God Save the Queen

Over the course of several months last year, the media manufactured a scandal with regards to the Duke of York’s reluctance to drop his friendship with a notorious financier after the latter’s less respectable, depending upon how you view the world of finance, side-business as a pimp was exposed and he went to prison where he died in an apparent case of Arkancide. Between this and the media spotlight on all the doings and difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex culminating in what has been amusingly dubbed “Megxit” it is not surprising that the republicans have come crawling out of the woodworks like the creepy little beady-eyed, pointy-eared, worm-tailed, buck-toothed, vermin that they are. Could there be anything lower or sleazier, more base, more despicable, or more vile, rotten and cheap than to make use of her relatives to attack Her Majesty and the sacred, time-honoured, office she holds after a lifetime of faithful, dutiful, public service?

It is more surprising to see men of sound principles like Peter Hitchens say things like “I do not much like the British royal family”, which is the sentence with which he opened a recent e-article for First Things in which he gave an excellent and admirable defense of the institution of the monarchy but expressed his doubt that anyone of generations younger than that of the current occupant of the throne has had the upbringing necessary to bear the responsibilities of the office. Mr. Hitchens posed this to his readers as a personal conundrum – how could he reconcile his monarchism with his lack of enthusiasm for the next generations of the reigning House?

Mr. Hitchens’ dilemma reminds me in some ways of the attitude of the Right Honourable Alan Clark, who served as Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and later for Kensington and Chelsea and held the office of Junior Minister in three different Ministries under Margaret Thatcher. Clark, a British nationalist, believed in all of his country’s old institutions, including the monarchy, but spoke rather disdainfully of most living members of the Royal Family. He respected the Queen, more so her mother – who was still living in his day - and adored Princess Diana but that was about it. Clark, however, never gave any indication of any sort of internal struggle over the matter and, indeed, was similarly rude in the way he spoke of virtually everyone else, his own family included.

I don’t have this problem myself. I am both a monarchist and a royalist in the sense of believing in the institution of the monarchy and the principle of hereditary reign, but I also very much admire and respect Elizabeth II as a person and do, for the most part, like the royal family. The members of the family that I would, perhaps, like less than the others, are not in the immediate line of succession. I may disagree with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales on the subject of climate change but that hardly constitutes grounds for disliking him and I happen to think that he will make an excellent king. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also impress me as a couple that will do an admirable job of reigning when their time comes. With regards to the latter couple Mr. Charles Coulombe, an American Monarchist – yes, there are Americans of sane and sound principles out there – said the following in his recent article about “Megxit” for the Roman Catholic magazine Crisis:

Princess Grace threw herself into the greatest role of her career. Devoting herself entirely to her new country and to her husband’s work, she became the symbol of Monaco’s new image, for all that her children from time to time seemed to be trying to revert to dynastic type.

So, too, has Prince William’s consort and future queen done, despite her middle-class background.

Since I like and respect the present occupant of the throne, the heir apparent and the next in the line of succession I don’t foresee myself having to face the kind of internal struggle Peter Hitchens is dealing with. I did, however, read a passage a couple of decades ago that struck me as providing the answer for anyone of sound principles struggling with this sort of dilemma. It is found in Twenty Years After, the second of the three (1) novels written by Alexandre Dumas père which are loosely based on a previous novel that itself is loosely based on the life of Charles D’Artagnan, Captain of Louis XIV’s Musketeers. In the passage, the Count de la Fère – better known to fans of the series as Athos - visits the grave of Louis XIII where he gives the following advice to his son Raoul, the Viscount of Bragellone:

This is the sepulcher… of a man who was weak and without grandeur, but whose reign was, notwithstanding, full of important events. Above this king watches another man's spirit, as this lamp watches over this tomb, and lights it up. The latter was a real king, Raoul; the other only a phantom into which he put a soul. And yet so powerful is the monarchy among us, that he has not even the honor of a tomb at the feet of him for the glory of whom he wore out his life, — for that man, if he made this king an insignificant one, has made the kingdom great. And there are two things enclosed in the Louvre Palace, — the king who dies, and the royalty which does not. That reign has ended, Raoul; that minister so renowned, feared and hated by his master, has gone to the tomb, drawing after him the king whom he did not wish to leave alone for fear he should destroy his work, — for a king only builds up when he has God, or the spirit of God, near him. Yet then every one thought the cardinal's death a deliverance, and I, blind like my contemporaries, sometimes opposed the designs of the great man who held France's destiny in his hands, (2) and who, just as he opened or closed them, held her in check or gave her the impress of his choice. If he did not crush me and my friends in his terrible anger, it was without doubt that I should be able to say to you to-day: Raoul, learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything. Only God has wished to render this principle palpable by incarnating it in a man. Raoul, it seems to me that I see your future as through a cloud. It will be better than ours. We have had a minister without a king; you, on the contrary, will have a king without a minister. You will be able then to serve, love, and honor the king. If he prove a tyrant, — for power in its giddiness often becomes tyranny, (3) — serve, love, and honor the royalty; that is the infallible principle. That is to say, the spirit of God on the earth ; that is, that celestial spark which makes this dust so great and so holy that we, gentlemen of high condition indeed, are as unimportant before this body extended on the last step of this staircase as this body itself is before the throne of the Supreme Being. (I have added the bold for emphasis on the most relevant sentences)

Now back to the republicans.

I don’t know which group of republicans in Canada disgusts me the most.

There are the neo-Marxist professors who fill the heads of impressionable youth with nonsense about how “imperialism” and “colonialism” were the equivalent of fascism and Nazism. Our young people have become particularly vulnerable to this inane tripe since they have not been taught history properly. Otherwise they would know that it was precisely because Canada was member of the Imperial Commonwealth that we went to war with fascism and Nazism in 1939. It had absolutely nothing to do with some Americanized crusade for “democracy.” Young Canadians of that generation gladly signed up to go overseas because they felt it was their duty to their God, their King, and their country.

On a somewhat related note allow me to interject here a comment on the following remark from Mr. Hitchens’ First Things article:

The monarch, stripped of all ancient direct power, is now remarkably like the king on a chessboard—almost incapable of offensive action, but preventing others from occupying a crucial square and those around it.

My comment is simply this – that it is less than a century since we were given all the evidence we need of just how important this role actually is. It was because they had retained their king that the Italians were able to remove Mussolini from power, although they proved themselves to be extreme ingrates when they voted for a republic the year after the war ended. In Germany, where Hitler had taken advantage of the vacancy created by the empty thrones of the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern families to seize absolute power, those who sought to depose him had no such advantage. Thus, Claus von Stauffenberg and his associates – mostly Roman Catholic aristocrats with royalist and monarchical leanings – had to resort to an assassination plan which famously failed.

Then there are the “Canadian nationalists” who think that we should have a domestic head of state rather than a “foreign monarch.” These twits can’t seem to grasp the fact that it is a total contradiction in terms to profess a “nationalism” or a “patriotism” towards a country while denying its historical and traditional essence. Again, part of the problem is a lack of knowledge of history. If only the late, great, Donald Creighton were still around to enlighten them – although his legacy lives on in his books – The Road to Confederation, The Dominion of the North, Sir John A. Macdonald Volumes I and II, etc. if they could only be bothered to read them. Perhaps it is too much to expect people these days to be capable of reading anything longer than a poorly spelled text message. Contrary to the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian History – our domestic equivalent of the Butterfield-rebutted nineteenth century Whig Interpretation – Canada’s is not the history of a country that followed the same path as the United States, only through the route of negotiation rather than revolution. Canada’s is the history of a country that defined itself as following a path from which the Americans diverged two and a half centuries ago - Loyalist instead of Revolutionary, royalist instead of republican. To deny this is to deny the historical and traditional essence of Canada, to deny the very country of which these people profess to be “patriots” and “nationalists.”

Somewhere between these two groups are the divisive agitators. By this, I mean those who attack the monarchy on the grounds that it is “offensive” to some group or another – originally French Canadians, more recently native aboriginals and immigrants. Again the lack of any sort of logical reasoning is apparent.

Whatever French Canadians might have historically thought of the defeat of General Montcalm at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) in the Seven Years’ War the fact of the matter is that when the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against the Crown in 1776 the French Canadians chose to side with the British and the Loyalists because they knew that they stood a much better chance of preserving their language, religion, and culture under the Crown that had guaranteed these things two years earlier than by siding with those whose rebellion had been in part an angry response to that very guarantee.

Something similar can be said with regards to the native aboriginals. When the time came to choose sides between the Crown and the Americans, first in the American Revolution then again in the War of 1812, the tribes overwhelmingly, although not unanimously, chose the side of the Crown. Indeed, many of them can be counted among the Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution. The first Anglican Church in Upper Canada, or Ontario as it is called in the vulgar tongue, was founded for Mohawk Indians who had fled to Canada as Loyalists. It is called Her Majesty’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks and still stands in Brantford, Ontario.

As for more recent immigrants the reasoning of the divisive agitators assumes them to be either incredibly stupid – moving to a country with a constitution and sovereign monarch they disapprove of without having inquired into these basic facts about her – or subversives who have moved here to overthrow said constitution and sovereign. If either of these things were true this would be a case for a much stricter immigration policy and not a case against the monarchy.

W. L. Morton provided the answer to all of this sort of illogic in his The Canadian Identity:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (4)

Probably the republicans who annoy and disgust me the most are those who are also libertarians, social conservatives, people who have enough courage to be open opponents of the overt anti-white bigotry and racism that hides beneath the guise of the cult of diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, and/or Western regional populists who feel the prairie provinces have been treated very poorly by the government in Ottawa. They do not annoy and disgust me because they hold these other views. Quite the contrary, as I agree with each of these groups far more often than I do those who espouse the opposite of these views. While these groups don’t always agree between themselves – the first two hold views that are usually considered to be difficult to reconcile with each other – in Canada, they all have a common enemy in the Liberal Party.

It is the Liberals, more than any other party, that have expanded the size of government and created the present-day cultural climate that is hostile to freedom of association, thought, and expression. It is the Liberals who have done the most to promote abortion, easy divorce, and the various causes associated with the alphabet soup gang in Parliament and it is the Charter they introduced into the constitution in 1982 that turned the Supreme Court of Canada into an American-style body of social liberal activists. The Grits are also the most obvious enemies of the other two groups. While the Liberal Party has never been officially republican, republicanism has walked hand in hand with it throughout its history. It has had all of two ideas throughout the duration of that history. The first, which dominated the party until 1963, was “let us make Canada more like the United States”, and the second, which dominated the party from 1963 to 1984 was “let us make Canada more like the Soviet Union”, after which the party has survived by not thinking at all. Both of these ideas naturally incline towards republicanism since the United States and Soviet Unions were both republics. It was in the second period that the Liberal Party did everything it could to earn the undying enmity of the libertarians, social conservatives, et al. The Americans, after all, only seceded from the reign of their king, the Bolsheviks murdered theirs. It was in this same period that the Liberal Party’s inclinations towards republicanism became most pronounced and obvious as they removed the designation “Royal” from several government branches and downplayed the country’s title “Dominion”, chosen by Canada’s own Fathers of Confederation to denote our being a kingdom without being as likely to provoke an invasion from the republic to our south. Ironically, any libertarian, social conservative, white rights defender or Western populist who advocates republicanism is in a sense promoting the completion of what Pierre Trudeau started. I regard all such as traitors to their own principles.

The previous paragraph should not be construed as saying that the monarchy is or ought to be a partisan issue, but merely that the groups mentioned are untrue to their own principles if they support republicanism. While the most outspoken advocates of republicanism in Canadian history have come from within the socialist movement the same movement has also been represented by some of the finest supporters of the monarchy – constitutional expert Eugene Forsey, Tommy Douglas, and even the much more recent Jack Layton come to mind. The monarchy ought to have the support of all parties because it provides us with a head of state – the person whose office involves the duty of representing the country as a unified whole – who is above the process of partisan politics. How anyone could possibly fail to see this as a huge benefit considering what is happening below the 49th parallel at this very moment is beyond me.

Think about it for a moment: The partisans of one party control the House of Representatives, the partisans of the other party control the Senate. The elected head of state belongs to party that controls the Senate. The party that controls the House has voted to impeach the President. The real grounds behind their doing so, not the thin veil of spurious rationale offered to the House, is because they cannot stand the man and his party. The Senate, which must conduct the trial before the impeachment is final, is most likely to rule in the President’s favour, not because the charges against him are the farce that they are but because he is of their party.

Why would anyone want to imitate the constitutional arrangement that allows for this scenario?

So let the republicans crawl back into the sewers they came from, I say.

God Save the Queen!


(1) The Son of Porthos was written by Paul Mahalin, although it was published under the name of Dumas père and Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask were originally published as part of The Viscount of Bragellone.
(2) This is a reference to the plot of the first novel in the series, The Three Musketeers.
(3) This foreshadows the plot of The Viscount of Bragellone, in which Athos, who had failed to save Charles I of Britain in Twenty Years After assists, with D’Artagnan’s help, in the restoration of Charles II, serving the principle of royalty even though he has a falling out with his own king, Louis XIV, over the latter’s tyrannical acts.
(4) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972, p. 95.

The Roots of the Old Dominion

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized needs of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. – Simone Weil

Today we celebrate the 147th birthday of our country. It is the anniversary of the day, in 1867, when the British North America Act came into effect, which effect was to form a federation out of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, with its own federal Parliament modelled after the one in Westminster, under the Sovereign monarch we share with the United Kingdom and other countries in what was then the British Empire but is now the British Commonwealth of Nations. Eventually, all the Crown possessions in North America would be brought into Confederation, whether as provinces like Manitoba or territories like the Northwest Territories, with the last province to enter being Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949. There are ten provinces in total. The ones that I have not yet mentioned are, in order of their entry into Confederation: British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta. There were two territories when I was growing up, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, but there are now three, Nunavut having become a separate territory from the Northwest Territories – which despite the plural title are considered a single territory – in 1999.

While the day our country came into being as the Dominion of Canada – the name the Fathers of Confederation chose for our country, taking “dominion” from Psalm 72:8 as a synonym for “kingdom” and not as a synonym for “colony” as the liberals, progressives, and socialists later falsely claimed – was just under a century and a half ago, Canada has roots that extend back much further. The British North America Act, enacted on this date in 1867, was signed by Queen Victoria on March 29th of that year, the culmination of a process of negotiation that had taken almost three years, beginning with the Charlottetown Conference of September 1864 and carried on through Conferences in Quebec and London, with plenty of discussion and negotiation taking place outside of the official conferences as well. Even this period of negotiation was merely the latest and ultimately successful stage, in the idea of creating a federation of the British colonies in North America, an idea that had been proposed several times earlier in the nineteenth century. Its revival in the 1860s and perhaps its success was in large part due to fear of the United States.

This fear was well-founded. The United States had invaded Canada in the war she fought with Great Britain from 1812 to 1815. In this war, Canadians had fought to repel the American invaders from their homes and communities and were ultimately, with the help of the British military of course, successful. Due to this success, the war which ended more-or-less in the preservation of the status quo ante and thus a stalemate as far as Britain and the United States were concerned, is, ironically yet accurately, traditionally regarded by Canadians as our victory over the United States, even though, technically, our country was not yet officially born. This victory became a key element of our country’s founding mythology – not mythology in the sense of “stories that are untrue” but in the sense of “stories that help a people to understand and identify themselves”. Here, therefore, is a root of the tree of the Canadian Dominion that extends back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

It is not the deepest root, nor is it the only reason that the fear of an American invasion on the part of the Fathers of Confederation was well-founded. American politicians had been talking about their vision of “Manifest Destiny”, i.e. the destiny of the United States to rule all of North America, for most of the nineteenth century. Then the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States split the American republic into two warring factions. While Britain was officially neutral, Lincoln’s actions generated tension between London and Washington, and there was a great deal of sympathy in Britain and in both the English and French speaking parts of British North America, not for the slavery which the Northeastern Yankees used to justify their cause – slavery had already been abolished in the British Empire and Canada had been one of the destinations of the “Underground Railroad” prior to the war – but for the Southern states who were, after all, merely giving to Washington a taste of the medicine that Washington had dished out to London less than a century prior. Out of this sympathy we gave sanctuary to Confederate officers just as we had given sanctuary to the escaped slaves before the war. Late in the war, Confederate agents were sent by Jefferson Davis to Canada to conduct covert operations against the North. Although these were mostly unsuccessful, it was deemed prudent by the leaders of the colonies of British North America, to form a federal union that would be able better to resist American retaliation.

In the history of the relations between pre-Confederation British North America and the American Republic we can see another root of the Canadian Dominion extending back to the Rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies. In that eighteenth century conflict, the leaders of the Thirteen Colonies had, citing various grievances against the British Imperial government, declared their independence from the British Empire. Not all British colonies joined in this rebellion, nor did everyone in the rebelling colonies support the rebellion. At the time the term Canada referred to a French colony that had been conquered by the British in the Seven Years War, and ceded to the British Crown by the French at the end of that war. Britain had promised the people of that colony, in what is now Ontario and Quebec, that they could keep their Roman Catholic religion, French language, and way of life, in return for loyalty to the British Crown. Canada did not join in the American rebellion and in the conflict, many of the American colonists fought on the side of the British Empire against the rebelling colonies. These Loyalists faced persecution, including loss of home and property, both during the war and after the rebels gained their independence and so many of these fled north to the loyal British possessions of Canada (Ontario/Quebec) and Nova Scotia (which at the time included what is now New Brunswick).

The division between the rebelling colonists who became the Americans and the Loyalists who became the first English Canadians was in part a reflection of political, philosophical, and even religious differences with roots in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and ultimately in the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. The American colonies, especially those of the Northeast, had been strongly influenced by Puritanism, a form of English Calvinism that believed that the English Reformation had not gone far enough and that wanted to purify English Christianity of every vestige of the Catholic tradition that could not be shown to be directly authorized by the Scriptures, and which tended to be republican and anti-royalist politically. One of the real reasons for the American secession was this Puritan influence, for the ideological descendants of the men who put King Charles I to death, accusing him falsely of trying to bring England back under the yoke of the pope because he rejected the ecclesiastical reforms they demanded and their demand that he persecute the co-religionists of his French bride, were naturally not pleased that King George III guaranteed the people of Quebec their French language and Roman Catholic religion.

The leaders of the rebel colonies justified their secession from the British Empire by accusing Parliament and the king of tyrannical behaviour and by appealing to the doctrines of liberalism, a modern political dogma that asserted the primacy of the individual and his rights, the contractual nature of society, and government legitimacy based upon democratic election. The Loyalists preferred the government of king and Parliament that they had, over any experimental government to be put together by the kind of men who would use baseless and false accusations of tyranny in order to stir up rebellion and revolution. The American revolutionaries had an inclination towards experiment, innovation, and breaking with tradition and the past to pursue progress in the future. This would very much reflect itself in their national character as it later developed. The Loyalists, as the name by which history knows them would suggest, were more inclined towards sticking to the tried and true, and the older classical virtues such as loyalty. This was later reflected in the national character of Canada.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both of these approaches but one of the strengths of the philosophy that helped shape our national character north of the 49th is that it has allowed our young country to have very deep and extensive roots. The dynamic, progressive, innovative philosophy that has played so important a role in the United States is a philosophy that severs rather than nourishes roots. Thus, while our American friends and neighbours might be able to point to the events that established the Roman Republic in the sixth century BC as a classical antecedent of their own founding, this is more a case of what Nietzsche called “eternal recurrence” than of any organic, rooted, connection. By not severing our ties with Britain, but practicing the virtue of loyalty, and developing into a nation in our own right within the existing tradition, we were able to build a country with roots as long and deep as those of Britain herself.

French Canada, too, due to the timing and circumstances by which it was removed from the French Crown and joined to the British, was able through most of its history to maintain an organic, rooted, connection to the ancient French tradition from which, ironically, France attempted to sever herself in the even more extreme revolution she underwent less than a decade after the Americans won their independence. Thus, until very recently Quebec was in some ways the most conservative of the Canadian provinces and while this conservatism was focuses more upon the French and Roman Catholic language, religion, and culture that tend to set the province apart from the rest of the country, back in 1937, decades before Quebec rejected many of her own roots in the “Quiet Revolution”, when Maurice Duplessis was premier in the French province, Stephen Leacock was able to write that it used to be said that “the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian.” (1)

There are those today, who would dismiss all of this as ancient history, and question what any of this has to do with the land of beer and hockey, the Canada goose and chocolate mousse, maple syrup and poutine, in which we live our everyday lives today. It is a good question, especially since the Liberal Party, with the full support of the New Democratic Party, with at most an extremely mild and moderate resistance from the Conservatives – more often complete capitulation and accommodation – has striven hard since 1963 to dig up these roots, haul them out to the old scrub pile, and burn them, while attempting to replace the healthy tree that grew from them with a sickly substitute. Nevertheless, I hope and believe that there is enough life left in the old tree, and that enough of the old roots remain, that she may one day be restored to full health.

Happy Dominion Day!
God Save the Queen!

(1) This was in My Discovery of the West. He went on to say: “It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.” He was referring to American immigrants to Western provinces.