Yesterday the Tory Party at Yale University held its annual banquet, marking 54 years since its founding (in which I played a small part). In connection with the event, the party published an issue of The Tory Truth, its irregular periodical, and dedicated it to the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. The editor asked me for a short essay on monarchy. I thought at first that it would have to be an exercise in nostalgia. My initial premise was that the late Queen was the last of her kind and that her death marked the passing of a venerable but obsolete institution. Kings and Queens would linger, I supposed, but only as celebrity anachronisms.
Yet as I pondered further, I began to see that monarchy is more than a bad habit that mankind is now shrugging off. It is rooted in human nature, and reports of its death may be exaggerated. Here is the piece that I produced, which I present not as confident prophecy but as a reflection on how unexpected the future may be.
Why Monarchy Will Endure
When the outlying territories of the Ottoman Empire began to fall away, the Great Powers searched for presentable younger sons of minor German dynasties and installed them as princes or kings of the newly freed lands. Thus it was that Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and even (for half a year) Albania received sovereigns who bore the surnames Wittelsbach, Battenberg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Wied.
No one saw anything odd about that. Everybody took it for granted that monarchy, preferably hereditary, was the natural form of government. The exceptions were few enough that any schoolboy could recite them: the Greek city states, the Roman Republic, Viking Age Iceland, the medieval Italian communes, the Swiss cantons, and the recent, revolutionary republics of the Americas and France. Elsewhere, government without a monarch equated to tyranny or turmoil, as in Cromwellian England or the last days of Republican Rome.
The modern schoolboy (or should I write “schoolperson”?) needs less than a moment’s thought to conclude that all his forebears were fools. From the “enlightened” point of view, which sees government as a mechanism that can and should be perfected by the application of rational principles, vesting sovereignty in a man or woman with no qualifications save ancestry is as nonsensical as leaving the choice up to a lady dispensing swords from the middle of a lake.
Nevertheless, as G. K. Chesterton advised, before we tear down a structure, we should consider why it was built. That monarchy was, until very recently, favored pretty much semper, ubique et ab omnibus suggests that its roots lie deep in human nature.
Men, Aristotle observed, thrive only in organized communities (“polities”). There is more to that truth than the obvious fact that it isn’t easy to live in solitude. A polity that consists only of individuals jostling side by side, with no relationships except through contracts founded on self-interest, has no power to preserve itself. If a faction of the inhabitants has the means to subjugate the rest, why shouldn’t they? Or if a great danger arises – a foreign invasion, for instance – what motive do some have to give up their lives or fortunes to save those of strangers?
Socrates was an outlier among Athenians. When condemned to death, he refused to escape, saying that his duty to “the laws of Athens” overruled the instinct for survival. His three most brilliant pupils were more typical of the city’s mentalité. Plato saw nothing good in “the laws of Athens” and proposed alternatives derived from abstract analysis. Xenophon became an admirer of Sparta and sent his sons to be educated there. Alcibiades betrayed the city. None of the three had any stronger tie to his countrymen than what self-interest could furnish, and that proved woefully inadequate.
A polity cannot endure unless its citizens regard the good of their fellow citizens as part of their own self-interest. That fellow feeling, commonly called “patriotism”, connotes an affection analogous to that of children for parents. (The analogy can be, and often is, misapplied. Citizens are not infantile wards of government, to be instructed by their betters on what they may think and how they may behave. The wise men of Davos are granted no rights by the Fifth Commandment.)
Patriotism is, then, essential to the survival of a polity, but whence does it derive? Historically, and nearly universally, it is first grounded on loyalty to a person who is seen as embodying the polity, that is, on a monarch whose title is accepted as legitimate without regard to his personal qualities.
This sentiment is not, of course, rational in the Enlightenment sense. The source of Elizabeth II’s legitimacy was not her admirable character and devotion to duty, just as Edward VII’s lack of those qualities did not render him any less a king for whom Englishmen were willing to fight and die.
Monarchical sentiment also is not irreplaceable. The United States of America has jogged along well enough without a king. We have a substitute in a similarly pre-rational attachment to our Constitution and our history, an attachment that survived, and indeed was strengthened by, a civil war on an epic scale. Unhappily, it now shows signs of fraying. It is no good sign that the Harvard Law Review recently published a 264 page essay by a prominent professor lauding the idea of ignoring the Constitution whenever it inconveniences progressive preferences. [Michael J. Klarman, “The Supreme Court 2019 Term: Foreword: The Degradation of American Democracy – and the Court”, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (Nov. 2020).]
Outside our own land, “Constitution plus history” has a poor record of fostering useful sentiment. The formula has been ingested throughout Latin America and has produced little in the way of good health. The Romans had greater success with loyalty to the mos maiorum and their own founding mythos, but that, too, failed in the end.
The most common substitutes for monarchy in the era of republics have been insidious: fictive ties of blood or the charisma of dictators. Readers of The Tory Truth do not, I trust, need to have those alternatives disrecommended to them.
In the long run, notwithstanding its current eclipse, hereditary monarchy is the only reliable foundation for a polity. One must add the reservation that “reliable” does not mean “immortal”. Nor is it obvious how the revival of kingship will take place. No one can be argued into affection for a dynasty. Yet “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret” is a wise maxim. Unless human nature changes dramatically or civilization proves to be a passing fad, the world shall yet see the return of the kings.