionary who needlessly destroyed a clutch of happy lives. But when his archives are eventually dusted off, I doubt we will find any dark secrets in there. We already know the fundamentals. He was a man who believed in royal morals underpinning royal spectacles.

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The immortal Princess Diana

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What would he make of the modern monarchy? In his 1990 review of Philip Ziegler’s Edward VIII, Christopher Hitchens observed that “the magic of the throne is now inextricable from Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump — the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture.” This line might stand as a eulogy for the Lascelles’s school: that there is little point in having a Royal Family unless they adhere to certain difficult and sometimes out-of-date principles. For Lascelles, as for the public at that time, those principles were about marriage. One of the last things he did was sit in the garden of Kensington Palace to watch the firework celebrations of Charles and Diana’s wedding. The next day, he asked for news about the event every few minutes, anxious it should all be going well. He died two weeks later.

Undoubtedly, the sort of revelations we have heard about the Royal Family since would have been anathema to his sense of decorum. But Tommy didn’t speculate. A young man from the BBC once tried to persuade him to appear in what Lascelles called “a television orgy on The Future of the British Monarchy”. Lascelles gave a forthright reply: “I told him I would as soon walk stark naked down Piccadilly.” We might find it easy to dismiss him as an old fogey. But how confidently can we say that we are beyond his concerns about private probity? Are we above worrying about what makes an acceptable royal spouse?

“My Lords and members of the House of Commons,” Her Majesty the Queen said at the State Opening of Parliament yesterday morning, “My government’s priority is to deliver a national recovery from the pandemic that makes the United Kingdom stronger, healthier and more prosperous than before. To achieve this my government will level up opportunities across all parts of the United Kingdom, supporting jobs, businesses and economic growth, and addressing the impact of the pandemic on public services.”  

She did her duty, as she always does. But Her Maj, to put it as forthrightly as possible, looked mightily fed up. No attempt was made to conceal that this is a speech written for her, read by her as a matter of constitutional form, and that any enthusiasm she may or may not have for the material is quite irrelevant. This was signalled in the very opening words, which she read glumly from a pamphlet with a brief upward glance at her audience but not even the hint of a twinkle. 

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By Mary Harrington

That she ends up with such unwieldy political buzzphrases in her mouth is not just the fault of a careless or inept speechwriter; nor even of the unavoidable juxtaposition between a monarch born in the age of the wireless and a government in the age of WiFi. It is a symptom of the widening gap between what the monarch is intended to stand for, and the language in which politics is now conducted. To put it in Bagehot’s terms, as the “efficient” part of the constitutional settlement becomes more technocratic, so the “dignified” part becomes less dignified.    

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Harry, the Prince of PR

By Sam Leith

On that occasion she projected respectful sincerity as she said: “I know what a rare privilege it is to address a joint meeting of your two houses. Thank you for inviting me.” She offered a strong and resonant affirmation of national fraternity (gently finessing the constitutional differences) when she said: “The concept so simply described by Abraham Lincoln as ‘government by the people, of the people, for the people’ is fundamental to our two nations. Your congress and our parliament are the twin pillars of our civilisations and the chief among the many treasures we have inherited from our predecessors. We, like you, are staunch believers in the freedom of the individual and the rule of a fair and just law.” 

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How the Queen brings us hope

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But the first body — the royal body — must go imperturbably on despite everything. If Elizabeth Windsor could sit down with Oprah and “speak her truth” I suspect she would have some very salty things to say indeed. But she never could, and she never would. This monarch is determined, for as long as she can, and whatever the cost to her soul and peace of mind, to keep the show on the road. It would befit the government to show a bit of respect for that devotion to duty. Sheesh: “Level up.” Give the poor old doll a break.  

Even two years in I was determined to pour scorn on the harmless young couple: “Prissy… simpering… clothes horse… will only ever be remembered as one of the House of Windsor’s plus-ones… Diana Lite,” I snarked in the Daily Mail of all places.

To be fair, I have always admitted to being just about the worst judge of character in Christendom; put me in a room with three saints and a sociopath and we all know who I’d be blood brothers with by sunrise. True to form, just a few years after laying into the Duchess of Cambridge, I was bigging up a certain American actress thus: “Meghan Markle has never waited soppily for some prince to rescue her. In fact, it seems far likelier that it is she who will rescue the prince.”

What happened to make me transfer my allegiance from Sussex to Cambridge? Two things: hypocrisy and the pandemic.

The first can largely be blamed on the House of Sussex. There is, after all, something grating about lecturing hoi polloi about carbon footprints when your Louboutins are click-clacking up the steps of Elton John’s private jet for the nth time. Later, while their subjects were being told not to leave their houses, there was something farcical about the speed with which the Sussexes struck out for what one feels was their destination all along: a gated community in La La Land; slipping over the Canadian border like draft-dodgers in reverse.

How different from the home life of our own dear future queen. Kate has had a good pandemic, upbeat and modest, sharing photographs of the children and her thoughts on home-schooling; visiting businesses affected by lockdown and just getting on with it. Her appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was unexpected and beautifully judged; she looked like a thoughtful, sad student performing a silent and simple act of sisterhood.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Meghan’s scenery-eating style of feminism, which at its worst saw her writing “inspirational messages” for sex workers on bananas. We all know a Meghan. Sitting on her throne of sorrows, she is the moist-eyed paragon of passive-aggressiveness, soldiering bravely on in the hope that someone will find the heart to ask: “Are you ok?” As for those not brave enough to break free from the Firm, especially that stuck-up sister-in-law with her stiff upper lip — well, she’s just trapped and bottling it all up. Far better to let it all hang out and hold a pity party on prime-time TV.

How unlike Kate. She seems refreshingly liberated from the modern notion that mithering on about one’s troubles will in some way solve them; the Markle-isation of mental health, whereby the super-privileged signal that they too are in pain, so please don’t envy them all this lovely stuff. The Heads Together initiative — led by the Cambridges and Harry — may tick the fashionable boxes, but it appears to have far more to do with service than with therapy: supporting young people, veterans and homeless charities.

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Meanwhile, the pandemic has made us impatient with the rich and famous lamenting their lives from luxury fortresses, something which led to the all-time low audience for the Oscars on Sunday. In Kate, we see the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, between stoicism and splattering one’s problems all over the shop.

Everything she did which I judged so ungenerously a decade ago reflects well on her now. “Waity Katie” passed the test which far more aristocratic young women have failed: the ability to stare straight back into a spotlight with perfect self-possession.

Though the likes of me gushed over Meghan for bringing “diversity” to the House of Windsor, we failed to register that the descendant of coal-miners and trolley dollies was equally as ground-breaking, and certainly more mocked by her prince’s inner circle (“Doors to manual!”) than Meghan ever was for her mixed-race heritage. Kate even has an embarrassing relation of her own; frisky Uncle Gary, proud owner of the Ibiza shag-pad known as La Maison de Bang Bang, who was welcomed whole-heartedly to the wedding.

She always gives the impression of having known what she wanted, and to be happy with what she has — an attractive quality in a world where screwing up and then griping about it passes for being “authentic” and where those who wear their troubles lightly are accused of being “in denial”. Much as I adored Diana, and found her expressions of emotion affecting and fresh, such travails are now the norm; everyone has an eating disorder, everyone doesn’t get on with their in-laws.

Similarly, I suspect she knows that another bout of over-privileged marital combat played out at peak viewing time is not something the public wants or needs. No one knows what goes on in any marriage and though the Cambridge’s relationship was subject to the usual tittle-tattle about William’s “affair” and her “rural rival” a few years back, they appear to have come through the rumours even stronger.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Most of all, I like Kate for what she doesn’t do as much as for what she does. She will never throw herself down a flight of stairs, have her toes sucked by an ugly American or travel on a plane called the Lolita Express. Not yet forty, she is maturing from a coltish girl to a grande dame; at the funeral of Prince Philip, perfectly coiffed and clothed and masked, I thought she had a look of the actress Claire Bloom, in the way a young Queen Elizabeth did too.

And so the soft spot that even a hardened republican like me has for Queen Elizabeth II appears to be transferring to her granddaughter-in-law, the perfect queen-in-waiting. It’s telling that the only members of the family not to see an upswing in popularity after Prince Philip’s funeral were Harry and Meghan, reflecting as it did a life of service so profound that it was the only time I recall the deceased giving express instructions that they should not be given a eulogy. The fashion for publicly foisting one’s emotions which marked this century’s Troubled Teens is hopefully on the way out, helped along by this young woman of humble origins who appears to believe that “Never complain, never explain” is a pretty good rule to live by.