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| The Bells of St. Dunstan's |
If you have been reading the British Newspaper sources, a topic which keeps popping up is the durability of the Monarchy. There is anger in many of the responses lacking respect, in fact, there is a melee of screaming and foretelling of more organized demonstrations against the Royalists in the coming days.
Being a foreigner, I stay out of the fray - however when the question was asked, 'Why is there such a high degree of attentiveness from Americans to the the Royal Family and England', I offered an analogy to "Mutiny On The Bounty" which went over like a lead balloon.
Still, I've started not to read the reports on abolishing the Monarchy because I think right now during this solemn period they are in bad taste. Not all the responses are negative on these sites,on another subject, the majority are intensely anti-Trump which is refreshing.
Yet, I came across this article, which gave me a chuckle:
~ From Counterpunch:
The Queen Tapped Into A Nostalgia That Has Kept the Monarchy Strong
"An hour before the Queen died, I looked out of my window in Canterbury at the medieval church of St Dunstan’s, which is associated with two historic events that help to explain why the British monarchy has lasted so long while others have not.
The first event took place on 12 July 1174 and illustrates the strong survival instinct of British monarchs down the centuries. On that day, Henry II, the formidable founder of the Plantagenet dynasty and ruler of England and half of France, dressed in a hair shirt under a smock, walked barefoot from St Dunstan’s to Canterbury Cathedral half a mile away in expiation of his responsibility for the murder by his knights of Archbishop Thomas Becket.
Whipped by monks, Henry went to Becket’s tomb in the crypt and confessed that his “incautious words” had led to the killing. His penitence went down spectacularly well with onlookers and, in what was taken as an instant sign of divine approval, Henry’s armies started winning in the field.
Several centuries later, St Dunstan’s became associated with another more gruesome aspect of the British monarchy, which is that their enemies have seldom flourished. In the crypt of the church is the head of Sir Thomas More, former chancellor of England executed in 1535 on the orders of Henry VIII for “maliciously denying the royal supremacy”. The head was given to his daughter, Margaret Roper, whose entrance to her home in Canterbury – a few hundred yards from the church – still stands.
If the English monarchy differed from its contemporaries on the Continent, it was because of the frequency with which monarchs from Edward II to Charles I were overthrown. They learned a certain flexibility and, from the 19th century on, were protected from being targeted by their loss of real power. By the time that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II were destroying their dynasties by starting a catastrophic war in 1914, British monarchs had been reduced to the safer role of national icon.
Queen Elizabeth played that role perfectly. At first, she was a symbol of empire. She was head of the Church of England, but as organised religion failed and ceased to be a sign of identity, the veneration for the Queen and the monarch increased. In time, worship of the Royal Family seemed to replace the place previously occupied by religion.
By not modernising too abruptly or overtly, the monarchy did not appear to be playing to the gallery. Did this make it easier for Britain to give up the empire grudgingly but without the same agonies as France? Probably it helped and diminished the sense of political loss.
The monarchy gave a comforting sense of continuity with the past, even if that sense was largely bogus, often concealing radical social and political change. Its existence did something to hold back such changes until they were irresistible.
As a child, I used to look at a photograph of my mother, Patricia Arbuthnot, in a long white dress just before she was presented as a debutante at Buckingham Palace in 1931 at the height of the Depression. Even in the 50s this seemed to me to be redolent of an era as long gone as the aristocratic ball in Brussels before the Battle of Waterloo.
My mother would describe how they waited in a line of cars outside the palace. Her father, a retired major in the Scots Guards and wearing full dress uniform, had brought sandwiches which, for lack of anywhere else to put them, he had placed in his bearskin helmet. As the family sat in their overheated car waiting to enter the palace, the butter in the sandwiches began to melt and threatened to spread on to my mother’s elaborate dress.
The age of debutantes in their finery passed away, but the monarchy was generally astute in avoiding being identified as effete aristocrats. Their engagement with politics was limited and generally uncontentious. Edward VII and George V agreed to the sharp reduction in the power of the House of Lords in 1911 by threatening to create more peers. But there were few such episodes.
A case can be made that the monarchy has continued to play a strong role in British cultural identity. I have a vague childhood memory of people in cinemas singing “God Save the Queen” at the end of a film. It is difficult to imagine that happening now.
By the turn of the century, Anthony King could write in The British Constitution that “the United Kingdom today, though still a monarchy in form, is all but a republic in fact”. There was a large dollop of nostalgia in attitudes to the monarchy and fascination with the Royal Family as celebrities. This is often portrayed as new, but I think it was Lord Northcliffe, a century ago, who said that royal funerals were second only to wars as topics about which newspaper readers most wanted to know.
The monarchy will continue much as before, since for a long time past, only a quarter of the population has wanted to get rid of it. The percentage may have been higher during Queen Victoria’s reign, writes King, adding that people will probably “be singing ‘God save the Queen (or King)’ for decades, possibly even centuries to come – if they can remember the words”."
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Take care y'all.😉
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