Monarchy: Past, Present . . . and Future?

by Christopher Lee, Anthony Weldon

Overview

A look at the state of today's British monarchy, how the past has shaped it, and how it will secure its survival, if at all, in the future—will William be "the last?" 

This examination addresses the reasons the British monarchy has lasted longer than any other, the role of the current Monarch in the UK and all the countries of the Commonwealth, current public opinion polls including European and American public perceptions, the Monarch as a modern head of state, and the "good for tourism" argument. The future of Britain and its monarchy are called into question by the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's child, the debate surrounding the succession of the Prince and Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall and whether it should skip a generation, and issues relating to the constitution of the UK—the future of the House of Lords, Scottish independence, and the future of the Established Church. All of these issues are covered in full, as is the key question of the British monarchy—the institution's staying power beyond the current succession.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781903071588
Publisher:	Bene Factum Publishing Limited
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Christopher Lee is a historian, writer, and broadcaster whose titles include 1603: The Death of Queen Elizabeth.

Read an Excerpt

Monarchy

Past, present ... and future?

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By Christopher Lee

Bene Factum Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Christopher Lee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909657-24-3

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CHAPTER 1

The First Kings of England

There are some 192 countries in the world. More than forty of them have monarchs. Of them all, Japan has the oldest uninterrupted monarchy and its present dynasty is traced in an unbroken line to the fifth century AD and the beginnings of the Yamato state. In Europe, the Danish monarchy was established in the tenth century, as was the British monarchy, although the execution of King Charles I in 1649 interrupted for eleven years the dynastical rule of the British. However, given that the next king was in exile during the Commonwealth, in theory the British monarchy has an unbroken line since the tenth century and so is the second longest in the world.

There have been fifty-three sovereigns of England since the tenth century. Yet in spite of the frailties and even failures of the individuals, only one, Charles I, angered the system and its magnates enough to be executed, and a decade later the monarchy was restored. This constitutional institution has been the least divisive aspect of the British people for a thousand years. That should be enough argument to insist there is no case for the disappearance of the monarchy, but it is not. Society and its ambitions are changing faster than the institution of monarchy. Very simply, monarchy could become irrelevant, gradually noticed as such and then vulnerable to personality shifting into another form.

To reflect the significance of monarchy and identity in the twenty-first century, it is not enough to take the existing monarch and set it up as the image and characteristics of that sovereign's people or, more explicitly, the form of modern monarchy and the profile drawn from that matrix. To understand monarchy and its origins at times we deal with an uneasy symbolism in a society given a general and certainly generic term, 'British'. In doing so, it is best to explore how that monarchy arrived as ruler, not simply of the people in a tribal sense, but of the considerably more powerful version, the ruler of a state which those people recognised as their original home. Nothing may be taken for granted. The origin of kings and peoples is not as well understood as might be expected.

Few events other than the Saxon defeat at the Battle of Hastings, the excitement of Tudor England and the origins of the Second World War are important in school history lessons. Little of the kings, other than the mythical Arthur and the cake-burning (or most likely not) Alfred, is taught. The first English historian, Bede, is rarely studied or even read; the prose is testing and the variations are too complex to skip from one to the other, and even at secondary level teachers avoid it. It could be of course that the primary source is set aside because Saxon history is left to its monuments — small, interesting churches, but rarely visited — and the mythology of people and places too difficult for a less and less inquisitive twenty-first-century English society. That Westminster Abbey was the inspiration of a Saxon king and that Emma of Normandy was, in modern style if we wish, game- changer and Saxon play-maker can excite little interest other than the bald fact; little more is truly known of Emma anyway. Even the Normans struggle to get further than pictorial essays in the historically important era when the Pembrokeshire descendants of the Conqueror's knights were the mercenary defenders and then the stock of Irish aristocracy.

Surprisingly today, with ranging media histories, few would know that the Tower of London is of Norman origin, or that Domesday had an administrative purpose, or that the Normans became Angevins became Plantagenets; the last Plantagenet — if remembered outside Shakespeare's version — was Richard III. To be discovered beneath a Leicester car park is hardly a memorial to someone who is said to have caused the deaths of the Princes in the Tower; but in a snapshot survey for this writing, not a single person of 168 questioned knew the names of the princes and most certainly not their dates.

The English have seemingly believed that the territory of England was populated by the English. The Welsh have felt the same about themselves. Such an obvious statement should not be dismissed when understanding monarchy because, for example, opinion suggests that the inhabitants of Scotland have not always believed that the land was occupied by people essentially Scottish. When claims were made on who should rule even parts of Scotland, never mind the whole territory, the right to be monarch of more than one glen was not so straightforward.

The establishment of a monarch of Scotland and England, and to a lesser extent Wales, tells the British the first thing they should know of their heritage: the point at which their country became a free-standing state. For the monarch was not simply leader of the people. He or later she was head of state, and thus the state and the beginnings of national identity were recognised by outsiders. The immediate outsiders were the peoples abutting the declared state and so, as an example, Scotland had to accept England as a state, or suffer the seemingly continuous penalty of incursion, intervention and, ultimately, war. Here, then, is part of the origins of national identity.

To be sure-footed in this search for the relationship between monarchy and peoples, we have to piece together the wiring diagrams of English, Welsh and Scottish monarchies until we can reach a point when we reasonably accept that the monarch was leader of the state as well as the people, even if that latter distinction were to be contested in civil war. It tells us more about our inherited instincts than we might normally imagine exist.

Therefore, what follows is not a biographical note on kings and queens. It is the story of how royalty was established in England, Wales and Scotland by the Middle Ages, and so it will explain causes that established the authority of monarchy that exist in those three territories, even before they were countries, and among those three peoples. Here was regional, tribal and family leadership. If that would appear obvious, then it is a statement to show that in small lands, such as those in the British islands, monarchy and principality were established along with the fundamental need for people to be brought together to protect the interests of the most powerful. It was to protect basic kingshipin which a powerful leader promises to protect those never to be powerful in return for an allegiance necessary for the chieftain to safeguard his as well as their interests. In the later form, that same kingship attempted to protect its people from more than a foreign invader. It also had a duty to protect them from government and government's ambitions for some or all the territory.

The first to rule over the territory or state of England, as opposed to just the greater tribe known as the English, was Athelstan, between AD 924 and 939. During the 1,089 years that England, then Britain, then the United Kingdom have been ruled by a sovereign, the extraordinary presence of a persistent system of rule and often unpredictable variation of character has offered a singular and not-to-be-forgotten given: the reigning monarch is not to be confused with monarchy.

The king or queen is but the holder of that crowned office. A popular or unpopular monarch necessarily supports or damages the institution, but in neither case is the sole reason for its survival or abolition. Therefore, to understand the future of monarchy, it is first necessary to separate the personality from the institution. We need to understand the history of monarchy, especially in the United Kingdom in whose capital lives the monarch of one-third of those countries that retain a throne.

It is here that we need to grasp the first distinction of monarchy: a monarch may rule people without ruling the greater territory in which they live. For example, Alfred the Great was king of the people of Wessex, but he was never King of England. He did not rule England. In fact, at that time, we cannot even properly say that England existed in a form we would easily recognise today. Other kings and invaders ruled other parts of the islands. To make this important distinction clearer, imagine a mass migration, for whatever reason, from one part of a continent to another: the monarch is still monarch of the people, but he or she is most certainly not monarch of the new territory. The monarchy of a state implies others bordering and beyond that state recognising the authority of the monarch, whereas a monarch of the people only (and it could be that the population is the same size in whatever condition) could be little more than a tribal leader with no rights over the territory, even when his people live in it.

Certainly before the Christian era, there were thousands of years of monarchs, but it is unlikely that until the Japanese dynasties (well after the establishment of the Christian age) there were unbroken, family-associated lines of monarchs, as we would today understand the concept. It is too easy to regard a king or queen in distant times as simply a military leader. To do so would miss one of the important aspects of kingship that continues in part in the twentieth century: the religious, even god-like authority of monarchy. We hear of the divine right of kings. By that simple phrase, we accept that the authority of the monarch is god-given and, in some instances, the monarch is seen as a divine figure. A modern example would be the Japanese emperor who, until shortly after the Second World War, claimed spiritual though not godly significance — more, that he was the conduit to god.

The British monarch is head of the Church of England here on earth and, according to a 2012 opinion poll, this pleases the population.

In China, the emperor most certainly had a mystical authority in a society drawn easily to animism — the existence of spirits and souls in earthly communion — long before the structure of a belief in a single and universal god. It may be imagined that a monarch assuming godly distinction would be vulnerable when the good times faltered. Crop failures, terrible weather, famine, disease and of course lost battles were all conditions that called into question a king's heavenly credentials. Waning powers or those fraudulently claimed could easily signal the end of a monarch's reign. In some societies, a monarch might be expected to fall on his sword or drink a final draught as the gossamer of heavenly authority parted. Furthermore, because the priesthood had remarkable responsibility in the choice, crowning and ritual of a monarch, the king would have to recognise the considerable power of the priests over the throne. Consequently, the religious patriarch might assume an authority greater than the monarch.

Whatever authority and however strong or weak that authority on the throne, the monarch was hardly a fairytale, rags-to-riches appointment. The individual who became king was likely, first, to be a powerful individual with considerable physical and political support, and therefore, second, already a member of privileged society and in some parts of the world able to claim family line to the throne. However, primogeniture, the right of inheritance of the first-born child, was not always clear. A society in which it was commonplace for an individual to have more than one wife (or concubine) was vulnerable to dispute over who exactly should inherit, even if this were made comparatively simple by a convention that the first male born would take precedence. This, at the time of writing, is no longer the case. The first born is heir.

The importance of proof of the parenthood of the monarch's proposed heir could never be underrated or, in some cases, guaranteed. Shortening the list of candidates by giving precedence to male heirs did not necessarily rid courts and factions of suspicions that the line of royal succession might be corrupt. There can be few offices of state in any society so vulnerable to corruption than the monarchy. The inspiration of patronage alone makes monarchy an easy target for political, personal and commercial jealousies. Because most in civil ignorance never and could never have truly known the workings of the monarchy in their own country, rumour and gossip are eagerly believed. This increased the need of the monarchy to maintain its credibility, often by creating an imagined crisis, then leading the people to safety as leader, as part-divine monarch of people of similar sect and language and later, as territorial definitions became clearer, dynastical monarch of a nation state and defender of the people in return for their allegiance.

Later, especially in western Europe, came the creation of a constitutional monarchy without any powers that influenced the course of the people, but was necessarily maintained even by republican tendencies. The instincts of the people suggested that contrary to all ideological discipline a monarch, even in titular form, was necessary to reassure them that a system and an individual, no matter how fanciful, represented what they stood for as a nation people. This is the irony of modern monarchy: the unelected leader is closer to the people than the government that the people elected to rule. It follows that monarchy gives a nation state its identity. The default observation of those ruled, as well as those beyond that society, is that the king must be a leader who, on balance, is supported by those who in other circumstances are in a position to usurp the monarch's authority and rule in his place. The people ruled and outside observers have a single view of the monarch: a superior person ruling by a right — even a divine right — to which none of his or her subjects could ever aspire. The further irony is that the monarch is rarely the leader of the nation's aristocracy. Indeed, the monarch may be seen as middle class. Where does the etymology place the origins of the supreme titles in these societies? Whatever the divine beliefs of the incumbent, unlike the concept of kingship, there is rarely anything god-like in these origins.

King comes from the Old English cyning, queen from cwen (woman). Unusually, 'queen' is not a female title derived from the male word as, for example, 'empress' is from 'emperor'. Cyning has within it 'kin', as in family. Cyning suggests the ruler of the family or leader of the people. The words 'monarch' and 'monarchy' have an earlier origin. 'Monarch' comes from the Greek monos, one, or alone, and archein, to rule. In ancient Greece, an archon was one of the nine magistrates ordered to rule. We have a monarch as one who rules by him- or herself; it was a term in common British usage by the 1300s. But ruling what? Tribe? People? Land? Supremely, it was a combination of all three that was recognised by outsiders. As early as 55 BC, Cassivellaunus could be described as a king of the Catuvellauni — the people who for so long opposed Julius Caesar in Britain. In AD 43, there was no sterner warrior king than Caractacus, none more famous than Boudicca in AD 61, and the walls and ditches the Romans left behind witness the powers of great warrior kings in these islands. Yet they were kings of tribes, not kings of the English, certainly not the British and most definitely not of England or Britain. A thousand years passed after the successful Roman invasion of Britain before there was a king of England. To imagine that perspective, it is today more or less a thousand years since the Battle of Hastings. But to get a grasp of what monarchy was to mean, we have to go further back in this island history, to the arrival from north continental Europe of the Saxons.

To think, in haste, through the importance of William of Normandy and everything that followed, from Angevin to Plantagenet, there is a tendency to overlook the significance of Saxon England. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were regular raiders from their settlements in Germany and south Denmark, and began to settle in England, or in the then dominant Gaelic Sasana — hence Sassenachs — in the fifth century. The continental tribes referred to these people as 'Saxons' which, by the eighth century, had picked up the word for English, 'Angli', and so became the 'Anglo-Saxons', the English Saxons. Certainly by the fifth century they controlled England south of the line running from the Wash to the Solent. One consequence of this invasion was the ravaging of the Christian Church. Anglo-Saxons claimed no divine right to rule and the British expected no divine protection. The sixth-century British monk Gildas (c. 500–570) proclaimed in his most famous work, De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, that the invasion was God's punishment for the waywardness of the Britons.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Monarchy by Christopher Lee. Copyright © 2013 Christopher Lee. Excerpted by permission of Bene Factum Publishing Ltd.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction ix

Times Past

Chapter 1 The First Kings of England 3

Chapter 2 The Road to Hastings 25

Chapter 3 Norman Rule and Beyond 31

Chapter 4 The Welsh Princes and Their Influence 43

Chapter 5 The Making of the Kingdom of Scotland 53

Chapter 6 The Middle Monarchs and the Making of the Anglican Church 65

Chapter 7 The Imported Monarchs 91

Chapter 8 The Coming of the Hanoverians 107

Times Present

Chapter 9 Royal Privilege and Duty 119

Chapter 10 Diana and the Pollsters 125

Chapter 11 The 1940s to Today 137

Future Times

Chapter 12 Scotland, the Church of England and the Lords 155

Chapter 13 In Conclusion-Or Not? 163

A List of Kings and Occasional Queens 183

Genealogy of the Kings and Queens of England, Britain and the United Kingdom 188

Bibliography 195

Index 197

Editorial Reviews

"In its rich texture and detail, 1603 will surely wet the appetite of readers interested in 17th-century English history." —Publishers Weekly on 1603

From the Publisher