You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy - but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery - two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.
- Andrew Sullivan
This is the genius of the British monarchy, supremacy exemplified in the late Queen Elizabeth II and now in King Charles III. Walter Bagehot was the first to really get to the heart of the matter.
Walter Bagehot, a journalist who would co-found and edit The Economist magazine was one of the greatest Victorians of the 19th century and he concerned himself with the workings and the reform of the delicate constitutional arrangements between parliament, the House of Lords, and the monarchy as so much is based on custom and unwritten practice.
Walter Bagehot published his classic work, The English Constitution in 1867 but it is the best way to understand the delicate balance of parliament and the monarchy. No one has written a finer work than Bagehot and his book remains the bible for many interested in constitutional matters regarding the monarchy.
In it he argued that the constitution was divided into two branches. The monarchy represents the “dignified” branch. Its job is to symbolise the nation through pomp and ceremony. The government - Parliament, the cabinet and the civil service - represents the “efficient” branch. Its job is to run the country by passing laws and providing public services. He was right to say that the dignified branch governs through poetry, and the efficient branch through prose.
In Bagehot’s view, a politically-inactive monarchy served the best interests of the United Kingdom; by abstaining from direct rule, the monarch levitated above the political fray of tribal politics (of left and right), and remained a respected personage to whom all subjects could look to as a guiding light. The monarch was to stay severely neutral and be apolitical. Instead the monarch was to embody in the flesh the core values of a nation.
There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. When Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human - for the rest of her life. She achieved that both stoically and heroically in many people’s eyes. King Charles III has taken on that inhuman mantle now. Time will tell if he can follow the late Queen’s example.
Duty, sacrificial service, and honour....without power. That’s the role of modern royalty.
It’s hard for non-British people to understand how a monarch can come to embody the psyche of the nation. The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. As Bagehot says, it’s an act of imagination.
Some of my non-British friends particularly can’t quite grasp this connection; to them the British royal family functions mainly at best as a different form of celebrity. But to these friends as well as those republican friends sincerely opposed to monarchy can and should grasp something else - nations and cultures need people and institutions who transcend politics, which left to itself quickly descends into tribalism or worse, authoritarianism.
