In episode two, Jonathan Pryce’s Philip tells his (much) younger blonde friend Penny: “The one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together” is “grow in separate directions”. His imagined advice to the vulnerable Diana (preparing to detonate her Andrew Morton “bomb”) is even more incriminating: “Be creative… you can do whatever you want, you can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness”, as long as “you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public”. But the show doesn’t dare go further.

Likewise Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth has always been a tough subject for biographers. There is no hard evidence that Philip was unfaithful, and while Her Majesty was still alive the issue was all the more sensitive. This may explain the strange detour in Gyles Brandreth’s otherwise excellent biography Philip, the Final Portrait. Promising an interrogation of the Duke’s reputation as a womaniser, Brandreth seeks to establish what Freud would have made of Philip’s female-heavy early childhood. (He was a longed-for son arriving late into a family of four girls.)

Brandreth explores the hypothetical possibility of Philip having “penis awe”, perhaps even “phallic swagger” — both conditions which apparently stem from disproportionate female attention and devotion when young. He tells us what we already know: that Philip liked the company of young attractive women, but his discussion with a Freudian psychologist is inconclusive. Apparently, men with “phallic swagger” aren’t always serial adulterers.

Had Brandreth really wanted to land a psychobabble blow, he would have looked into the male role models in Philip’s life. There was his father’s failed marriage and glamorous lady friends in the Riviera, his uncle Lord Mountbatten’s notoriously “open” marriage, not to mention his Greek uncle Big George and Marie Bonaparte’s “unconventional” relationship. Monogamy did not have much currency in the Duke’s wider family.

In many respects Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage was in keeping with the pair’s pedigree, upbringing and exceptional status. What went on behind closed doors in their marriage is a moot point and one which has disproportionately focused on the importance of monogamy at the expense of arguably greater goals — an enduring marriage and stable family monarchy.

Aristocrats have long played by different rules, and in the first half of the 20th century, when marriages were often undertaken for practical and dynastic reasons, an exclusive physical relationship was rarely a prerequisite for a lasting union. Between the wars, commentators promoted the idea of emotional and spatial independence in marriage. In 1935 co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council, Edward Griffith, recommended “the independence of each must be guaranteed”. Others were more explicit: “A woman may love her husband with all her heart, but even love needs an occasional rest.” And those women, invariably without an income of their own, had to shut up and put up.

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But times were changing fast. Service girls, having enjoyed rare freedom outside the domestic arena during the war, bought into new idealised notions of a companionate marriage. These modern unions were based on affection, friendship, and sexual gratification; it was anticipated that a spouse would meet all of their partner’s emotional and physical needs. Or as a panellist on the 1954 Royal Commission of Marriage and Divorce put it: “We are coming to expect more and more of our marriages.” It was these expectations that meant “marriages today are at risk to a greater extent than formerly”.

Take 99-year-old Daphne Attridge for instance. As a young woman, she served in the female army (ATS) during the war and keenly followed Philip and Elizabeth’s love story. Like many, she got engaged during the conflict (and promptly unengaged). Until she found her perfect man, she pinned her romantic hopes vicariously on the royal couple’s relationship. “We wanted to know they were in love. That mattered to us.”

This post-war companionate model of marriage has endured, but marriages in general have not necessarily. As the Commission predicted, higher expectations led to greater disappointment and a rapidly rising divorce rate. Despite the best efforts of both church and state, marital breakdown quickly became a hallmark of modern living, with Elizabeth and Philip’s union an almighty exception. But then, they were playing by different rules, weren’t they?

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There is no doubting the late Queen’s devotion to her husband; she was sticking press cuttings about sailor Philip’s wartime adventures into her scrapbook aged 14. As for the nomadic Prince, steadfast Elizabeth was a game-changer. However, their union lent heavily on more independent models of marriage in vogue in the early 20th century: Elizabeth did not hang out with Philip’s “funny friends” who entertained him in Soho supper clubs, at Cowdray Park playing polo, and on (and off) the River Solent. She avoided Cowes Week “like the plague”, pursued separate equine hobbies, had agency and income that vastly outstripped her husband’s and slept in her own bedroom. (According to the author and campaigner Marie Stopes, interwar champion of Married Love, the latter was a sensible move. Apparently separate bedrooms prevent “everyday association” which “tends to reduce the keen pleasure each takes in the other”.)

By all accounts, even Charles was irked by his father’s latter-day friendship with Penny; perhaps he was also miffed that there had been a spread featuring 13 women in Tatler, entitled “The Duke of Edinburgh’s Fan Club”. And yet somehow, in both cases, Philip got away with his reputation enhanced: a raffish old man at worst. Who could resist the outspoken Duke in his dotage, stumbling around Sandringham, riding carriages with his sometime blonde companion and driving when dangerously old? Like his father, Charles had also inherited Mountbatten as a pre-marriage mentor, but with very different results. Times had irrevocably changed. The posh propensity to turn a blind eye no longer washed in a society where divorce was prevalent, and modern celebrity promised riches outside the royal club.

Elizabeth and Philip’s union was forged in a different age, when commitment to monarchy and marriage trumped everything else. Ultimately their 73-year union not only stood the test of time, it was a great success, and one which the couple were justifiably proud of. The Queen, never an open book, divulged her tips for a successful marriage in 1972 — the year of the couple’s Silver Wedding anniversary — explaining that a Christian marriage should be “tolerant and understanding”. Fifty years later, the Duke confirmed the Queen had “tolerance in abundance”.

Exactly what that says about the dynamics within our late monarch’s marriage is open to interpretation, as the Duke no doubt intended. After all, Elizabeth and Philip came from an old-fashioned school of thought — it was important to be seen, but, where possible, royalty should not let in too much “daylight upon the magic”. As Walter Bagehot explained, “its mystery is its life”.

Back in 1994, Charles suggested that when king, he might become Defender of Faith, instead of Defender of The Faith, the title given to him as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. There was a storm of criticism, and some years after, he clarified what he meant: he would keep the royal title while also protecting other faiths. His openness to those faiths — especially Islam — did lead many to question his commitment to the Church. On the surface, at least, he seems to veer towards syncretism or even a covert form of secularism; an appeal to a multicultural Britain no longer willing to assert Christianity as the one true faith.

But the story is more complex. Charles — who might just be Britain’s modern-day philosopher king — has long been affiliated with Perennialism, a school of thought which holds that there is one universal truth which is present, to varying degrees, within all traditional religions. As the patron of the Temenos Academy, an educational charity dedicated to the study of Perennialism, Charles has done more to cultivate this philosophy than any other modern thinker. Unconventional as that philosophy might sound, it is one fit for a hereditary monarch: its purpose being not to subvert tradition, but to revive it.

Charles has expressed particular sympathy with the Traditionalist School, a branch of Perennialism. Led by the French philosopher René Guénon, the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon, and the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Traditionalists emerged in the 19th century in reaction to the materialist ideologies of the Enlightenment. Its proponents believed that modernity had left humanity bereft of its spiritual dimension, and thought that this could be remedied by the metaphysical teachings contained within traditional religions.

For Guénon, pre-modern civilisations had oriented themselves “vertically” towards transcendence, with every aspect of life, from politics to art, corresponding to the order of the cosmos and the nature of God. But with the proliferation of “profane philosophy”, the dimensions of existence had become purely horizontal, extending only to things of this world. The result is what he famously called “The Reign of Quantity”, in which all human activity is rationalistic and utilitarian, focused on material progress rather than man’s ascension toward the divine.

Charles, who has himself invoked the concept of The Reign of Quantity, also seems to lament a world which no longer reaches for God. He has devoted himself not only to the reconsecration of nature, as is evident in his environmentalism, but also the reconsecration of art. In promoting the mastery of traditional crafts through the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, he echoes Guénon’s view that creativity should not be a mode of mere self-expression, but a vessel of transcendence. The students at his school “can experience the beauty of the order of nature — a spiritual, sacred beauty, connecting the whole of creation”.

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Protecting hedgerows, trees and ancient crafts is all very well. Where Charles’s philosophy becomes controversial is in the fact that he, like Guénon, is willing to draw inspiration from the religions of both East and West. His suggestion that Islam “can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost”, for instance, appears to reflect the Perennialist position that it is possible to illuminate one’s own tradition with the light of others, for nestled within all of them is the same universal truth.

Does this suggest that Perennialism, if allowed to flourish, would one day lead to the merging of all the world’s belief systems into one? Those sceptical of Charles’s openness towards other faiths fear precisely that: a “one world religion”. In our postmodern age, it is not hard to envision a world which has dissolved all particularities to make way for an ideological monoculture.

One hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton imagined what the beginnings of such a world might look like. His novel The Flying Inn is set in a future England where the elites, romantically inclined towards the idea of a universal religion and politically motivated to unite East and West, embrace a strange, progressive form of Islam which they see to be less superstitious than Christianity. The end result is something that resembles neither traditional Islam nor Christianity, but a ghastly syncretism which destroys the country’s identity (and its pubs).

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But Chesterton’s dystopian England is not what the Perennialists had in mind. In fact, they were more critical than anyone of syncretism — with Guénon writing sharp polemics against New Age spirituality and its subversion of tradition — and would certainly have feared the coming of a “one world religion”. They emphasised the need to be firmly rooted in one faith in order to attain spiritual insight, and were highly critical of the homogenisation of cultures promoted by a globalising, secularising world. This, Guénon believed, caused the “flattening” of knowledge and ultimately sealed off higher truths.

We can rest assured that Charles has no intention of subverting Christianity. But he does believe, in the spirit of Perennialism, that glimmers of its light can be discerned elsewhere — perhaps in places less dimmed by modernity. That’s why he may draw inspiration from Islamic or Dharmic thought, and yet still remain the steadfast defender of the Christian faith.

Admittedly, Charles’s attitude to defending that faith is somewhat unorthodox. But in the 21st century, where there is no choice but to accept religious pluralism, it might be the only way to go about it. Perennialism has the virtue of being able to welcome multiple faiths, while also maintaining a conception of absolute truth. Whereas other leaders might surrender their truth in the name of inclusivity — instead allowing each religious group to have its “own truth” in true postmodern fashion — Charles’s philosophy allows for religious difference without slipping into relativism and the eventual abandonment of the sacred.

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The path from pluralism to relativism is all too easily taken. When Nietzsche remarked that “there are various eyes… and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth”, he foreshadowed the postmodern response to pluralism that ends in the denial of objectivity. Today, this takes the form of states privatising religion and reducing it to an aspect of cultural diversity rather than a source of insight that could benefit us all. Likewise, when identity politics calls to “represent” religion, it too often reduces it to a point of intersectionality on par with race and class rather than something which points to a shared eternal truth.

But Charles, our philosopher king, is a firm believer in eternal truth. He is able to respond to pluralism in such a way that results in neither syncretism nor secularism. Instead, his philosophy allows religious difference to go beyond the secular paradigm of inclusion and reintroduce a much-needed spiritual dimension to public life — for everyone.

He is, of course, in the best position to do so. The symbolic function of monarchy is to point to something higher; to be the “vertical” axis which reaches for transcendence above “horizontal” reality with all its diversity and conflict. Perhaps his reign might strive to overcome The Reign of Quantity in this way, made all the more possible by the fact that his kingship allows him to respond to modernity from a station that is not political, but spiritual.

While some seek to tear the modern world down in a way that is distinctly post-modern, Charles — in returning to the primordial foundations of existence — represents something pre-modern. Far from betraying tradition, King Charles III might just save it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, it was extreme privilege that defined royals back then. Today a very large part of the public can afford fancy dining, expensive hotels, and foreign travel — at least from time to time — and most can expect to retire to a comfortable bed in a pleasantly ambient temperature. But not so long ago these were the prerogatives of only a small share of the population, at the top of which sat royalty.

Yet despite their elite lifestyles, monarchs and their consorts can tell us a surprising amount about how life in Britain has changed over the past 300 years, and in no department more than that of demography. In fact, the whole demographic story of Britain since the early 18th century can be told through the reproductive history of four queens.

Let’s start with Queen Anne who came to the throne in 1702. Her sister Mary had died childless in her early thirties — a death immortalised by the funeral music of Henry Purcell, who followed her to the graveyard within less than a year. Mary’s husband William III — first cousin of Mary and Anne as well as Mary’s fellow monarch — died some years later in his early fifties with no heir, so the throne passed to Anne. By the time Anne died, just short of 50 years of age, she had apparently had 18 pregnancies, and although one of her offspring did make it past infancy, he did not survive his mother. And so, with Anne’s Catholic half-brother excluded for religious reasons, the call went out to distant — Protestant — relations in Hanover.

The reason that Anne’s reproductive failures are of interest is that they stand as an extreme but not atypical example of the sad human condition for most of history, during which not even royalty could shield an individual from the cruelty of nature. This was the unchanging world which the Reverend Thomas Malthus described a century later, in which humans bred like rabbits and died like flies. Populations pressed forwards like Europe’s in the Middle Ages, only to be pushed back by plague or war. Ultimately humans stretched the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity at a time when crop yields were still very meagre and hunger never far off for most of the population.

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But the world which Malthus described as eternal was coming to an end. Already in Malthus’s day, death rates were plunging, life expectancies extending and the population growing rapidly. A few years after his death the young Victoria came to the throne: her reign would redefine population patterns in the British Isles and set a precedent which was to spread well beyond it. Victoria had nine children and each of them outlived her, even though she managed to live a good three decades longer than Anne. Again, this is exemplary of trends at the time but a rather extreme example; infant mortality remained very high and only began falling towards the end of Victoria’s reign. To be survived by nine out of nine children was indeed a feat, but far less miraculously atypical than it would have been a century or two earlier.

Britain’s population explosion under Queen Victoria was one of the most significant events of the 19th century. As well as providing a ready labour force to transform the country into the workshop of the world, it supplied a huge excess population that settled in colonies from Vancouver to Tasmania. The Anglosphere as we know it today could not have come into existence without the millions who left the British Isles and settled new lands, creating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And until the latter years of the 19th century — when other European countries started to follow suit and export their surplus citizens — the people of the United Kingdom provided the bulk of the inflow that turned the United States from a handful of colonies hugging the Atlantic in 1800 to the behemoth it was becoming a century later.

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Just as Queen Anne and Queen Victoria represented the demography of their ages, so too did Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A Scottish aristocrat and one of ten, she married the future George VI, one of six. But, typical of a generation which came to reproductive maturity in the inter-war years, Elizabeth and her husband did not follow in the fertile footsteps of their parents but limited their progeny to two. Already before the First World War family sizes were shrinking, with a fertility rate in 1914 in the UK of about three children per woman. By 1939, it was down to two. This was the next phase in what we now call the demographic transition, a change which happened first in the UK then spread to the rest of Europe and to North America and in more recent decades to the rest of the world. After a period of falling death rates, a more urban and educated population produces fewer children, as they have more hope of their survival.

But demography would not be so interesting if it did not have twists and kinks. The Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, defied the demographic trend of low birth rates and small families by marrying younger than her mother and having twice as many children. And again, she was typical of her generation. After the Second World War there was a perhaps inevitable baby boom as the men returned home and a certain amount of catching up took place in terms of family formation. But with some ups and down, the baby boom went on for the best part of two decades, creating the baby boomers of whom those of us born in 1964 (including Prince Edward) represent a final hurrah.

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After Elizabeth II’s final child was born, the country’s fertility rate again began to tumble. Each of her children has produced just two, representative of the country as a whole. And although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bucked the national trend by having three, Meghan and Harry certainly represent a large swathe of their generation by not only stopping at two but making an environmental virtue of the fact.

Perhaps it is surprising that so much of our demographic history can be seen through the lives of four women who were so exceptional in terms of their social status. But maybe we should not be shocked that, as well as being heirs to the throne, each royal generation also exists in its own time, influencing and being influenced by the wider trends around them.

To circumvent this, they projected all that patriotic feeling, all that flag-waving and ceremony and ritual, onto one family — who weren’t even British originally. So instead of days commemorating national independence, or great military victories against rivals, which would all feel a bit foreign and vulgar, they celebrated the birthdays, weddings and funerals of this one family, who they both venerated and sort of tormented (their loutish media even hounded a princess to her death). What a strange country.

It’s testimony to the British monarchy’s continual survival and relative strength that the decision of an Oxford College common room to take down the portrait of the Queen feels significant.

While it’s sad on the one hand, it also seems strange and archaic that they even had a picture of the Queen in the first place. It would be like finding out that real-life prison crime lords had pictures of Her Majesty in their cells, like Noel Coward in The Italian Job. Or that they were still playing the national anthem before gigs, as in the Beatles’ day. A cultural revolution has swept the country, and the monarchy remains the last vestige of the old order.

Despite our common disagreements over life at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the monarchy has so far largely avoided entanglement in our culture wars, possessing a fairly impeccable record on race and espousing a more general British Niceness that covers most ranges of opinion. (It’s telling that the Queen’s removal was spearheaded by an American student, unironically protesting “colonialism”.) Yet that will start to change, and as we live through the final chapter of the second Elizabethan era, more trouble lies ahead for the Royals.

The monarchy’s great skill is to build a narrative, in particular to preserve the fiction that the nation is an extended family, with the Windsors as its representatives. Their life cycle is celebrated as the nation’s, their joy is our joy, their sorrow is the same as the blows and hardships we endure.

Royal weddings become a symbol of the nation’s hope and optimism, and the family’s most recent high point was the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Even I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the day, watching with four generations of in-laws; because modern life so unnaturally starves us of the endorphins produced by group activity, it can feel exhilarating when things are done together.

It even got me ruminating on the meaning of monarchy and its role within a hyper-social species such as ours, as well as the importance of ritual. Although in fairness, I had started drinking at 11am on a Friday, which might have had something to do with it.

Even in my area, one of those pleasant London inner suburbs where luxury beliefs are the norm, there was a pile of unsold Guardians the next day while all the copies of the Mail and Express had gone. (The only other time I’d seen that in Haringey was after the riots that summer, reflecting the most basic of human instincts – venerate the chief and protect the tribe from violence.)

More recently, we shared in the family’s sorrow at the funeral of Prince Philip, who would have turned 100 today. As well as his work with charities and the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, much of the funeral television coverage featured married couples who, like the Queen and Duke, had enjoyed or endured decades of marriage together, and so the royal union came to represent their own. The Royal Family’s suffering was theirs, just as their joy was, which is why Britain’s small band of eccentric republicans always have such a hard time not appearing mean-spirited.

Yet the royals are not ordinary people; indeed, in some strange way they are throwbacks to the pre-Christian world where the separation between divine and mortal was ambiguous. It’s well known that Prince Philip was worshipped as a god on one island, but as a reader on The Rest is History podcast pointed out, Philip was the closest modern equivalent to a hero from legend. Like Aeneas he had to flee his homeland following a war in the land of Ilium, and came to wander the sea like Odysseus; he fought heroically in war, was a great chariot racer (he was even a pilot) and married a foreign queen before achieving divine status.

This is Britain, though, and unlike the ancients we don’t like boasting about great deeds of war and renown. So he just became known as Phil the Greek who liked insulting foreigners.

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The thing is, we aren’t at all like these people — which is why the system works. Meritocracy is, to mangle Churchill’s famous quote, the worst system except all the others. It’s better we reward people for gaming the Oxbridge system or making a pile in finance rather than for their ancestor’s ability to swing a sword on horseback. Yet it also creates numerous problems of its own, some of which are eased by monarchy.

Chiefly, there is the quite serious problem of runaway status-anxiety, which manifests itself in all sorts of problems, ranging from mental health to over-spending to political radicalisation.

Royalty takes the pressure off. Prince William is roughly my age, but I am never going to compare myself to him, nor feel like a failure in comparison. In contrast, I might compare myself with that pillock from school or university who goes on to become far more successful than me.

Meritocracy also wears down the sense of noblesse oblige, the idea that elites have a duty to care for those less fortunate, and to feel humble and grateful. There are now almost no mechanisms for suppressing the ego and narcissism of the ruling class, and so the Royal Family are almost a freakish exception in this regard.

The rituals associated with monarchy may seem arcane and even absurd, but they provide a function in drawing prestige and splendour away from the powerful. The unchanging nature of ceremony removes the individual ego, and where people in power innovate, they also reflect their own glory. Tradition is about sublimating narcissism, why is why non-traditional ceremonies — secularised weddings or “naming ceremonies” — make everything about the individual.

The Blairite love of abandoning tradition was a symptom of an extreme lack of humility. When the boss changes the ancient dress-code he may be being nominally progressive, but he’s also asserting his dominance; the new rituals reflect the new lord’s worldview.

The Royal Family remain far more liked and respected than the people who would replace them, but that is the nature of modern democracy, a degrading popularity contest which inevitably leads us to feel contempt for those in charge, often quite rightly. It’s why more democracy is not always a good idea.

More from this author

Who destroyed Prince Harry?

By Ed West

There has, in recent years, been quite a bit of research showing the benefits of monarchy in raising social trust and even increasing economic growth. It partly explains why monarchies are associated with political stability, and account for seven of the 10 least corrupt nations on earth. If you were going to live in any country on earth and all you knew about this mystery place was whether it was a republic or monarchy, you’d obviously go for the latter. The worst outcome would be Saudi Arabia; in contrast the depredations possible under a president are limitless – Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan… the list goes on. If you were to expand that test to the last 200 years, then the contrast only becomes more extreme.

Yet all these arguments are essentially utilitarian; that the monarchy has proved its “historical utilitarianism” just as with Chesterton’s Fence. Yet fences may still rot, and all ancient institutions, whether of monarchy, Church or nation itself, depend on some myth-making and targeted amnesia. Like Tinkerbell’s fairies, they only exist so long as people believe in them. If people still think the Church plays a useful role in social capital but don’t believe in the Resurrection, the Church will still die; likewise, with the monarchy.

Few people believe the coronation represents God’s choosing of the monarch, and not that many even care about the national church she leads, but more importantly, few really buy into the myth of their being the nation’s guardians, or that their sovereignty and higher status is somehow natural or justified. Perhaps more seriously still, the 2019 proroguing controversy removed any doubt that the monarch is utterly powerless. The idea that Her Majesty was a check on overmighty politicians may have been a myth, but it was one we all pretended to believe in.

Without that shared belief, the monarchy lacks the moral support it needs to face some rough years ahead, not just with the scandal of Prince Andrew, the fall-out with Meghan and Harry, and the damage to the next king from The Crown. It is quite seriously unpopular with younger people, an age divide that, like many things, is relatively recent.

Suggested reading

The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Despite all this, the Royal Family is in ways well-suited to 21^st century politics, in particular the recent fact of multiculturalism. Monarchies are historically more tolerant, and Daniel Finkelstein’s grandmother’s saying, “While the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central”, reflects a real historical truth.

The polarisation problem, too, favours our Queen. The monarchist argument used to be that without her, we’d get President Blair, but more likely Britain would have a presidential figurehead – like in other former monarchies such as Germany, Austria and Ireland – and it would be someone like David Attenborough.

Yet whether even Attenborough qualifies anymore for that role, modern societies don’t produce “national darlings” anymore, neutral figures beloved by the collective nation. Almost no public figure is apolitical today, just as few areas of life are apolitical, because we are going through something akin to a reformation.

That is bad news for the royals, since monarchies have usually found great religious divides difficult because, from the time of the Emperor Justinian onwards, they have sought to be neutral yet often ended up antagonising everyone. At some point the House of Windsor will need to decide on which side of this cultural divide it stands, because a more general British Niceness won’t do anymore. Their predecessors the Stuarts faced the same question – and they chose the losing side.