Off with her head!
My friend Gary Younge writes in The Guardian yesterday that it is time to ‘ditch the Monarchy’.
I don’t agree.
The Monarchy serves a purpose, as any student of British history knows. The last time there was no Monarchy in England, Cromwell and his band of merry men made the Taliban look like a school picnic. Just a few short years of Cromwellian republican rule and everyone was ready for the restoration of Charles II.
I don’t disagree with Gary that the British Monarchy as currently constructed is a complete waste of space.
Buckingham Palace is populated by total cyphers; vacuum heads who don’t have two brain cells to rub together. Grown men in the roles of Princes who spend their mid twenties playing at being soldiers or getting drunk in clubs. It’s beyond embarassing. It’s a waste of a precious resource – the position, not the family currently in charge.
The problem here is not the concept of Monarch, but rather the fact that the current crop of losers are locked into their jobs, apparenly forever.
In the ‘good old days’, (see The Tudors, on Showtime, for example), the Monarchs were really tough operators – smart, deft, often brilliant. Compare them to a combination of Warren Buffett and David Geffen with a bit of Richard Branson thown in .
They had to be.
The Monarchy was always being contested. There were enemies everywhere ready to overthrow you and your whole line if you made a single fatal mistake. You were on edge all the time, and you had to keep really really sharp.
Those were the days.
Those were the days of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I.
No more.
Now that the ‘Windsors’, (real name Battenbergs), are apparently locked into the job tighter than a tenured full Professor at the State University at Fredonia, there is no more edge, no competition, no survival of the fittest. In fact, job security has made these misfits lose whatever edge their ancestors once had, as they waste away their time getting dressed up for costume parties or frittering away tax dollars on home repairs and parties. It IS annoying.
Particularly since the British Monarchy could be one of the world’s greatest bully pulpits for change and social good. It could be the locus of great thinking, instead of the locus of one of the world’s greatest wastes of money and position.
Gary says make the position entirely ceremonial.
I say, make the position competitive!
What we need is competition. Another War of the Roses for example.
Let’s bring another family into play. One that could accomplish something that would really add to the UK.
Now, it so happens, I do have someone in mind….
(Full disclosure:Â My wife is a descendent of the Plantagenets, the family that Henry VII and his Tudor line overthrew in the 15th Century.)
I say, 600 years out of power is long enough!
The last time the Plantagenets rules England, things were better. Who could forget Richard the Lionhearted? Or the Hundred Years War? Those were the days.
And when the Plantagentes were running the place, they were so busy crushing Scotland or invading France or schlepping off to Cyprus that they didn’t even have time (let alone think about) dressing as Nazis for some costume party. No. They were real monarchs.
So I say the House of Battenberg no longer deserves the crown. Let’s give it to someone who can really make something of the job.
2 Comments
eb May 24, 2009
I must say (my British approach)
Your “Death to the Queen” headline comes across a bit strong. Just the headline. No real reason to call for “her” death, followed by “her” personal picture. Then say “off with her head.” So… I guess I am just sensitive. But the headline came across as a personal call for her death. I know it wasn’t.
Ian McNulty May 23, 2009
@Michael
I’m wondering if you’ve read The Golden Bough – a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion inspired by anthropologist Sir James Fraser’s lifelong obsession with “the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia”, which demanded that priests could only succeed to office by killing his predecessor.
After 30 years of research, stretching over 12 volumes, he concluded that “on the crucial question of the practice of putting kings to death either at the end of a fixed period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a custom has been considerably augmented.”
He cites many examples (as you might expect in 12 volumes!) including the Khazar kings of Southern Russia, ‘who were liable to be put to death either on expiry of a set term or whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth, or defeat in war, seemed to indicate a failure of their natural powers.’
Extending Fraser’s thesis that civilisation has progressed from magic, through religion to science, the modern democratic process might be seen as a rational kind of regicide, where primitive survival-of-the-fittest leader rituals have evolved into the more rational form of ritually slaughtering democratically elected leaders at the polls rather than on the altar.
If the purpose of the Monarchy is to protect us from the likes of Cromwell and the Roundheads of the New World Order, then recent events in the UK suggest they have failed. But I can’t agree that it’s the Monarchy that is the major problem.
It’s not fair to say that Prince Charles hasn’t tried to make the Monarchy one of the world’s greatest bully-pulpits for change and social good. The problem is that the changes he thinks would be for the social good are against the interests of the current economic and political consensus. Which could go a long way towards explaining why he’s been made such a figure of fun and ladled with so much contempt.
At least the homes the Royals fritter away tax pounds repairing are historical monuments and many of their costume parties are tourist attractions. Which is more than can be said for the home repairs and parties of the current political class.
To my mind the problem is the Roundhead’s puritan war against pleasure. Our pleasure that is, not theirs. Whilst they’ve been partying-on, the rest of us have been picking up the tab. More than half the UK population now want their day at the polls, but the Roundheads insist that would threaten democracy, stability and national security.
The idea that holding an election would threaten democracy is an oxymoron that beggars belief. The only stability and security under threat is that of the political class. Now they’re telling us that revealing the truth about what they’ve really been up to is ‘inhumane’ and a “McCarthyist witch-hunt”.
Technically, under the British constitution, it’s the Monarch who calls elections and appoints governments and prime ministers. But in practical terms the Monarchy have been progressively stripped of their powers and essentially held under house arrest in the kind of splendid isolation that would drive anybody bonkers.
As Charles Moore said in his Telegraph article yesterday, Now is the time to obliterate the professional political class, we do not need a revolution. What we need is a restoration.