The Man in the High Castle

Why Kings and Queens Can't Fix a Broken Country that Won't Fix Itself

My grandmother was a great admirer of the Queen, for reasons I never really understood.  As a working-class woman, who ran a pub for most of her life – a hard and relentless job that began in the early morning and often went on till past midnight – she did not benefit in any way from whatever it is that the Royal Family has to offer the nation.  Perhaps it was the memory of the war that underpinned her admiration, or that sense of tradition, stability, and continuity that the Queen symbolises for so many.

Over the years I have often been equally amazed at how many people share that admiration and affection, though I have never felt it myself.  It’s not that I have anything against the Queen personally.  As hereditary monarchs go, she was a good one.  She took the concept of service seriously.

She played the role that she was expected to play as well as anyone is ever likely to do.  She was diplomatic, unflappable, able to adapt to changing times, and willing to do whatever she was required of her on any occasion, whether it was meeting and greeting even the most loathsome foreign leaders, witnessing the independence of former British colonies, joining in a James Bond video, or trooping the colour

I felt some sympathy for her back in 1997, when the public – showing that disturbing combination of sentimentality and rage that has become part of our national temperament in recent years - demanded that the Queen engage in the same performative grief at the death of Princess Diana that inspired so many to weep and gnash their teeth in public.

At the time this ‘floral revolution’ was presented, even by people who ought to have known better, as a watershed moment in the relationship between the people and a supposedly remote and out-of-touch monarchy.   Now, with the death of the Queen, it’s clearer with every passing day that this ‘revolution’ was an ephemeral spasm that changed nothing at all.  

I’ve mostly tried to tune out the spectacle of mourning, because the death of a woman I never met from natural causes at the age of 96 is no doubt sad for her family, but it has no personal significance for me, and the concept of ‘national mourning’ is not something that I feel able to participate in, even vicariously. 

I recognise that many people feel differently, and I respect the genuine sadness of people who regarded the Queen as a permanent part of their lives for so many years. But as was the case with Princess Diana, there are also those whose sincerity is questionable.  When Boris Johnson proclaimed his love for the Queen he once lied to, I didn’t believe him.  When the likes of Dan Wootton and Nigel Farage post video clips of themselves laying flowers, I don’t believe them either.

If some people are mourning, others have used the Queen’s death as yet another opportunity to lay into Harry and Meghan for the ‘hurt’ they supposedly caused her; to decry anyone who feels differently as some kind of moral delinquent; to dip their pens in the kind of bathos that Jeanette Winterson displayed when describing the Queen as the ‘only stable female’ in her life.

Ain’t nobody got time for that, and if I can possibly avoid it, I will.  But of course it’s very difficult to avoid it. Yesterday, for example, I found myself in Lincoln Cathedral at noon, listening to a prayer on the speaker calling on God to guide the new king and help him lead the nation to truth, harmony, and justice.

Watching mourners lay candles in sand troughs alongside a portrait of the Queen, I couldn’t help wondering why we need the new King to lead us to truth, harmony, and justice, when his predecessor has not brought us any closer to achieving a society based on these values. 

Once again, I don’t blame the Queen for this; it’s not her job to do what a country should be doing for itself.  But it is worth pointing out that truth, harmony, and justice do not flow from the divine right of kings and queens, but from decisions taken or not taken by ordinary people and their elected representatives. 

The Body Politic

The great progressive achievements of the post-war settlement were not bequeathed to the nation by the monarchy, any more than the right to vote or the loose constitutional arrangements that uphold British democracy.  And yet even a constitutional monarchy with few powers continues to exercise a powerful psychological hold over the British and particularly the English people, that goes far beyond the monarchy’s actual contribution to British society.

This symbolism is crucial. In the sixteenth century, the body of the monarch was believed to consist of two bodies: the physical body or the ‘body natural’,  and the sacred ‘body politic’, by which kings and queens became repositories of abstract power, government and the continuity of the state.   

The two were often intertwined, which is why Philip the Second of Spain endured the English weather in order to marry Mary Tudor, and – unsuccessfully as it turned out – impregnate her and ensure that England became part of the Hapsburg/ Spanish dynasty. 

Philip also considered marriage with Mary’s successor, the first Elizabeth, and it was subsequently rumoured that the Spanish ambassador attempted to bribe the Virgin Queen’s laundress to reveal information about her menstrual cycle and make political calculations regarding her fertility.  

In theory these distinctions between the ‘natural’ and the purely symbolic shouldn’t count for so much in a modern democracy with a monarchy whose role is mostly ceremonial, but the events of the last week have made it clear that we are not nearly as modern as we like to think.

Take the astonishing sight of the Privy Council that finally gave the Prince of Wales the throne he had been waiting for.   Former heads of state, opposition leaders, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ministers and politicians, beefeaters, and trumpeters, all gathered to hear the Clerk of the Accession Council read out the text of proclamation confirming the kingship of Charles III.

The Clerk praised Almighty God and invoked the ‘Lords Spiritual and Temporal’ who ‘with one Voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart’ proclaimed Charles ‘our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord’ of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith.

This text was read out to a ruling class that has lost its collective mind, that now governs a bitterly polarised country where truth, harmony and justice remain largely aspirational concepts, to which many of the Clerk’s listeners are entirely indifferent to. 

This is a country where more than 2 million people cannot afford to eat everyday; where 6.8 million people are on NHS waiting lists; where the very concept of the ‘United’ Kingdom that the new ‘Liege Lord’ will rule over is increasingly subject to centrifugal forces that may break it apart.

And yet somehow all this was forgotten, amid the po-faced processions, in which Penny Mordaunt’s ability to wear a black headband and look solemn was proof that she was prime ministerial material; in which Nick Timothy could be heard tweeting how fortunate we are to be British, and Johnson was invited onto television with Fiona Bruce to share his admiration for the Queen, while Tory politicians and commentators fell over themselves to praise this disgraced prime minister for his speechifying in parliament.

There are sectors of the political class, the media, and the public that will always revel in this. They bask in our capacity for ancient rituals, pageantry, pomp and circumstance, and we think the rest of the world admires us just as much as we admire ourselves.

Even as we mourn the death of the Queen’s ‘body natural’, we continue to see the monarchy as a marker of national identity and a symbol of the continuity of the state in a polarised, uncertain country that has spent the last six years trying to turn a nationalist spasm and the fantasies that accompanied it into something real.

No wonder so many people cling to her memory and look to the monarchy to provide the unity that the country has been unable to provide for itself.  In doing so, we ignore the vast and preposterous wealth that the Royal Family has accrued, and the pyramid of inequality and class privilege that even a supposedly powerless monarchy embodies.

Many of those who praised the Queen for her service have never served anyone but themselves, and yet they now present themselves as patriots because of their willingness to be filmed laying commemorative flowers, and they spit venom at Meghan Markle even as they hold their hands on their hearts.

All this is pathetic, infantilising, and dispiriting.  More than two hundred years ago, Tom Paine denounced the ‘hereditary monarchical system’ as a ‘system of mental levelling’ which ‘indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority.’ In a system in which ‘ Vice and virtue, ignorance and wisdom, in short every quality, good or bad, is put on the same level,’ Paine wrote, ‘Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals.’  

Today, we still cling to the vestiges of that irrationality and the archaic rituals that are part of it.  Like my grandmother, we still look up to those who look down on us, such as the petulant king who throws public tantrums over malfunctioning fountain pens, who took advantage of his mother’s death to coolly sack more than a hundred members of his own staff without warning, who has amassed a vast fortune in addition to his mother’s estates, on which – unlike the rest of us – he will pay no inheritance tax.

Not many people question this right, and some have been arrested or threatened with arrest for suggesting that the new king should not have an automatic right to be where he is.

So mourn the Queen, if you feel that strongly about her.  Or simply if you want to mark the end of a period of history that you were part of.  But real history is not measured by the reigns of kings and queens.  It does not consist of rituals, processions, archaic ceremonies, and incantations from the past that merely seem ‘historic’. 

History is what we make ourselves. It’s the sum of small actions and larger ones. And if we really want a society based on truth, harmony and justice, we cannot rely on the anachronistic relics of the divine right of kings to provide it. We should not subjugate ourselves before people and institutions that have not nearly as much regard for us as we think, even if we believe that such subjugation is purely symbolic.

And when the Queen is finally buried, and the processions come to an end, and we have finished laying out the flowers, the teddy bears and the marmalade sandwiches, we will find ourselves still living in a country in which so many things need fixing, and we would do better not to rely on the man in the high castle to fix them for us.