Three score years and ten was considered a life time. The psalmist certainly thought so:-
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90)
Queen Elizabeth, crowned as an adult, has not only managed to live three score years and ten, but she has reigned for three score years and ten, living considerably longer.
During the period of her reign the world has changed faster than at any other period in history.
The platinum jubilee celebrations will be celebrating not only the seventy years of being our monarch, but also the triumph of survival and continuity in an age of rapid change.
The Queen has seen crowned heads of state disappear in large numbers during her reign. Many commentators take the view that our monarchy has survived and flourished because she has commanded a personal loyalty across the generations. Elizabeth Windsor has done the job, or played the role with remarkable skill.
The most obvious face of that change has been technological. We are doing things today with computer and the internet that would have been inconceivable half way through her reign, let alone at the beginning. The challenge of the early years was to what extent to allow the new media access behind the scenes.
But there have been dramatic cultural changes as well, and almost all of them corrosive to the idea and practice of monarchy.
The culture wars have attacked privilege of any kind, including privilege of birth. The woke warriors define themselves by their determination to redistribute power away from the privileged.
The monarchy has to straddle a contradiction. It needs to reflect the concerns of the population but cannot if egalitarianism is the chief concern; but it can at least “go eco”. Its supporters have high hopes for good green Charles the Third.
However, it may prove to be only the Queen’s geniality, and archetypal efficiency which makes what has become a counter-cultural monarchy so surprisingly popular. It may not be the office, or the system or the Firm that has popular support, but Elizabeth herself. In which case there is the concomitant danger that the popularity will evaporate on her death.
Everything will depend on a mixture of events, the chemistry of personality that Charles brings to the throne, and the vigour of the new culture warriors. But if those who prefer a monarchy to a republic want to defend their preferences, we may need to fight for our values.
The monarchy does not sit easily with progressive ambitions.
One of the most obvious foundational cultural values that the monarchy rests on is the hereditary principle. (Being slow to the starting line I have only just discovered that the Catholic heir to the Stuart’s dynasty is the Duke of Bavaria, Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern, the head of the House of Wittelsbach, formerly the ruling house of Bavaria. A survivor of Dachau, Franz, when asked thought that his claim to the throne of England might best be described as “hypothetical”.)
But at a time when too many politicians lack the confidence to define a woman using the simplest criteria of biology, the very elements that the hereditary principle depends on are being called into question. And that’s before you get anywhere near the totem of equality – either of opportunity or outcome.
This begins to make what has been a largely secure institution look suddenly and bizarrely insecure. It’s not just a matter of objective values versus subjective ones, but the new primacy of the imagination and wish-fulfilment constituting mental maps and identities, fuelled by a near fanatical quest for fairness. Defending the idea of a hereditary monarchy when hierarchy, privilege, and biology are all under such a cultural assault, may not be easy.
White supremacy has become a “have you stopped beating your wife” concept. To admit it exists is to admit guilt. It aims to strike a severe blow at Caucasian culture. The antidote, of course, is the ancient understanding of “Noblesse Oblige”, that is – privilege imposes responsibilities. The riposte to the BLM dogma is that we understand our lives and our institutions more in terms of responsibility than of power.
The Queen herself has been an inspiring example of devotion to duty. Prince Charles has achieved great things in the lives of countless people through his work with the Prince’s Trust, for too long undervalued and undercelebrated by the media. Both Princess Anne and Prince Philip were equally self-giving. Will the impetus of “devotion to duty” bring immunity from the charges of “white privilege” that stack up against the established order?
As the numbers of atheists and Christians change in the flux caused by the relentless growth secularism, it may be that the deepest challenge to the monarchy will come from secularism and moral relativism. Monarchy is at its most coherent when it is informed by the rich symbolism that runs through the Old Testament into the New. The anointing of the monarch in the Western tradition brought spiritual authority, secular responsibility and moral probity together in a powerful combination of the spiritual and the political.
It may be that monarchy, rather like Churchill’s description of democracy, is the least worst way of ordering the political and soul of a country. But the values it has inherited to give it authenticity are under great pressure today. And if we want our children to live under a way of political and cultural life, infused with Christian spirituality as we have enjoyed, we may have to struggle rather harder, not only to appreciate it, but to defend it.
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