The King has Arrived

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!