Freedom under a symbolic monarch, guided by a distributed system of government, is a gift from Britain to the world
There are only a few figures who are recognised nationally, and even fewer who are known internationally. But it’s a very small number – a handful – who are known by everyone, everywhere in the world. Fame, like everything else, comes in tiers, and the sky’s the limit.
Queen Elizabeth II was one such figure. American presidents sometimes come close, but none have been as enduringly popular or as instantly recognisable as the Queen. But Elizabeth II was far more than the world’s most famous woman. She was the defender of the most effective system of government that has yet been created: that of constitutional monarchy.
No system has proved as effective as a bulwark against tyranny. The United States has its solutions – dividing power between the judiciary, legislative, and executive branches – but none have proven as enduringly successful or popular as the model pioneered in Britain.
America’s tripartite division is, perhaps, insufficient: a fourth branch is necessary, for reasons that are psychological and social, simultaneously. Someone independent (and worthy) needs to carry the symbolic burden. It is for this reason that those who clamour for the dissolution of the great drama of the monarchy, so well played by the Commonwealth’s great former sovereign, risk destabilising the societies they purport to support.
Every country needs someone to shoulder the symbolic burden of the state. If that person is not a monarch, set up explicitly to manage that role, the responsibility (and temptation) tends to fall on the head of state, the leader of the executive branch.
Why is that a problem? Because the proclivity for pharaonic leadership makes itself manifest; because the temptation to dynasty re-emerges; because the role of president or prime minister (or dictator, for that matter) and, simultaneously, star is too much of a part for any one person to play without significant and often deadly moral hazard.
In the US, a remarkable and free country, the president can too easily slide into the role of Tsar – and not just the president, but the “First Family,” with the wife an ersatz queen, and the children princes and princesses. All people need someone to look up to; need someone to serve as a model for emulation – but it’s useful to separate those who could formally serve that role from those who have to make the administrative and practical decisions.
Everything in its proper place. And that’s something that Queen Elizabeth II knew very well.
For 70 years, she ruled not only over her people, but her prime ministers. Is it not a very good thing to have someone elected to what would otherwise be the highest position in the land still be required to defer to something else; something superordinate and higher – and, if not God, at least the Queen, at least a Queen such as Elizabeth, a dutiful, responsible, careful, judicious, calm and dignified steady hand at the wheel; someone capable of and willing to perform that complex function. And, with her doing that, her prime ministers did not have to and were also unable to (as she was perfectly capable of most properly stealing the stage, and keeping them in their proper place).
The monarchical system therefore fulfils a vital psychological (spiritual) and social purpose. It’s of great practical utility, as well. The Americans are a great and attractive people, not least because of their remarkable tendency to mythologise and dramatise their culture, political and individual.
The Brits have the same propensity: to play out a great story – and the monarchy can play the leading part, just as Queen Elizabeth did so well. That’s a great benefit, culturally – and economically. Who can deny the tremendous attraction of the traditions of the UK, say, to the tourist trade – to those who can come to this great island and watch the drama unfold, in the pomp and circumstance that make the UK of great interest (particularly when it is, as it is in the UK, allied with the ability to also satirise and make light of that same tradition, and to take the edge off in that sophisticated manner).
It will of course be very difficult to sustain the monarchy, in the absence of the great and ever-reliable and stalwart Elizabeth. I sincerely hope that Charles III, waiting so long in the wings, will rise to the occasion, and that the rest of the Commonwealth will recognise and appreciate what they have in the shared historic, philosophical and cultural bonds that unite them, grounded in the miraculously valuable principles of English common law and the great democratic traditions of individual sovereignty, so remarkably allied as they are with the symbolic monarchical tradition.
I hope that this recognition and appreciation is managed in an unapologetic and forthright manner. We should all remember, in the aftermath of the passing of our great monarch, that it was the UK and its traditions and freedoms that produced the industrial revolution that has made us all wealthy beyond even the imagination of our forebears, and that fought the long battle to make slavery not only untenable on the political and economic fronts but clearly wrong from the moral position. Slavery was universally practiced, as far back into history as we can see, and as widely as any other economic practice. Abolition was the exception and, while abolitionist sentiment emerged in other jurisdictions, no country did more to enforce the strictures against slavery on the international scene than the UK.
Free men and free women under a symbolic monarch, guided by a distributed system of governmental, artistic and entrepreneurial responsibility: that’s a great system, and a gift, in a very real sense, from the UK to the world.
And the Queen held her hand at the helm of that remarkable system for seventy years. And thank God for that. And God Save the King.
For all our sakes.
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