Britain’s longest-serving monarch has died.
It feels like a death in the family. Born in 1926, the year John Logie Baird first publicly demonstrated television, and crowned in 1953, the year Joseph Stalin died, the Queen has been with us so long that only a fraction of the population can remember life without her. her.
She reigned longer than any other British monarch, easily surpassing her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Following the principle of “I must be seen to be believed”, she met countless people in person and touched the lives of billions through radio and television. Who doesn’t remember her Christmas broadcast? Or the comfort she provided during the COVID-19 pandemic when she quoted Vera Lynn’s promise that “we’ll meet again.”
He’s gone now.
The miracle of the monarchy is how it survived in a democratic and egalitarian age. Everything it stands for—inheritance rather than merit and recognition rather than election—is the antithesis of everything we hold dear as a civilization. However, the British monarchy not only survived, but also prospered. He made none of the compromises of the cycling monarchies of the Scandinavian world. In fact, he almost relished resisting compromise.
How did this happen? In preparation for her job, the Queen was given a handbook on how to survive the acid of modernity. That was Walter Bagehot’s great book The English Constitution, published in 1867 at the height of Victorian brio. When she was a child, the Vice-Provost of Eton College, Henry Marten, made regular visits to Windsor Castle to instruct her in her constitutional duties, placing particular emphasis on Bagehot’s wisdom. Nothing about this experience was normal. Marten addressed the lonely princess as “gentlemen” and lectured her as if she were a class of Etonians. Even more surreal was what he taught her when he was channeled by Bagehot: that Britain was a “republic in disguise”, that the best qualification for a monarch was stupidity, and that the task was to spend life as a frivolous distraction from the real business of government.
Bagehot thought that statesmanship was too serious to be left to the masses. Rather, it was necessary to leave the rule to a small elite of serious-minded men who understood the world. But how could you get people to accept such a situation in a democratizing age? The answer was dispersion through the monarchy. Bagehot hoped that people would focus on the magnificent royal families in their gilded carriages leading the great parade, while “the real rulers are hidden in secondary carriages”. “No one cares or inquires about them, but they are unreservedly and unconsciously obeyed because of the splendor of those who overshadowed and preceded them.”
In Bagehot’s scheme, the royal family was to be transformed from a relic of aristocratic society into an embodiment of bourgeois virtues. Victoria was tasked with being the empress of India and at the same time the pinnacle of a friendly marriage. But Elizabeth II. she had to abandon Bagehot’s playbook and invent an entirely new one. No one today believes that the Queen ruled as well as she did – and if they did, they would be right to demand change. The idea that the monarchy is essentially a show is taken for granted. It is distraction in the sense of distraction rather than disguise.