Melancholic Autumnal splendour was soon overtaken by the instant decay of a new administration. But lest we should have forgotten the Queen’s funeral and the new royal accession, King Charles has now twice reminded us that the Spring of his new beginning is still intact.
First, an appropriate Spring date for his early coronation has been announced. And then, on Wednesday, he perhaps deliberately broadcast to the world his irritation and dismay at Truss: “Back again? Dear, oh dear. Anyway…” This incident has already exploded any notion that Charles as King will be completely apolitical. But a more political monarchy should be welcomed, both in principle and also on account of the immediate and complex danger in which our realm now stands.
In the face of this peril, King and Prime Minister represent two completely opposite possible future responses: one concerned with restoring a more natural, rooted, cooperative order under the authority of a mystical deity; the other determined to install a yet more nakedly liberal and secular regime in which order is to be distilled out of the uprooted strivings of human individuals who seek only their own further advantage.
Thanks to both new global circumstances and to Truss’s overkill, we can no longer be so sure of the inevitable triumph of the second, more obviously modern perspective as we once might have been. We can now recall that the Queen’s funeral was the sudden and gently confident rising to the surface of an older and deeper reality. What drew people to this event was a phenomenon of incarnation, in an ultimately Christian sense, which nonetheless resonated for people of many different faiths and none at all. The Queen, in her increasingly frail body, had been the ultimate locus of power and authority. She stood for the notion that legitimate power, in contrast to the Trusketeer vision, is, indeed, inherently symbolic as well as personal, because it derives from above and from our answerability to the eternally and objective Good, True and Beautiful, not from a balancing of brutally material forces.
England was once devoted to the notion of the “king’s two bodies” — the idea that when the mortal body of a monarch dies, her immortal body of authority survives. (Charles became king not through a ceremony, but at the very instant of his mother’s passing away.) This idea was ultimately inseparable from a theological one: the doctrine that Christ was, in a still more radical sense, at once both human and divine.
Yet in the case of kingship, this never meant that the monarch was a pagan semi-deity. Rather, kingship is anointed: the king is only king under God, and bound to the divinely-given law of the land and to the people who themselves belong to God. The scriptures recognise both the dangers of monarchic tyranny and the likelihood, in a republic, of aristocratic corruption. It is for this reason that they advocate what is in effect a mode of constitutional monarchy.
We speak of ourselves too often as a mere “democracy”, as if we believe in the dominance of the sheerly aggregated will of the British people. But in reality, we live in a representative democracy, under the ultimate sway of the Crown. Political representatives are in effect a kind of “aristocracy”, since they at once guide, influence and interpret the will of the people.
It can seem as if the way forward should be further to liberalise and democratise that mixture. But do we wish to unleash the isolated wills of narcissistic individuals — or their aggregated compound, often in populist reaction against the former? In reality, a less hollow, more participatory and continuous democracy can only prevail if we cultivate a more honourable and rooted leadership at every level, rather than a self-seeking oligarchy that seeks to manipulate and control the populace as though it were a machine.
Monarchy might stand at the apex of this better “aristocracy”. Its leadership is inherited, tying it to tradition, to land, to the interpersonal and to patronage. It is naturally linked to the rural soil, to the encouraging of creative labour, and to life, as instanced by the causes that Charles III supported when he was a prince.
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