Do we live in a monarchy? Of course we do, say some. See the man clenching his shoulders as a huge metal bonnet of gold and jewels is lowered over his ears: he’s our king. Well, not really, say others. The word “monarch” means one man who rules alone, and today our kings and queens are decorations obedient to an elected parliament. But then a third voice says: not only do we live in a monarchy, but Britain is a far more monarchical place than most people realise.
The UK is the only sizeable country left in Europe whose institutions are still basically monarchist. Power flows top-down in Britain, not upwards from the people. A ghostly old deference pervades Cabinets, councils, administrations and ceremonies. In the middle ages, kingship was often “contractual”: you protect us and we’ll obey and fight for you. But later came the age of the “divine right” of kings : the absolute, anointed and unlimited authority of a monarch. In Europe, that was overthrown by the French Revolution and by the century of revolutions and constitutions that followed. Divine right gave way to ideas of “popular sovereignty” – sometimes real, sometimes a dictatorial fake. But England, as it swelled into Great Britain, missed out on this.
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-9 had merely taken absolute power away from the Crown and transferred it to the parliament. And there it still sits, disguised today as the absurd doctrine of “parliamentary sovereignty”. Over the last half-century, efforts have been made to limit that absolutism, mostly through the law – judicial review, the new supreme court. But the structure still feels monarchist when you tap it. Take official information, for instance. In pedantic theory it’s all secret. It’s the Crown’s exclusive property, and a mere citizen has no general right to it, although he or she can now use the recent Freedom of Information Act to beg access in specific cases. A minister may choose to share a government paper with him or her, but has no duty to do so. Any old-school monarch, from Charles I to George V, would understand this perfectly.
Reluctance to delegate authority “downwards” is deeply monarchical. With no constitution to limit it, central authority rules in the last resort. As Enoch Powell famously said: “Power devolved is power retained.”
Mrs Thatcher abolished the elected government of London and went round the land closing university departments. Nothing happened to her. But, in most modern countries, where the rights of local government and universities are entrenched in a constitution, she would have been arrested as an enemy of the state. You can’t arrest our queens and kings. Their most important privileges are immunities. Mel Brooks, playing Louis XVI in History of the World Part 1, enjoys royal immunity as he uses peasants for target practice and pinches the bottoms of the ladies-in-waiting: “It’s good to be a king!”
(One school of thought guesses that the Windsors might be a bit more popular if they stopped looking so mournful and showed that they enjoyed being rich, adored and able to summon everything and anybody at a nod.)
This king, like his predecessors, is immune to all sorts of things, from official inspections to various taxes and laws (especially laws concerning royal properties and estates) which he doesn’t like. He may and does pay money to the Treasury, but not because he has to. And the tradition of royal immunity long ago overflowed into the world of top people, diluted down to “one law for us and another for them”. In other places, immunity is bought by corruption. Here it is simply assumed – often, as in the case of Boris Johnson, all too correctly.
The very title “United Kingdom” describes a monarchical contraption. Elsewhere, many nation-states have decentralised authorities – German Länder, Canadian provinces. But those are federations, where the rights of British Columbia or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are constitutionally guaranteed. Devolved Wales and Scotland have no such rights. Royal Westminster could abolish the Welsh assembly or the Scottish parliament tomorrow, by a majority vote of one. Realistically, it would be terrified to do so, although the Conservative party fought desperately to prevent devolution and has never quite accepted such a dent in the kingdom’s shining armour. (Anyone watching Norma Percy’s TV history of the Belfast agreement will remember how Mrs Thatcher, snarling like an Amazon queen defending her brood, refused over and over again to let Dublin share so much as a sliver of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland).
Most people in Britain think that if you peel the monarch off and stick a president on instead, what you have is a republic. Considering that this island lies a few miles off two working republics, France and Ireland, such ignorance is startling. And dangerous. A proper republic is an elaborate piece of democratic architecture in which power grows up from the base of “popular” sovereignty – not the royal or parliamentary kind. That’s “subsidiarity”, the European democratic principle which has always baffled British politicians and diplomats. Republican institutions and citizens have written rights, inscribed in a constitution which is made deliberately difficult to amend. The constitution is the “supreme law”, and offences against it can be tried in a supreme court.
All that is the dead opposite of monarchy and the Anglo-British tradition of governance. In the 1640s, England led the world politically, as in so many other ways, when it staged the first modern revolution and cut the king’s head off. But being first means you also make mistakes which later imitators can avoid. Mishandled revolutions often lead to tyrannies: Robespierre, Stalin ... Oliver Cromwell’s chaotic Protectorate was neither republican nor democratic. After the 1848 revolution, France overthrew the monarchy but – instead of a stable republic – slithered into an imperial dictatorship under Napoleon III.
A decent republic is about liberty, equality and fraternity. But the second point can grate against English sensibility. Ask the young woman picking at her smartphone on the Clapham omnibus. “Fairness to all? Absolutely! Equality before the law? Obviously. But social equality enforced by capital levies, taxing down private education and general interference with England’s sacred laws of property ? No, hold on a minute.”
At a coronation, there’s a moment when the man or woman seems to disappear under the glittering weight of crown, orb and sceptre. Hereditary succession has Russian-roulette elements. So British monarchy has been safest when power seemed to radiate from the crown itself as a changeless, inviolable gift from heaven, rather than from the person who happens to be wearing it. But in the 21st century, it’s scarcely possible to think like that any more. One truly dud monarch, and the show’s over.
The late Queen, by 70 years of charm and hard work, kept that truth in the background. Without wallowing in Mel Brooksish luxury, she looked most of the time as if she genuinely enjoyed her job. Ironically, it’s partly because she was so good at that job that now, in 2023, the props holding the monarchy up are reduced to one: the personality of a single man. Melancholy self-sacrifice (“It hurts to be a king!”) is no programme for Charles III; these days, it would merely irritate his subjects. Instead, they would like to see him laugh as he slashed the royal sword into the thickets of privilege and deference which imprison him, and which protect the anachronisms of the British state. In short, he could be remembered as the happy warrior who made his kingdom fit to be a republic.
