For the English liberal, the monarchy is an unfortunate protrusion of Old England; like racism, the House of Lords or malt vinegar, it is simply out of time and place, a source of mild embarrassment in the company of foreigners. For the English conservative on the other hand, it is an institution embodying a great idea – one that binds its citizenry, irrespective of class or creed, to a common national interest. It follows that faced with the slightest challenge, the conservative rallies to its defence – for the less sound the idea, the greater its need of protection – whilst the liberal can’t quite understand what the fuss is about. It’s about the revolution. Yesterday, Oliver Cromwell; today, Meghan Markle: doing God’s work, rattling all earthly powers in the process.
It’s not about upper class discomfort with the free American spirit or independent womanhood. Troublesome transatlantic communions were once the rage among the upper orders: American new money, hunting respectability, sent its daughters to Europe and European respectability, hunting new money, duly married them. Some unions lasted only as long as it took to fix the leak above the billiards room, but at the dawn of the twentieth century a near quarter of the House of Lords had an heiress to a Stateside fortune on their arm. They made the English gentry as American as it is Franco-Dutch-Germanic and – long before the advent of the electrified yurt and the possibility to rent one’s land to the glamping public – saved it from extinction.
Something else is at stake here. There’s a British turf war underway: positions of privilege are contested, current occupants pitted against ambitious younger aspirants. Like Elvira and Arturo, the star-crossed royals were caught in the fray. To our latter-day cavaliers, the Californian came to personify all that they loathe in the rise of the millennials – released from the universities into the professions, the new puritanism of political correctness and the identities ruffling feathers everywhere: schools, boardrooms, broadcasting, the law courts, parliament. Intolerable. But the conquest of the palace? The promise of royalty reinvented? A bridge too far. Windsor, the last redoubt, was saved from the radicals.
English conservatism is on the qui vive – insecure and excitable, a sign of shaky foundations – but there’s not a New Model Army with which to sweep it aside. Monarchy, aristocracy, the peerage – in need of some improvement? Pull the other one. The British Labour Party won’t do a thing about any of it. Why would they? As Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have remarked in 1915: those social democrats are splendid fellows.
Patrick Casey
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 274, February/March 2020
