Republicanism has been very much to the fore recently in the letters column of The Herald. The catalyst for this seems to have been the coincidentally simultaneous publication of a book about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor entitled Entitled (another one word title – it’s such a cliché), and the memoir of the late Virginia Giuffre. There seems to be a widespread disgust at the perceived royals’ sense of, well, entitlement. Somebody wrote in to suggest that the monarchy be abolished, as well as the House of Lords, as well as the devolved governments, as well as Westminster, the latter to be replaced by a new Parliament built right at the geographical epicentre of the isle of Great Britain. To this I responded:
Dear Sir,
I was very interested to acquaint myself with your correspondent’s vision of how Great Britain might evolve constitutionally, were the monarchy to be abolished (Could this be the beginning of the end of the monarchy? Herald, November 4). The abolition of the House of Lords and the devolved governments, and the relocation of Parliament to Lancashire, all sound quite logical and rational, but the proposed model doesn’t seem to me to take national culture, or cultures, into account. This reallocation of powers is a table-top exercise, rather reminiscent of the Sykes-Picot agreement between the UK and France in 1916, the Balfour Declaration the following year, or the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill carve-up of Eastern Europe at Yalta in 1945. Remember how well they all went. You can’t redraw the map in a national-political-cultural vacuum. Moving Parliament to Dunsop Bridge is not much different from throwing a dart at a map, blindfold.
Like it or not, the only thing that glues Great Britain together as a national entity, is the monarchy. If King Charles receives his P45, or as we say north of the border, his jotters, then I think the likeliest outcome would be that Scotland, England, and Wales would become independent countries, and the island of Ireland would unite. Whether or not such an outcome would be propitious, nay felicitous, I lay to one side. But the Establishment at Westminster understands it, and that is why it will do everything in its power to protect, preserve, and maintain the monarchy. This is the real reason why the naval officer formerly known as Prince has been so ostracised, and vilified. It is not merely the monarchy which is in danger of foundering; it is the entire Ship of State.
Yours sincerely…
The Herald kindly published me, under the headline Why we need the monarchy. As a seasoned writer to the newspapers I have grown used to the fact that the editorial headline is beyond one’s control. So I wasn’t much fazed. But I thought the headline was ill-chosen. My stance was neither royalist nor republican, just as it was neither unionist nor nationalist. My topic was rather the modus operandi of the Westminster Establishment. Its deepest instinct is for self-preservation.
Robert Harris wrote a novel about Captain Dreyfus, which won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. Dreyfus was accused, unjustly, of being a spy, found guilty, and banished to Devil’s Island. In a scene at the beginning of the book his epaulettes are ceremoniously, unceremoniously, removed. This is essentially what has happened to Andrew. He has been “de-epauletted”. He has lost his naval rank. But I don’t think he is required, thus far, to return his military campaign medals. That would surely be a step too far. It is said that he served in the Falklands War with distinction.
I thought of him yesterday on Remembrance Sunday. I take it he wasn’t present at the cenotaph, though, not having turned my telly on for weeks, I wouldn’t know. I attended the service at Dunblane Cathedral. The cathedral was full. There was a strong military presence. The two minute silence was introduced by a bugle playing the Last Post. The lessons were read, most eloquently, by the Deputy Lieutenant for Stirling and Falkirk, representing HM the King. The Old Testament lessons was from Micah.
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
The New Testament lesson was from St. Matthew.
But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also…
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
I always find the Service of Remembrance a very moving occasion, but, you know, it contains a fundamental cognitive dissonance which every minister of the church must struggle with, preaching Christ’s gospel to people who are training for war. Such dissonance seems especially resonant, or perhaps to clang, to reverberate, in our own time. Jesus said, “Resist not evil.” Really? Our culture, the culture of western European and dare I say American democratic tradition, is founded on the notion of resistance to evil. Popular culture, the movies, are shot through with it. Gary Cooper resists evil in High Noon, when everybody else has backed down and turned a blind eye. In The Man who shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne advises Jimmy Stewart, “You’d better start carrying a handgun, pilgrim.” In The Magnificent Seven, Yul Brynner says to the villagers who have hired him and his men to protect them from evil (I paraphrase), “You need to kill, and carry on killing, even when you’ve forgotten the reason.” In The Untouchables, Sean Connery says to a colleague, “You carry a badge? Then carry a gun.” And to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness, “You wanna stop Capone? He puts one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his men in the morgue. That’s how you stop Capone!” Then, for two minutes in every year, we silently resolve to turn the other cheek.
Most apologias for Christ’s teaching emphasize the distinction between the evil deed and the evil doer; hate the deed, but love its perpetrator. In Victory, as Winston put it, Magnanimity. (But first, Victory.) I’m not sure about such interpretations. President Reagan once said that if you need to explain yourself, you’ve lost the argument. I have a notion that Our Lord was moving on an entirely different plane, one of deliberate self-sacrifice, and when his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he gently told them that they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.
My generation has been incredibly lucky. No call to arms. We have all read our Wilfred Owen and I believe that we have not, by and large, been seduced by the faux-attractiveness of war. But that which we have taken for granted is looking increasingly fragile. The drones have reached Belgium. The sabres are rattling.
jamescalumcampbell 