Time To Reign.

Reigning But Not Ruling: Republics are generally a people’s political response to a sovereign who has ruled them badly. Oliver Cromwell famously “cut off the King’s head with the crown on it” because Charles Stuart had plunged Britain into a bloody civil war. King Louis XVI lost his head because the French people were no longer willing to starve while Versailles glittered. Once a monarchy has been tamed by its people, however, it becomes an invaluable instrument for isolating the role of head of state from the vicissitudes of politics.

WHAT WOULD MY YOUNGER SELF have said to the person he had become on Saturday night (6/5/23) as the Coronation unfolded? Would he have upbraided the old man seated in front of the television, watching another old man being crowned king? Certainly, he would have reminded him of the day long ago, in the Student Union of Otago University, just days before Prince Charles was due to visit Dunedin, during a debate on the monarchy, when someone (it might have been Michael Laws) shouted “Long live the King!”, and Chris Trotter leapt to his feet and shouted “Long live Oliver Cromwell!” How did that radical young republican turn into a sentimental old monarchist?

A large part of the answer to that question is bound up with the fact that the event recalled was so long ago. Because, at the heart of the monarchical principle lies the brutal reality of time. The span of a human life and all of the experiences that are crammed into it is what a reign is all about. It is not what a presidential term is all about.

The difference between a reign and a term is of no small importance. In a constitutional monarchy such as ours the identity of the head of state is known years in advance. A king or queen accedes to the throne immediately upon the death of their predecessor. Barring some awful catastrophe, the next monarch will already be a known quantity and the succession will be seamless.

The contrast between a royal accession and a presidential election could hardly be starker. Inevitably, the elected head of state will be the product of political choices. Either, he or she will be nominated and confirmed by Parliament – as our Governors-General are now – or, the head of state will be the product of a vote. In the latter case, a number approaching half of the electorate (more if there are multiple contenders) cannot help feeling bitterly disappointed that their candidate failed to attract the requisite support.

If the republic is a healthy one, the losers of the presidential contest will look forward to the next opportunity to assert their will. If it is not, then the losers may refuse to concede defeat – throwing the legitimacy of the head of state into doubt. Presidential terms are, therefore, necessarily short – four to five years – if only to keep the losing sides’ spirits up. Any longer and the president’s opponents might be tempted to shorten his or her term … by other means.

With these potential problems in mind, some republics limit their heads of state to a single term. Providing the president’s role is largely ceremonial, as in the Republic of Ireland, such limitations are generally accepted without objection. In those republics where a president exercises executive power, however, as in the USA and France, the incumbent is generally given the opportunity to win a second term.

Time is as important to the constitution of republican leadership as it is to the subject’s experience of monarchy. In a republic, time becomes the ally of those who see the orderly rotation of political elites – and their chosen leaders – as vital to the health of the state. Republicans regard political permanence as tantamount to tyranny. From their perspective, power is best served up in relatively short periods of time.

As we New Zealanders say: “Three years is too short for a good government, and too long for a bad one.”

Everything changes, however, when the head of state is not only ceremonial, but hereditary. Historically-speaking, republics are an angry people’s political response to a sovereign who has ruled them badly. Oliver Cromwell famously “cut off the King’s head with the crown on it” because Charles Stuart had plunged Britain into a bloody civil war. King Louis XVI lost his head because the French people were no longer willing to starve while Versailles glittered. Once a monarchy has been tamed by its people, however, it becomes an invaluable instrument for isolating the role of head of state from the vicissitudes of politics.

More than that, a constitutional hereditary monarchy, being the enterprise of a single family, mirrors the experiences of the people over whom it reigns. My father was the subject of three kings and a queen. But, for most of my life, I have been the subject of just one monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. As such, I grew up contemporaneously with the sovereign’s children. Like them, I married and began a family. Like them I got older and, hopefully, wiser.

All the ups and downs of the Windsors have been tolerated by their subjects because they, too, have had their ups and downs. Charles is not the only man who married the wrong woman. Harry is not the only grandson to give his grandmother grief. Certainly, the Windsors’ wealth is immeasurably greater than all but a handful of their subjects, but that has never appeared to bother the vast majority of those who, for 70 years, referred to Elizabeth Windsor as, simply, “The Queen”. Monarchs are supposed to live in palaces and ride in golden carriages – that’s what it means to be “royal”. In all the life transitions that truly matter, however, their subjects saw the Windsors as people like themselves.

Crucial to this identification is the very strong sense that the Windsors’ subjects know them. People of my generation recall the Queen’s “royal visits”. We remember Charles and Diana and baby William playing with a Buzzy-Bee on the lawn of Government House. We all felt the shock of Diana’s tragic death. Younger Kiwis watched the marriage of William and Kate and counted-off their offspring. All of us have watched Charles grow older and older, and wondered how he endured his seemingly endless apprenticeship.

No elected president can possibly provide a nation with this sort of story, for that length of time. Nor can an elected head of state offer a backstory stretching back centuries, or an historical drama peopled with such a compelling cast of characters.

That’s why the older Chris Trotter could be found seated in front of the television on Saturday night, watching the man he had always known finally coming into his inheritance. Oliver Cromwell had no option but to behead Charles I. I am glad his revolution, and the French, and the Russian, drove home the lesson that, ultimately, kings and emperors, like presidents, are only entitled to rule with the consent of the governed.

“I come not to be served, but to serve”, said Charles Windsor.

And I said: “God save the King!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 9 May 2023.

Two Kings, One Country.

A Meeting Of Minds On The Treaty: The ultimate irony of a radical Māori nationalist push for a republic would be an answering surge towards monarchical institutions. A Māori-Pakeha alliance forged between members of the Professional-Managerial Class in pursuit of a radically identarian republic may yet find itself opposed by a Māori-Pakeha alliance embracing all social classes and dedicated to installing not one, but two, monarchs over New Zealand.

IT MUST BE TWENTY YEARS since a bunch of well-meaning Pakeha attempted to hold a serious constitutional conference. Republicanism, a topic making a comeback following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, was on this long-ago gathering’s agenda, but so, too, was the Treaty of Waitangi.

That was the problem.

Once the Māori nationalists had laid down the wero of incorporating the Māori version of the Treaty into a reformed New Zealand constitution, the conference was over. As arranged, the good and the great delivered their thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand’s ramshackle constitution, but nobody was really listening. Everybody understood that te Tiriti o Waitangi, if accepted as the true constitutional blueprint of New Zealand, would act like the most powerful acid on the institutions and principles of the colonial state.

Those attending the conference also understood that the Māori nationalist position was effectively non-negotiable. All future deviations from the constitutional status-quo would be in the direction indicated by the Māori nationalists and their Pakeha enablers in the judiciary, academia, the public service, the major political parties, and – now – the mainstream media.

In their heart-of-hearts, the Pakeha conference organisers understood that, henceforth, constitutional reform in New Zealand could only be a matter of the slow and incremental advance of te Tiriti to the heart of the New Zealand state. This transformation would be accomplished without the widespread popular debate, or validating public referenda, generally considered essential to the making of new constitutions. Indeed, it was clear that any te Tiriti-based transformation could only be accomplished by stealth, and only forestalled by force.

For all but the most naïve republicans, therefore, the Queen’s death was an event to be feared: inevitable, but fraught with danger.

The Māori Party’s recent ideological shift from monarchism to republicanism signalled the growing confidence of the Māori nationalist cause. Among the radicals, the Crown has lost its magic. The cosy relationship between the House of Windsor and the Kingitanga – which the Prime Minister was at pains to shore up by taking King Tuheitia with her to the Queen’s funeral – is as unlikely to withstand the drive towards a radical decolonisation of New Zealand as the “Settler State” itself.

With their Green Party enablers adding their voices to the Māori Party’s call for the indigenisation of the New Zealand constitution – a process which would begin with the repudiation of the name “New Zealand” in favour of “Aotearoa” – and Labour’s Māori Caucus determined not to be outflanked on the left by their Māori Party challengers, the Labour Party will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the position that the republican “conversation” can be put off to a later date.

That said, the radical agenda of the Māori nationalists will not be without its opponents. Quite how the Kingitanga is supposed to retain any vestige of ideological credibility in an Aotearoa shaped by the requirements of comprehensive decolonisation is a question bound to create serious division. Without the presence of the British Crown, the Māori Crown may strike the radicals as an embarrassing exercise in colonial emulation. The Māori King and his subjects are unlikely to take kindly to such an insulting characterisation.

The Iwi Leaders Group may, similarly, respond with growing alarm to the radicalism inherent in the Māori and Green parties’ decolonisation and indigenisation agenda. The curious blending of aristocracy and capitalism that has grown up under the auspices of the Crown makes precious few concessions to the poverty-stricken Māori masses living in the major cities.

Indeed, the blending of traditional Māori leadership with corporate capitalism, was the Crown’s inspired solution to the dangerous political potential of the uprooted urban Māori population. (Those with a working knowledge of Scottish history will recognise the origins of the model in the transformation of traditional clan chiefs into modern capitalist landlords that followed the final defeat of the Jacobite cause in 1745.)

The Māori Party, the Greens, and the Labour Māori Caucus may soon find their radical constitutional plans opposed by an alliance of Māori and Pakeha forces that traverses Left and Right. Included in the opposition, the tertiary-educated and largely middle-class Māori and Pakeha radicals may find not only those Māori who identify primarily as New Zealanders (the nearly half of Maoridom who opt to go on the General Electoral Roll) but also the very poorest and most marginalised Māori.

Young Māori, tertiary qualified, fluent in te reo, and earning a six-figure salary from a government agency, may find that they are not received all that warmly by Māori who are crammed into motels, micro-managed by MSD, forced to work for the minimum wage at jobs that don’t pay the rent, and then made to feel worthless on account of their inability to speak their own language, feed their families, or make sure their children attend school. Race and nationality are powerful markers of identity – but so, too, is socio-economic status. So is class.

The ultimate irony of a radical Māori nationalist push for a republic would be an answering surge towards monarchical institutions. A Māori-Pakeha alliance forged between members of the Professional-Managerial Class in pursuit of a radically identarian republic may yet find itself opposed by a Māori-Pakeha alliance embracing all social classes and dedicated to installing not one, but two, monarchs over New Zealand. Their unifying slogan, harking all the way back to the formation of the Kingitanga in the 1850s, could well be: “King Charles III in his place, King Tuheitia in his, and the Treaty of Waitangi over them both.”

It is not difficult to imagine the said King Charles, and King Tuheitia, at Turangawaewae, jointly signing a new covenant, in which the common rights and privileges of all New Zealanders, and the resources and treasures of both its peoples, are reaffirmed, protected and guaranteed by the two Crowns, and the democratically elected bi-cameral parliament, of the dual monarchy of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The radical, Māori nationalist drive towards a te Tiriti-driven, identarian republican constitution, written to advance the interests of both the Māori and the Pakeha members of the Professional-Managerial Class, may end up driving the traditional defenders of capitalism, liberal democracy, and the rights and aspirations of working people, into a set of constitutional arrangements as odd as they are innovative.

Radical, identarian republicanism may yet make royalists of us all.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 September 2022.

A King’s Grasp.

Worst Case Scenario? Mike Bartlett’s teleplay, King Charles III, teases out the consequences of a constitutional monarch who makes the mistake of attempting to defend the rights of his subjects.

WHILE MANY OF US pretended that Queen Elizabeth II would, somehow, live forever, others among us knew better. One of those who knew these days of mourning – and celebration – would come, and gave thought to what they might portend, was the British playwright, Mike Bartlett. His thoughts turned to the man who would succeed the Queen, and the times into which the reign of Charles III would be launched, and he wrote a play. Like all wordsmiths, Mr Bartlett understood that if one truly wishes to tell the truth, then one had best write fiction.

Bartlett’s play – later turned into a BBC 2 television drama starring the late Tim Pigott-Smith – was called, simply, King Charles III. Described by The Daily Telegraph critic, Jasper Rees, as “pure televisual gelignite”, the BBC 2 adaptation places before royalists and republicans the two most dangerous questions that have always lain, unasked and unanswered, at the heart of constitutional monarchy.

The First: Is there any act of Parliament so injurious to the common good that no monarch, in good conscience, could be expected to give it the royal assent?

The Second: What is likely to unfold if the royal assent is withheld from such an act?

The legislation Bartlett invents for the purposes of his dramatic thought experiment seeks to restrict the freedom of the press. For centuries, this tradition has protected the people from those who would oppress them. Bartlett’s fictitious Charles, aware that the bill has passed through both Houses of Parliament, knows that he now constitutes the sole remaining barrier to the destruction of a fundamental freedom.

According to the Nineteenth Century constitutional writer, Walter Bagehot, there are three crucial rights available to a British constitutional monarch. These are: The right to be consulted. The right to encourage. The right to warn. Having swiftly exhausted all three, the fictional Charles must decide upon his next move.

The real King Charles III will soon face a series of equally portentous choices.

The government of the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is committed to passing legislation inimical to the survival of British civil liberties. She has filled the upper echelons of her Cabinet with individuals who are well to the right of most Tory MPs. The 80-seat majority bequeathed to her by Boris Johnson is almost certainly large enough to withstand any last-minute pangs of Conservative Party conscience. Only if the King withholds his royal assent, will the ancient rights of “freeborn Englishmen” be preserved.

Having pledged to both houses of the British Parliament that he will follow the example of his mother on matters constitutional, the smart money would have to be on the real King Charles III behaving very differently from the fictional King Charles III.

In the months ahead, the British Isles look set to be rocked by civil discord and state-sanctioned violence. In the looming contest, the British people may win, or, the British state may win. Either way, the British Crown will certainly lose.

If the British people are trampled beneath the boots of the Police. If their most inspiring leaders, like the trade union leader Mick Lynch, are imprisoned. And if, throughout it all, their king maintains a constitutionally-sanctioned silence. Then, whatever system of government emerges from the crisis, its head-of-state won’t wear a crown.

A bloody, bold and resolute monarch, however, might fare better than even the fertile imagination of Mike Bartlett has compassed.

A recent survey of British voters aged 18-34-years-old indicated that around 60 percent of them believe their country should be ruled by a strong leader with the power to make decisions for the good of the country – without being constrained by Parliament.

Is it stretching too long a bow to suggest that Bartlett has perceived in the personality of the real Charles precisely the character traits that make his fictional King Charles so compelling? Having waited 70 years to exercise sovereignty, will he really be content to follow dutifully in his mother’s outsized footsteps?

The multiple crises which loom ahead of the United Kingdom are of sufficient severity to cause it to come apart at its historic seams. The corrupt system that threw up Liz Truss may no longer be capable of saving it.

If a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, then, surely, so should a king’s. Or what’s a kingdom for?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 September 2022.

The Weight Of History.

Receiving The Burden Of Sovereignty: The weight of royal ritual and tradition, and all the gilt machinery of monarchical government, is crushing. 

THE SHEER WEIGHT of it takes your breath away.

 

On display in St James’s Palace on Saturday night (10/9/22) were rituals and traditions dating back centuries. To say the weight of those rituals and traditions, and all the gilt machinery of monarchical government, is crushing, would be no exaggeration. 

To the millions watching on television, however, the ceremony proclaiming King Charles III, conveyed another, older, message. That the House of Windsor is the last great royal house of Europe.

When the late Queen’s great-great-grandmother, Victoria, sat upon the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, the House of Saxe-Coburg (later re-named Windsor) was just one of many great royal houses. Alongside it stood the House of Hapsburg, the House of Hohenzollern, and the House of Romanov. By the end of the First World War, the Queen’s grandfather, the King-Emperor, George V, was the last man standing.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and Germany had declared itself a Republic. The Emperor of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Karl I, had similarly renounced his throne. The Tsar of all the Russias, Nicholas II, along with his family, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks. The Ottoman Empire, which had once threatened to conquer all of Western Europe, had similarly disintegrated under the hammer blows of war.

Britain, alone of all the great monarchical European empires, stood alone. Only once, in a span of close to 1,000 years, had the English people succumbed to foreign invasion, defeat and occupation. The Norman Conquest of 1066 broke the Anglo-Saxon state into pieces and re-constituted it according to the principles of feudalism. That feudal state then proceeded to see off all foreign challengers for the best part of ten centuries. The Spanish failed in 1588. The French in 1805. The Germans tried and failed twice. The first time between 1914-18. The second, between 1939-45.

It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of British resilience. The grim audit of war had seen the other great royal dynasties declared politically bankrupt. The emperors and aristocrats who ruled them had failed in their first and most important duty – to protect the security and integrity of their realms. That failure allowed their peoples to reconfigure their political systems into new and (sometimes) more democratic ways. Old ideas and old institutions were either tossed aside in revolutionary fervour, or, carefully retired to the national attic – pending more favourable circumstances.

But not the House of Windsor. Not the British Empire. At the end of every existential struggle, England’s king, and its ancient aristocratic families, were there to take the salute of their triumphant armies. Proof that the ideas and ideals of the Middle Ages were more than equal to the challenges of economic and social change. Certainly, other classes had been admitted to the magic circles of political power, but the splendid feudal pageantry, the resonant feudal vocabulary, remained undisturbed – as the millions watching on Saturday night could see and hear.

Yes, the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 50s, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 had tamed Great Britain’s kings and queens, transforming them slowly but surely into that most curious of creatures – half-medieval, half-modern – the “constitutional monarch”. But, it was never a purely one-way process. Century after century, the rebellious and democratic instincts of the British people have been tamed and domesticated by their kings and queens.

It was impossible to look upon that extraordinary line-up of former prime-ministers – four Tories, two Labour – all of them members of His Majesty’s Privy Council – standing loyally to attention and bellowing “God Save The King!”, without mentally doffing one’s cap to the extraordinary political legerdemain of the British ruling-class.

It is easy to scoff at such scenes, dismissing them as so much medieval mummery, but the deeper truth remains: they’re still being played out. J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan informs his young readers that fairies will continue to exist only for as long as people believe in them. The same is true of kings and queens.

Politicians under-rated the political perspicacity of Elizabeth II at their peril. In the 70 years of her extraordinary reign, the late Queen saw the British economy and the British people transformed. By a sustained act of tutelary will, she convinced them that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they remained one people: that there was more holding them together than there was tearing them apart. Her stubborn refusal to be convinced otherwise thus acted as a sort of dam, behind which the waters of division and disquiet rose higher and higher.

It was Louis XV of France who famously declared: “Après moi, le déluge” (After me, the flood!) Although she would never have indulged in such nihilistic despair, Elizabeth II could justifiably have said the same.

King Charles III must be wondering, along with the British political journalist who came up with the metaphor, whether his mother’s death signals “the conclusion of a season, or the end of the whole series?” Certainly, he could be forgiven for considering the term “United Kingdom” to be a joke in very poor taste. Those who witnessed Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s angry rejection of Boris Johnson’s arm, or watched on Twitter the Welsh nationalist actor Michael Sheen’s stupendous evocation of Welsh pride, would surely agree with the King.

A principled man (not a healthy attribute in a constitutional monarch) Charles must be looking with grave apprehension at the new, far-right British prime minister, Liz Truss. She cut a positively creepy figure in the otherwise splendid surroundings of St James’ Palace – bearing a frightening resemblance to the wicked queen in Disney’s Snow White.

The go-to Nineteenth Century explainer of Britain’s unwritten constitution, Walter Bagehot, wrote that the British monarch has only three constitutional rights: The right to be consulted. The right to encourage. And the right to warn. Given the ferocious ambitions of the Truss ministry, one suspects that King Charles III will soon be in need of all three.

And, here, in his far-flung realm of New Zealand? What will his antipodean subjects make of their new king? These islands are no less troubled by division and disquiet than Charles’ own beloved British Isles. Looming constitutional debates, all having at their heart the historical relationship of the British Crown with Aotearoa’s indigenous people, can hardly avoid attracting his royal attention.

In the meantime, the pageantry and pathos of the late Queen’s funeral – not to mention the looming pomp and circumstance of Charles III’s coronation – will serve as a reminder to Māori and Pakeha alike, that their nation is the deliberate creation of an empire presided over by the great-great-great grandmother of its new Head of State. A reminder, too, that, in Karl Marx’s memorable formulation:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

King Charles III’s brain, and those of his subjects, alike.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 September 2022.