His Majesty, King Charles III accompanied by Queen Camilla has arrived here in the Dominion of Canada, where he will be giving the throne speech opening the new Parliament in person. While it is not often in recent years that something happens in my country of which I approve, this is very much to my liking.
I have been
both a royalist and a monarchist all my life.
I put the word royalist first because monarchism requires royalism for
clarity. Monarchy is the ancient
constitutional principle of the rule of one – or better, the leadership of the
one, for the suffix –arche indicates the idea of headship, source, leadership
more than “rule” which is what the suffix –cracy suggests. The ancients
recognized three basic constitutional principles, the one, the few, and the
many, but also that there were good and bad forms of each. The good form of the principle of the one is
kingship, the bad form is tyranny.
Royalism is about kings and queens, not tyrants. Kingship is an office that possesses authority
by ancient prescription. A tyrant never
has authority, only power, which he generally obtains by gathering a mob of
followers to support him. Tyranny is
closely intertwined with democracy and populism and always has been.
While my
royalism and monarchism was initially instinctual and related to my general
conservative and reactionary instinct, that is, an inclination for what is
ancient, time-tested, proven, and traditional rather than what is faddish,
popular, and theoretical, one of the many ways in which the office of kingship
is superior to any sort of elected head of state is that it is not a political office
in the sense of partisan politics.
My great-aunt
Hazel passed away this January. Thirteen
years ago in “Testimony of a Tory” I made reference to a conversation that she
and I had over Christmas the previous year in which she wholeheartedly agreed
with me when I said that I wanted Canada to remain a monarchy and never become
a republic. She regularly voted NDP and
while that party’s most recent leader, Jimmy Dhaliwal, was a republican, its
most popular leader in the last twenty years, the late Jack Layton, was a royalist.
One of the
most enthusiastic supporters of Canada’s monarchy in the last century and
probably the most noted expert on our constitution that our country has ever had,
Eugene Forsey, was literally all over the map politically, as far as party
alignment goes. Raised a Conservative,
he was one of the founders of the CCF membership in which he abandoned at the
time of the merger that formed the NDP, then sat in the Senate as a Liberal
appointed on the recommendation of Pierre Trudeau, while all the time calling
himself a “John A. Macdonald Conservative”.
The Green
Party’s former leader Elizabeth May, currently the only elected Member from
that party, is a strong royalist.
You don’t
have to be a conservative to be a royalist, although, and I say this as a
rebuke of those Canadians who call themselves “conservative” but think that
American republicanism is the standard of conservatism, you do have to be a
royalist to be a conservative in the truest sense of the word.
Some have
criticized kingship for all the pomp that surrounds it but this criticism is
misguided. The pomp of kingship is
attached to the office and not to the man who holds it. Furthermore, the pomp of kingship is a
dignified pomp, which extends to other institutions associated with kingship,
especially Parliament. That there is as
much dignified pomp in our House of Commons as there is we can attribute
entirely to its association with kingship through the Westminster parliamentary
system. Democracy removed from such a
setting is a petty, ugly thing, and it becomes much more petty and ugly when
someone skilled at expressing the grievances of large numbers of people,
regardless of whether these grievances are legitimate or not, uses that skill
to rise to power. The cult of
personality that can form around such a person is attached entirely to the man
and not his office and is dangerous as well as ugly. We have seen this happen twice in the United
States in recent decades. The cult of
personality surrounding the current American president is one example. That which surrounded Barack Obama is the
other.
In one of
Alexandre Dumas père’s
D’Artagnan romances, the character of Athos defends the office of kingship,
saying something to the effect that if it should happen to be occupied by an
unworthy occupant, honour and duty require that the office be respected, if not
the man. In the case of our current
Sovereign I have to say that the man won an awful lot of respect from me when
at the beginning of his coronation, in words he himself had added to the
service, he replied to the welcome in the name of the King of Kings by saying “in
His name, and after His example, I come not to be served but to serve.” That is so much better than the overweening
peacocking and hubris coming from the elected head of state south of the
border.
So, a warm
welcome to His Majesty.
God Save the King!
What a wonderful thing to have witnessed His Majesty the King open Parliament today.
ReplyDeleteI only wish that the older convention of saying "My Government" instead of "The Government" were restored in the delivery of the speech.
What good is royalism when the royals are pro-Muslim Jewish trash?
ReplyDelete