After Good Queen Bess (the second)

The Queen has Covid. At 95, this could be a serious worry. But, fully vaccinated, she has been restricting herself to light duties.

Inevitably though, any threat to her health brings up the thought of her mortality.

One day soon, and nobody knows how soon, the 700-year-old oak Coronation Chair, which sits in Westminster Abbey, will be moved from St George’s chapel to a spot just in front of the high altar. There, Elizabeth’s successor will be crowned.

But we live in an era of turbulent and rapid change. And the Queen’s death will present the country with three questions. The first, who succeeds her? The second, should the Church of England be disestablished? And the third, can the monarchy survive?

In fact, the third question feeds directly into the first. Of the Queen’s children, both Charles and Andrew are in trouble.

Andrew’s incompetence and incontinence need no further comment, but serious storm clouds are gathering over Charles. The Police have begun their investigation into cash for honours. Prince Charles’s closest aide, Michael Fawcett, has resigned. Is it possible for Charles to maintain that he knew nothing about the arrangement?

Problematically for Charles and critically for the monarchy, popularity has become one of the prime forms of public legitimacy. There was a terrifying moment during the hiatus that followed Diana’s death when even the Queen wobbled in the popularity stakes. And the fear that the monarchy might be swept away in the emotional turmoil became very real.

Is Charles popular enough to survive a scandal if the cash for honours debacle turns nasty and catches him up it?

In 2013, an act of parliament changed the rule of primogeniture. Anne is, of course, two years younger than Charles, but parliament is sovereign. After James the Second was encouraged to make his escape from the Tower, parliament invited a different member of the royal family to sit on the throne. William and Mary of Orange arrived. There is no legal barrier to

parliament passing an act and inviting Princess Anne to succeed her mother if it was thought more likely that her dignity, competence and popularity might stabilise and save the monarchy.

Disestablishing the Church of England would be enormously complex, which is one reason why it has not yet happened. But it goes increasingly against the culturally inclusive grain to give precedence to a denomination that has only 14% of the population identifying with it. For those under the age of 24, the number sinks lower to 2%.

But unless the Church of England is disestablished, it will be difficult for the monarchy to maintain that it is genuinely “there for everyone” given its DNA in the Coronation Oath, which runs:

“Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant reformed religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England…”

As Prof David Voas of UCL, co-director of British Religion in Numbers, said, “there are many ways of defining religious affiliation. But, we’re at a point where… a minority of the population – in practice, single figures – is Anglican. There can no longer be a majoritarian argument for an established church.”

If it isn’t justified by numbers, is it justified by anything?

There is, of course, a close link between monarchy and Christianity ever since the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312. In the West, the Church looked to the Emperor (or monarch) to ensure the safety of Christians and the defence of the Catholic Church. If the Anglican Church was disestablished, could Catholics and Anglicans jointly make the case that the continuation of monarchy embodied the great virtues of the faith (in particular the sanctity of the individual and their equality before the law) for a secular democracy?

In The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy, Prof Robert Hazell from UCL summarises six rules for survival:

1. Remain scrupulously neutral (politically).
2. Keep the team small (lose the entitled hangers-on).
3. Try to avoid scandals (easier said than done).
4. Be accountable (populist).
5. Maintain public support (be popular).
6. Whole-hearted commitment (no Harry and Meghan).

One of the greatest virtues of the monarchy is that it keeps politicians away from the role of Head of State. But at a time of crisis with no overall ideology binding our democratic state together, unresolved historical baggage carried without justification into the future, the Queen’s successor will need more than competence.

More than that, they will need luck and the prayers of those of his or her subjects whose practice is to pray, to survive in the perpetual shadow of the nostalgia that inevitably compares whatever the present is with the days of Good Queen Bess (the second).

Perhaps they might also even fall to their knees and embrace the Faith personally as their best predecessors have done.