God save the Monarchy

I wrote the first draft of this piece on Thursday, sitting in limbo. Messages from friends were flooding my phone, filling it with speculation. The Queen was dead; the Queen was dying. At that moment, it felt as though the country would be plunged into a new uncertainty. The Queen had acted as a visible link to Britain’s past, before the great rupture of the second world war, before 70 years of social upheaval, political flux, demographic change, and national decline. I couldn’t remember the country without her. My parents couldn’t. Feeling uncertain in the face of such a severing of links was natural.

It was also fundamentally wrong. However much uncertainty there was around the fate of the individual, there was none at all about the fate of the country. That, after all, is the point of monarchy. However strongly we associate monarch and country, ruler and ruled, there will come a point where there is a new ruler. This was not a succession subject to dispute; Charles would become King, and things would continue pretty much as they had.

For many, their uncertainty seemed to come from a sense that the Queen somehow embodied the nation. They wouldn’t frame it in those terms, but the way they spoke about rupture, about change, about how Britain wouldn’t be the same made it clear how they felt. In this, you could see - if you squinted - the continuation of the mediaeval tradition of the two bodies of the monarch. One body is physical, temporal, and mortal, “subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident”, to the fading of old age. The other body is immortal, constituting the body politic of the nation; the subjects of the crown.

But it was only one half of this belief; viewing the Queen as representative of the nation and figurehead brushed aside the role of monarch as nothing more than a curious parasocial phenomenon, a constitutional quirk. And this is wrong, intuitively and obviously wrong; the role of monarch is distinct from other elements of human society. A CEO, a general, a politician may be leaders, but they are not monarchs. There is no assumption that they somehow speak for the history of the nation behind them, and the spreading possibilities in front. There is no weight of tradition in their actions.

Holding onto the belief that the monarch is representative of the nation without the belief in monarchy or the immortal body politic results in projecting onto the nation an uncertainty that does not exist. No matter what happened, there was no uncertainty for the state; upon the demise of the Queen, the body politic instantly became that of the new ruler. The pomp and pageantry of proclamation and coronation could wait; the King became the King at that moment.

There have already been calls - muted, and largely shouted down - for Britain to re-evaluate the role of the monarchy; to reshape it to reflect modern values, and the modern nation. But the monarchy represents a thousand years of English history, traditions shaped and refined over centuries of Britons. It is a continuous thread with our ancestors, and our past. It doesn’t need to reflect society; it simply needs to exist. To alter it in line with the changing tastes of politics would be to destroy the value it holds in this sense.

There are other arguments for the retention of the monarchy. The British constitution would need to be reshaped; the powers of the crown redistributed; the head of state redefined. Perhaps some fraction of tourist revenue would be diminished. There are passions in the nature of humanity that need a place to vest; eliding the role of head of state and head of government would perhaps lead to an unhealthy degree of investment in political figures, as demonstrated by the curious sentimentality and loyalty shown by Americans to their presidents.

But ultimately, the argument that matters to me is that the monarchy is part of an increasingly threadbare connection with our past. While the link is living, while we are still connected, we can still make claim to be the inheritors of this land, culture, and tradition. And the further we erode it, the clearer it becomes that we live in a country that shares a name and a land with its predecessor, and very little else.

Change and decay, in all around I see; O thou who changest not, abide with me.

God save the King.