THE MONARCHIST

Friday, March 26, 2010

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Thursday, March 4, 2010

“The aristocracy is not dying,” says the Duke of Devonshire. “It is dead. Coffin’s nailed down, it’s in the ground. It doesn’t exist.”

The previous Duke of Devonshire in his study at Chatsworth (Photo: Andrew Crowley)

The Duke was responding to Labour’s plans to eliminate the remaining 90 hereditary peers before the next General Election. If Labour manages to get the proposal through Parliament in the next few weeks, the Duke has promised to drop his title. “Because then it would be clear-cut what the people wanted, and it would be confusing to maintain hereditary titles,” he says. “So, finish that, go back to being called Cavendish.”

Yes, in a manner of speaking, the Duke is right, but as Toby Young writes, ironically under Labour, Britain is more class-bound than ever.

Friday, October 23, 2009

The recent Head of State nonsense, in what was once known as the Elder Dominion, has smoked Canadian republicans out of the wood work. There are not many Canadian republicans, they are a small and rather predictable breed whose central criticism is that the monarchy is old and British derived. So are habeas corpus and free speech, the latter of which allows many republicans - who are overwhelmingly journalists - to earn a living. Even if only a scribblers living. While reading one of these screeds I was mentally preparing a rebuttal, then I struck gold. The author pointed to a recently declassified report by Lord Moran, Britain's High Commissioner to Ottawa in the early 1980s. The reference is a ham fisted attempt to portray Lord Moran, whose father was Winston Churchill's personal physician, as a condescending British toff.

Back in 1982 when I was the Star's bureau chief in Ottawa, I met Lord Moran, who then was the British high commissioner to Canada.

Our meeting was cordial, but I got the distinct impression that Lord Moran, whose real name is John Wilson, was completely bored with our session, as well as with Ottawa, Canada and Canadians as a whole.

From his pompous attitude, which stuffy Brits like Lord Moran carry off so well, it was clear he saw most Canadians as inferior colonials with limited talents and even less curiosity.

Turns out my first impression was right, as evidenced by a 1984 dispatch that Lord Moran, who was high commissioner from 1981 to 1984, sent to London on his departure from Ottawa.

The letter, obtained by the BBC from the British Foreign Office under Freedom of Information legislation and made public earlier this week, trashes Canadians in general, our politicians, especially the late Pierre Trudeau, our writers, actors and even our skiers.

Reading the six-page letter, titled "Final Impressions of Canada," reminded me of that meeting with Lord Moran.

It also made me wonder why, if top British diplomats like him hold us in such low esteem, Canada continues to cling to its British colonial roots, complete with having us acknowledge Queen Elizabeth as "the Queen of Canada."

Heavens. I wouldn't be surprised that Lord Moran was bored stiff talking to Bob Hepburn (which I guess is not his full name). I've never met his lordship, he might very well be a pompous toff, though I rather doubt it. After nearly four decades in the British Foreign Service, it's unlikely anyone lacking in tact and some measure of humility would have been posted to some of the most sensitive areas of world, notably Africa in the wake of decolonisation. Britishers often come off as condescending and superior by virtue of their accent and bearing. Posture is still insisted upon in the betters schools (Moran attended Eton), so is the Queen's English. Victims of our proletarianized North America culture - not that Britain is so far behind now - might very well mistake manners and education as pomposity. Bobby Hepburn (since we are not to stand on formality and call him Robert) goes to some trouble to destroy the monarchy on the basis of one meeting.

I'm exaggerating only slightly. I'm sure anything involving hierarchy, formality and restraint are an anathema to Bobby. Which is why the living embodiment of such traits is obnoxious to him. The victim of this drive-by smearing, Lord Moran, has not commented and is unlikely to do so. The article does perform one invaluable service, it points us to the former High Commissioner's report. Rather than being condescending, it is a frank and honest assessment of Canada's virtues and faults. I've read very few professional hand-wringers of Canadian identity, a modestly profitable cottage industry here, that capture Canada so well as Lord Moran. Thin skinned nationalists can complain, the honest patriot should make time to review the report here. Ironically the report describes Bobby Hepburn without citing him.

One of Lord Moran's complaints, though he does not say it explicitly, is that Canadians are quite provincial in their attitudes. One of the symptoms of provincialism is overacting to criticism from the metropolis. The Big Time calls you Small Time and you jump up and down about how Big Time you really are. There's a reason people like Michael Ignatieff, whom I do not like, spent so much of their career in London. The former Imperial Capital is a much bigger stage than Toronto or Montreal. An honest man can admit that, a pompous old scribbler will find it harder.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Only Gerald Warner could write this:

The now extra-Parliamentary hereditary peerage should be returned to the exclusive jurisdiction of Her Majesty the Queen, as the Orders of the Garter and the Thistle have been. In future, instead of awarding a Most Noble Marquess who has done sterling service in the community a Knighthood of the Garter, the Queen should consider offering him promotion to a dukedom. None of this should have anything to do with the Prime Minister of the day: let him hand out life peerages to any scallywags he wishes; but the hereditary peerage should continue as a body of true nobility under the Queen. Dukes and other hereditary peers are living heritage: we should be more concerned to conserve them than nasty creatures such as the Natterjack toad.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Sometimes the best monuments are the most modest ones. I accidentally came across Wellington's personal mounting block, which most passerbys would probably miss since a giant statue of King Edward VII rests beside this very spot. In the days of yore, horse blocks were used for assistance to mount and dismount a horse or a cart, especially for the young, elderly or infirm. They were especially useful for women riding sidesaddle, allowing a horse to be mounted without a loss of modesty.

Of course the thought of Napoleon's conqueror needing assistance to get up on his horse seems unflattering and ungallant, that is until you realize that the Grand Old Duke was getting up in age around 1830, so it stands to reason. In any event, I was pleasantly surprised to come across it.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, famously delivered the most incendiary political speech of his life to an overflow audience of 4,000 at Limehouse, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London, attacking the House of Lords for its opposition to his "People's Budget" of 1909.

It is rather a shame for a rich country like ours probably the richest in the world, if not the richest the world has ever seen, that it should allow those who have toiled all their days to end in penury and possibly starvation. It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb, bleeding and footsore, through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn...

The landlord is a gentleman - I have not a word to say about him in his personal capacity - who does not earn his wealth. He does not even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks to receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride, is stately consumption of wealth produced by others...

The landlords are receiving eight millions a year by way of royalties. What for? They never deposited the coal there. It was not they who planted these great granite rocks in Wales, who laid the foundations of the mountains...And yet he, by some divine right, demands as his toll for merely the right for men to risk their lives in hewing these rocks eight millions a year...These capitalists put their money in, and I said: When the cash failed what did the landlord put in? The capitalist risks, at any rate, the whole of his money; the engineer puts his brains in; the miner risks his life....

And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Wont you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? they scowl at us, and we say: Only a hapenny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! and they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.

The speech was well received but provoked wrathful protests from powerful quarters of the country, most especially from the British Opposition and the Ruling Establishment. Three days later Prime Minister Asquith found King Edward in a state of great agitation in consequence of Lloyd George's Limehouse speech. The elderly King had never been more irritated and annoyed, or more difficult to appease.

The ominous sounding "People's Budget" was indeed a revolutionary concept, because it was the first budget in British history to introduce the Welfare State with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth to the British public. Its rejection by the House of Lords led to a constitutional crisis and two general elections in 1910, including the subsequent enactment of the Parliament Act of 1911, which forever removed the veto of the House of Lords on money bills. The era of the gentleman aristocrat was over, the age of the ambitious politician had begun.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Flail Britannia.

Brought up by drug-addicted parents in a poor neighborhood of London, she was transformed by the glare of reality television into a multi-million-dollar product whom the public was urged to celebrate, especially after being diagnosed with cervical cancer, Mr. Parkinson noted.

"Jade Goody has her own place in the history of television and, while it's significant, it's nothing to be proud of," he wrote in the Radio Times.

"When we clear the media smokescreen from around her death what we're left with is a woman who came to represent all that's paltry and wretched about Britain today. She was ... barely educated, ignorant and puerile. Then she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and from that point on became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died."

What made Ms. Goody stand out in her reality-TV appearances was her shocking ignorance of her country's geography, her naked and drunken exploits and her racist bullying of an Indian housemate.

To generations of outsiders the image of Great Britain was captured in films like Goodbye, Mr Chips and the Brideshead Revisited miniseries. Dignified, well educated men and women, often reserved to the point of being aloof. Everyone had been to one of the great public schools, then Oxbridge. They governed a third of the earth's surface with a detached, albeit often farsighted paternalism. Over the skies of Southern England in 1940 a few hundred men, many of them toffs, flew Hurricanes and Spitfires while wearing neckties and using cricketing metaphors. Much of this was myth, a skillful exaggeration of a Britain that never really was but many assumed should be. If the quintessential American was the businessmen, so the quintessential Englishman was an aristocrat. Unlike the continent, being a peer of the realm was a sign of genuine social distinction. Pre-revolutionary France was full of thousands of minor members of the nobility who lived little better than the peasants over whom them held often only a nominal lordship. In Britain only a few hundred were genuine aristocrats, though younger siblings were given courtesy titles. The law of primogeniture, much maligned by egalitarians, created a class of aristocrats without real titles and little money.

They married into the upper reaches of the productive middle class, worked in the City, sat in the House of Commons, served in India, or the Navy or the Army. Noblesse oblige was their code, which they followed more or less well. Their paternalism could become authoritarian and their class system was rigid and obtuse in its manners and customs. A gentleman was anyone who behave as such, and could demonstrate some independence of means. This gave the governing classes of Britain a remarkable flexibility. In three generations, the Peels of Tamworth went from humble merchants, to founders of the industrial revolution to the very pinnacle of political power, under their most famous son, Sir Robert Peel, who governed as Prime Minister in the 1830s and 1840s. For North Americans this seems unimpressive, raised on the themes of Horatio Alger, rising to the top is something a man does before middle age, not something his grandchildren accomplish. The old American saying is "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations." Compared to continental Europe, however, the British class system was self renewing, adapting to changes in the economic and social structure of their society. Had it not been, Britain would have gone the way of France, Germany or Austria, a blood soaked nineteenth century and the jackboot ridden twentieth.

The class system, however, was unjust, denying men of talent the relatively unobstructed rise that they could obtain in the colonies or the United States. It's unlikely that Andrew Carnegie would have become the great success in Britain that he became in Pennsylvania. Injustice breeds resentment, especially among the talented and ambitious. That resentment found its outlet in politics, especially in the New Jerusalem promised by the socialists. Had this hatred of the aristocracy simply been directed toward the economic sphere, the wrecking of great fortunes through the workings of the inheritance tax, the damage would have been contained to there. The Jacobin spirit which moved these men could not stop there. They found that while taxation had destroyed the fortunes, ruined great family manors and embarrassed more than a few heirs to the continent - back when the pound was much stronger than today - it could not destroy the lure of the aristocracy. Many of these jacobins were also republicans, but few dared attack the monarchy openly. So much easier to subvert it and the peerage.

However impoverished many great families became, the lure of a title was strong. The middle classes, while mocking the idleness of their social superiors, wanted to adopt the manners and customs of the elite. Britain was an aspirational culture. While the vast majority of men and women were necessarily absorbed in the daily struggle for life, the aristocracy was able to focus on cultivating the softer elements of civilization. Manner of dress, manner of speech, the revised code of chivalry, a conception of honour. These things trickled down. It was pointless, reasoned the jacobins, to economically destroy the aristocracy if its spirit lived on and grew. The culture of aspiration was replaced with the culture of degradation. In America a similar phenomenon was seen among the blacks. To aspire to a higher standard of living and behaviour was labeled as "acting white." During the Second World War Greer Garson became one of the English speaking world's biggest stars. Playing middle class housewives, Garson spoke the received pronunciation and was seen as the exemplar of English womanhood. She was a lady, though from a comparatively modest background. The middle classes had aspired and achieved. In the 1960s the descendants of the Minivers began to aspire down. In three generations we have sunk from Mrs Miniver to Jade Goody. The schools, which once taught classics, behaviour, mathematics and history are now focused on:

A new report on the primary school curriculum in England and Wales encourages educators to place more emphasis on technology than on traditional subjects.

According to its recommendations, students would not necessarily have to learn about the Victorian era or the Second World War - teachers could choose two "key periods" of British history - but learning skills such as blogging, podcasting and Twittering would take a central role.

Plutarch or Twittering? Mrs Miniver or what Americans call white trash? Does Britain aspire up or down? Is there an up or down?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

If The Monarchist can be accused of eccentric behaviour, it is apparently because we stem from a mind so original it cannot be conformed to societal norms:

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

— Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), English Poetess

Speaking of eccentricity, I suspect that if you commissioned a scientific poll and asked people if they generally thought our shared monarchy was an ancient glory, harmless eccentricity or intolerable relic, 5% would declare it a glory, 60% would decide it was harmless and 35% would spit and wail intolerable, or somewhere thereabouts (we have opened a new poll in the sidebar, you are encouraged to generate grossly unscientific results).

Saturday, March 1, 2008

10 Downing Street, 28 February 2008.
Office of the Prime Minister: "We received a petition asking...

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reinstate a House of Lords composed of hereditary peers."

"We believe that the purpose of the House of Lords is not only to keep a check on the elected House of Commons, but also to keep a check on the passing fads of the electorate. The only way this can be accomplished is for the House of Lords to be largely, if not entirely, made up of hereditary peers. The system of hereditary peerage allied with an elected House of Commons maintains a legitimate balance between representation of the electorate and immunity to the fads of society. A House of Lords made up of hereditary peers maintains the hope that a depraved society will not always be reflected in depraved government."

Read the Government's response here

"The Government's view is that in a modern democracy it is unacceptable that individuals should qualify for a seat in Parliament on the basis of their ancestry. The Government is committed to removing the remaining hereditary places in the House of Lords.

In July 2007, after the free votes in Parliament on the composition of the House of Lords, the Prime Minister confirmed the Government's commitment to bringing forward a comprehensive package to complete House of Lords reform. The Government will develop proposals for a substantially or wholly elected House of Lords. As part of this package, the Government is committed to removing the anomaly of the remaining hereditary peers."

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Yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, Mr. Brown, it is the people's view that in a modern democracy it is unacceptable that individuals should qualify for a seat in the House of Lords on the basis of how much they donate to the Labour Party. The people are committed to removing the Government's corrupt system of cash for peerages, and one way of doing that is to completely remove any influence your cronies have over appointments to the Lords.

Friday, December 31, 2004

"Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society." - Edmund Burke

"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents." - Thomas Jefferson

THE PEERAGE OF ENGLAND