monarchy

How do you fund a monarchy?

There are only two ways: taxation or plunder

In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since the end of empire, the plunder route is basically closed off too. In Britain no one pays tax directly to the monarch any more. But many of us do pay rent…

Britain is home to one of the most important monarchies in the world. A big operation with branch offices all over the kingdom and in dozens of other countries that retain affiliate status.

The options for monarchies in the modern period have been limited. They’ve either disappeared all together, withered to an essentially showbiz function or – in a few important cases – retained their absolute power. In the Gulf states, for instance, the royals still run the show. When you’re executed in Saudi Arabia you’re executed by the king. No arguments.

In Britain, though, we have a kind of hybrid situation. The monarch has limited powers under the constitution but huge prominence and a large, although quite ill-defined official role. Right now, Britain’s sovereign is well into his seventies and he’s not been well. Although you might expect him to have chosen a quiet retirement over a full-time job, he’s actually more-or-less constantly on the road, providing figurehead duties and walking along lines of fenced-in royalists seeking cures and indulgences.

King Charles shakes the hand of a well-wisher while on walkabout. A stern-looking security guard looks vigilant behind him — And what do you do?

Britain’s is considered to be a relatively modern monarchy. It hasn’t blocked a law in the parliament for over 300 years, showing up politely to open new sessions and taking an essentially deferential public stance towards whoever currently controls the executive. But there’s a tension. The British monarch holds various powers in reserve and there are several privileged back-channels connecting the monarch with government. The head of government is obliged to travel to Buckingham Palace for weekly meetings, for instance, and, remarkably, there’s a full cabinet member whose job it is to safeguard one of the sovereign’s historic estates. This awkward balance is said to be what’s most precious about the British crown-constitutional settlement, the arrangement that guaranteed peace in Britain across the centuries while Europe was roiled by revolution and unrest. But it’s assumed that, were a sufficiently radical government to come to power – perhaps one elected on a republican mandate – the monarchy would be less quiescent, more engaged. In ordinary circumstances, though, the king agrees to stay in his lane.

But the trade-off is a costly one. The British monarchy stands back from the polity – the senior royals have accepted the somewhat humiliating role of constitutional zoo animals (they must smile and wave and never lash out in public) – in exchange for essentially unlimited wealth. It’s not a bad deal. The king is one of the wealthiest men in Britain. Likewise his immediate family. His children and their children will want for nothing and will enjoy cosseted, globetrotting millionaire status for life, whether they choose to get involved with the firm’s official business or not. There are men and women in the royal orbit – people none of us have even heard of – who are millionaires because of this clever settlement with the state. Even errant family members are promised accommodation for life provided they STFU and toe the line.

The present British monarchy, installed on the death of Queen Victoria – the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (renamed Windsor once being German became an issue) – has had its ups and downs. The Nazi thing, the divorcee (who was also a Nazi), the uncooperative Sloane ranger, the one accused of sexual abuse and so on. The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II is said by everyone to have largely restored the institution’s reputation but, crucially, also shored it up against future crises. What she achieved, in that record-breaking 70-year period, was to provide a platform for her family – and for her successor King Charles III – to operate freely.

As a result, the present king, brought up in extreme luxury, isolated from ordinary people and indulged since childhood, has a degree of freedom to operate that few of his modern predecessors could claim. His entrepreneurial activity is diverse – both in business and in his official role. He’s able to intervene in nationally-important matters – from sustainability to urban planning to youth unemployment. Many thought that his ascent to the throne would in some way limit his activity beyond the wearing of the big crown, launching ships and so on. They were wrong. King Charles III is an engaged sovereign, a head of state unafraid to get his oar in.

Interior of Dartmoor Prison. A prison officer walks away from the camera along a landing — One of the king’s places

All this activity is, of course, expensive. And the official sources of income are under pressure – from public scrutiny, from obligations to comply with legal and financial norms and from tightening budgets. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the king and his eldest son, Prince William, have been developing an additional source of income – previously undeclared – from property owned directly by the two estates they control – the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster. There’s no need to provide the detail here (read the story). It’s what you’d expect. Monarchs gonna monarch. But The Times, historically the newspaper of record and the paper thought by the British establishment to be essentially their own, has done some first-class digging and found hundreds of secret leases, adding up to millions of pounds per year of income for father and son (and all with no capital gains tax or corporation tax to pay).

Every monarchy on earth derives its income principally from land (or what’s under it). The king and the prince own land on which a prison, various Royal Navy boatyards, windfarms, the Mersey ferry, NHS hospitals, a scout hut, a mine, pubs, fire stations and a motorway service station are located. We learn from the report that they also own ancient title to various riverbeds, beaches and foreshores and that they claim fees from those who want to cross them or build on them or even moor boats in the water above them – literally the definition of unproductive, rentier behaviour, right? Anyway, it’s powerful new evidence of the parasitic hold that even a modern, constitutional monarchy must have over the nation to which it has attached itself if it is to prosper. And this one is certainly prospering.

Tom Nairn’s Enchanted Glass is the best book about the British crown-constitutional settlement as ‘symbol of a national backwardness’.
I’ve written about monarchy here before.

How do you like your tradition?

Essentially perfect small town joy or ridiculous and contrived ceremonial fiction?

I was watching this ace video about the shrovetide madness that takes over in several small English towns in February each year and just gurgling with joy at the completeness, the perfect, hermetic correctness of the whole thing. It’s a kind of unarguable tradition. So rooted in the life of these communities. It just is.

The loons in Ashbourne and half a dozen other communities have been crashing around en masse with a huge, leather ball (this year’s Atherstone game was a particularly wild one) for eight hundred years (it might be six hundred, or nine hundred – nobody seems to know) and they see no good reason to stop.

And the obvious contrast that jumped out at me was with the other tradition that we’re all supposed to be engaged with right now – the coronation of a new monarch – a tradition so overblown, so pretentious, so deliberate, that it sucks all the air out of the very idea of tradition, leaving us with the pathetic tradition failure of King Charles and his pen holder, in which a flunkey is berated for not knowing the exact detail of a ritual that was probably brand new.

Part of the Coronation Claims submission form provided by the UK Government for the 2023 coronation of King Charles III - the full text of the form is at the URL linked from the image — Sorry, you’ve missed the deadline

There’s an enormous national effort going into the production of authentic-looking tradition for this coronation. The government has set up a scheme, for instance, that permits people to fill in a form and claim ‘a historic or ceremonial role’ in the event. The Coronation Claims Office “…will ensure we fulfil The King’s wish that the ceremony is rooted in tradition and pageantry but also embraces the future.” Basically, people with plausible stories will get an invitation to put on some kind of costume and attend the coronation. And in this way tradition is made.

We know that most of the traditions of the contemporary monarchy were invented in the late 19th Century – either from whole cloth or based on rituals forgotten since the middle ages – in response to the institution’s last really big crisis of esteem. Some of the traditions are even newer. The big revival of royal tradition began with Victoria’s spectacular diamond jubilee celebration in 1897 and the first true state coronation – with all the parades and public showbiz – was Edward VII’s in 1901. Before that they’d essentially been private events, not really for the hoi poloi. Permitting subjects to cheer from the side of the road was a breakthrough for royal engagement with the populace. It is well known that the new king hates all this.

British life, like that of any modern nation, is a pattern of tradition and novelty; eternal and brand new; authentic and pretend. The rituals of our monarchy, though, are a suffocating simulation that makes a joke of the whole idea of tradition. The institution’s desperate effort to retain legitimacy in a changing world has turned Britain into a tradition factory, a manufacturer of low-grade historical fiction, a fake state.

The video is a lovely half-hour doc from a football channel called Copa 90 that’s won loads of prizes.
The key text in our recent understanding of British royalty as elaborate invention is David Cannadine’s essay in this excellent book.
Everybody knows the royal traditions were invented but the question is, do you care?
This article by Simon Heffer from the New Statesman is about the crisis produced by Victoria’s withdrawal from public life that triggered the monarchy’s massive renewed investment in tradition (paywall).
The crazy mediaeval football thing is surprisingly widespread and might be the origin of actual football.

Monarchy: to be bothered or not to be bothered?

A night-time aerial view of the convoy of vehicles carrying the body of Queen Elizabeth along the Westway in London — The late Queen entering London via the Westway

Less than half of gen-z in Britain thinks we should keep the monarchy but mainstream politicians can’t get enough of it.

What do lefties and republicans think about the monarchy? Seems obvious, right? Off with their heads! But no, there’s some complexity here and it connects closely with the weird (almost unique on planet earth) constitutional arrangements that persist here in the archipelago.

On the left there are basically two positions on the monarchy. Not on monarchy in general — only one there really — but on Britain’s actually existing monarchy, the Crown-Constitutional Parliamentary state that’s been locked in here since the 17th Century.

In position one, the monarchy is an unequivocally, catastrophically bad thing—a major impediment to meaningful popular sovereignty and an aspect of Britain’s backward machinery of state. Britain’s monarchy, in this view, is a vital contributor to the country’s long-term decline, solidified in the retreat from empire and the disastrous deindustrialisation of the post-war period.

In this perspective, identified with the British ‘New Left’ since the 1950s and developed in great detail in the pages of New Left Review by brilliant writers like Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, the settlement that secured the monarchy in 1688 locked in the dominance of sclerotic aristocracy, land-owning elite and the compliant institutions that sustain them. The result is a country that, paradoxically, became a nation-state first and industrialised first but failed fully to make the transition from ancien régime to modernity, whose progress from feudalism to capitalism is still incomplete. In the New Left worldview ceremony, deference and acceptance of hierarchy have naturalised and hardened aristocratic dominance and neutralised the popular radicalism that has expanded democracy elsewhere in the capitalist world.

The other left anti-monarchist perspective, embodied these days by lefties belonging to populist or ‘realist’ strands of the tradition, is much less bothered. These anti-monarchists oppose the unelected power of the monarchy (obvs) but would probably be quite happy to leave the Windsors where they are and get on with the class war. In fact, for left-populists, the fervent opposition to the crown and its institutions embodied by that earlier generation of left-wingers is actually damaging to the cause. For them, the critics and theorists who developed the declinist narrative of the New Left—whose animating idea was that Britain is stuck in a deferential mire and can aspire only to a steady loss of status, relevance and prosperity—are a bit FBPE, a bit ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ and not least because opposing the monarchy puts them at odds these days with a clear majority of the British working class.

It’s not just the left who oppose the monarchy, of course. There’s an indignant centrist/liberal republican movement too – in fact they’ve been at it for longer and they’re more organised than the left. In the Crown’s 19th century slump it was largely Whig/Liberal radicals like Charles Dilkes who opposed the monarchy and, in the present day, the Liberal party itself still has a robust republican strand. The young Liz Truss was not alone in her vituperative opposition to the royals. See also Norman Baker’s book And What Do You Do?

The rehabilitation of the monarchy that’s taken place since the end of the 19th Century, described by Tom Nairn in his brilliant and thoroughly New Left book The Enchanted Glass, has, to put it bluntly, worked. The Crown-Parliamentary state won. In the middle ages, monarchs cowered in their palaces, derided publicly. When they ventured into the streets kings and queens were often booed, some were so often away crusading (or hunting, or carousing) they might not be known to their subjects at all.

Labour leadership and conference officials bow during a minute's silence for Queen Elzabeth at the 2022 Liverpool conference — Labour Conference 2022: national anthem at one end and Red Flag at the other

Working people who, until the early 19th Century, were suspicious of or even hostile towards royalty are, especially in the most recent decades of the Queen’s reign, mostly in favour (the numbers might be a bit different among fans of The Crown and the young, of course). Principled opposition to monarchy will just put the left in conflict with the working class and leave lefties in a very familiar position—thrashing about trying to explain why ordinary people don’t agree with them. It all begins to look a bit Remoaner/People’s Vote/Russian money.

So now, a left wing party or movement that put much energy into opposing the monarchy, that set out policies aiming at an elected head of state or even a slightly less anti-democratic settlement—one that, for instance, removed the monarch’s powers of consent to new laws—could only damage its prospects with working people. Leave the monarchs alone, lefties, they’re not worth it.

Over on Goodreads, I reviewed Nairn’s beautifully-written and highly-entertaining page-turner The Enchanted Glass which dates from the period before the annus horribilus but has two excellent forewords by the author bringing the story well into the 21st Century.

I’d go so far as to say that this is a beautiful book. Funny, angry, imaginative – an unforgiving demolition of the fantasies and self-deceptions of Britain’s backward, complacent, destructive tolerance of the invented rituals of modern royalty – the damage done to our democracy, the permanent strangulation of popular sovereignty, the narrowing of our national potential, the bleak prospect of unstoppable decline made inevitable by our unthinking acceptance of the Crown-constitutional status quo.

Published in 1988, there is absolutely nothing dated or irrelevant about this book – in fact one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the constant, startling correspondences we find between Britain towards the end of the Thatcher revolution and Britain after the Brexit revolt.

The scope of the book is not limited in any way to a critique 0f monarchy or monarchism. My understanding of Britain’s constitutional weirdness (Nairn’s wonderful name for Crown-constitutional Britain is ‘Ukania’) and the powerful parasitic grip of Britain’s social and economic elites has been so enhanced by his excoriating, wide-ranging critique of City, Crown, complacent Parliament, self-interested administrative class, complicit media elite (and so on). I feel I have a new super-power.

Nairn is a brilliant writer, his language sparkles and surprises – you’ll find yourself stopping to look up words you’ve never heard that always turn out to be perfect for the job. It’s an absolute joy – and it took me a long time to read, mainly because I couldn’t help myself from highlighting brilliant passage after brilliant passage on the Kindle (it’s a cause of immense Bezos-directed resentment that I can’t share my highlights with you because I read the book in a non-Amazon format! Sort it out Jeff!).

Nairn, who as of this review, is still with us, developed his powerful argument for the backwardness of Britain’s constitutional arrangements and for the inevitable decline of the state and the polity across his many decades as writer (and editor) at New Left Review. If you have a subscription you can read the entire archive of his writing (and of his pal Perry Anderson – also still with us – another brilliant writer with whom he worked closely) online.
Review of The Enchanted Glass, from Goodreads

I’ve been bingeing on texts about monarchy lately, for obvious reasons. I also recently read David Cannadine’s influential paper ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual : The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’ c. 1820–1977’ which is in a terrific book of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. The essay, published in 1977, explains how the rituals and customs invented or updated in the 19th Century rescued Britain’s Crown from irrelevence or even obliteration in a revolution like those that wiped out the monarchies of Europe one after the other (Hobsbawm’s essay in the same book, a wider-ranging survey of the twilight of monarchy across Europe, is also worth a read).

Another good read in this context is a David Edgerton’s 20th Century history The rise and fall of the British nation, which aims to dismantle the whole declinist New Left narrative. Perry Anderson, owner but not quite sole proprietor of the declinist story, predictably enough dismantled Edgerton’s dismantling in the pages of New Left Review (you might need a subscription to read that one).

Listen to this episode of Bungacast, the podcast from the people who brought you ‘The end of the end of history‘ for a good illustration of the modern, populist left perspective on monarchy—dismissive, derisory but definitely not bothered.