There’s one everywhere you go. Even today, in a post-republican world. All people, nations, tribes, and tongues have some connection with the phenomenon. While the nature, character, and personality of the beast varies, its essential form and substance remain the same through time and space. We refer, of course, to royalty and its representatives. That absurd relict of pre-modern epochs.
That aggressive reactionary of the modern age. That alarming remnant in postmodernity (if, indeed, we may consider it a separate period – since 1914-18? 1939-45? 1989-? – distinct from modernity). Because as demonstrated most recently in Her Britannic Majesty’s diamond extravaganza, for sheer chutzpah, wastefulness, and faux-dramatic egregiousness, there’s nothing to challenge it.
Politics can’t hold a candle to royalty. One of the most glamorous and galvanizing times in modern politics was characterized in terms of a previous kingdom, when café society began calling the Kennedy administration a type of Camelot. History dazzles us with panoplies of crowned heads whose lives have contributed colourful anecdotes to every field of human endeavour and fallenness. King Arthur was hardly the quintessential cuckold; having lost a wife, a best friend, and one brief shining moment of a kingdom in one fell swoop. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Fleur de Lys or Lily, the Queen of Sheba. Prince Charles talks to his plants. (Two out of three isn’t bad, is it?)
Now I don’t want to give my thirteen readers the wrong impression. I like royalty. In, perhaps, the same way that lazy folks on Facebook click the “Like” icon when they can’t be bothered, or clever or quick enough to say something relevant. In fact, there was a time when some of my role models were royals – or people who acted like they were descended from the Sun King (“Après moi, le deluge”) or Anglo-Saxon monarchs (“Dieu et mon droit”). But one simply can’t stay seventeen all one’s life, can one? There’s a certain amount of growing up to be done… which royal brats from Cloud Cuckoo Land to Kingdom Come would do well to learn. Don’t blame them entirely for their petty disposition, dears, their parents have a lot to answer for. The sad fact is that the divine right of kings to rule wrong is more common than we think. You don’t have far to look…
That despots, demagogues, dictators, and democrats have all to bow the knee to royalty from time to time is probably the best thing that can be said about them. This often comes as a mixed blessing. Where would we be without a Queen Victoria to curb the monotonous nomenclature of a Gladstone? That worthy prime minister would have named all the public and private places in the Commonwealth after his sovereign were it not for her haughty disdain. “We have to inform you, Mr. Gladstone,” said our regal empress, drawing herself up to her full height of four feet eight and a half inches (from where British rail gets its ‘standard gauge’), “that we are a dam in Australia, a falls in Zambia, and a park and a reservoir in Ceylon, but we are not a mews…” – get it? (No, my editor was not a-mused, either; in fact, she was at her wit’s end…)
Point is that the arguments against royalty in general far outweigh the case for constitutional monarchies in particular. Kings and queens are outdated, outmoded, and outside the pale of a world dying of thirst for good old-fashioned republicanism. Ahem, some cavalier island-nations notwithstanding. A certain democratic socialist republic that is bearing the brunt of ambitious pretenders to the throne will bear witness to this testimony. Add the burden that taxpayers’ money has to bear to support princes, princesses, aristocrats by connection, nobles of the blood, and other sycophantic hangers-on with so-called regal descent and royal lineage thrice removed on the distaff side… and you begin to feel weighed down…
Power is another stumbling-block. Presidents you can vote out in five or six years (well, all right then, some may take a tad longer than that), but crowned heads are in it for the long run. Bhumipol Adulyadej (really, what were his parents thinking?), aka Rama IX of Thailand, is currently the world’s longest-reigning monarch with a rule of 66 years.
Elizabeth II of Britain at 60, not out, is but a decade behind her nominal predecessor Elizabeth I of England at 70, declared hurt. It’s just not cricket, old boy. Nor is all this ballyhoo about swords and assorted paraphernalia from our grand and glorious past. Besides, who needs to pull out a sword from a stone – or heist one from a museum – to prove anything? Kind hearts are more than coronets! Now if only our powers that be – political, familiar, social, economic – could see that, they would stop lording it over their ‘subjects’ (polity, family, society) and serve them instead.
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