A Changing of the Guard

The end of an unparalleled reign

As a Brit, and something of a patriotic Brit at that, I joined millions in sadness as we mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth the Second this past week, witnessing today an unprecedented state funeral marking the end of the second Elizabethan Era of the United Kingdom.

The grief is curiously personal for a lady whose devotion to her public & her duty often required us to know almost nothing about her. For longer than I have been alive, the monarchy has always been relatively apolitical, and silent on many issues, preferring to remain above such matters. This has been its quiet strength.

It’s also remarkable that the institution has not merely survived but thrived this past century or two, gifting the UK a worldwide stature that frankly seems far beyond what can be justified on paper, a little like the scions of a vast dynasty discovering that much of the family’s money has been spent, and they are living on the tales and favours of the past.

In some sense, Her Majesty helped perpetuate that strength throughout the seven decades of her reign. I do not need to recite details; the news of the day is filled with such for any that care to know. It remains to be seen whether Charles the Third can exceed those that carried his name in the past, and whether he too will learn when to be silent and when to speak with impact.

I found myself reflecting, as well as being asked by those from outside the UK, what the big deal is. Why the international outpouring of sympathy & sadness? Why have a monarchy and why do so many British very clearly support such an institution? What did she do or represent that had millions queuing for days to pay their respects? For that matter, a poll today alleged that support for the monarchy had never been higher in our former penal colony Australia, which just serves to highlight that either we’re all suffering from a tremendously effective mass hallucination, or there might be something to it. Or the Aussies had had one too many tinnies; could be that too.

In the time of Her Majesty’s forebears, the sun never set on the British Empire, the likes of which may never be seen again; given our modern sensibilities vs what we got up to back then, perhaps such global hegemony is best left in the past anyway, though I’m sure dystopian fiction will continue to argue we’ll just do it again with corporations (I for one spent some time waiting to see if Jeff Bezos would build a moon base and complete the super-villain look).

No doubt to the chagrin of many, we appear to have ruled the world quite effectively (even if plenty would argue also ruthlessly), and I get the feeling that for many in the 20th and 21st century, there’s this lingering sense of ‘we’d best listen to the British or they might do it again’. Personally, I feel that our time as a global power may have been and gone; you’d be hard pressed to find quite the same level of superb diplomacy that we have long been renowned for – I wonder how many in the country winced when we sent Liz Truss out as our Foreign Minister. Now she’s PM… fun times.

It is perhaps for that reason most of all that having a constitutional monarchy may resonate with so many. As Sir Terry Pratchett put it in The Fifth Elephant regarding his race of dwarves, ‘there is a sanity to return to, the Scone survives, dwarfdom continues‘. We may be buffeted by the winds of political change, generations may change their views on a whim, but not all power and not all tradition resides in a relatively random smattering of elected nobodies. It is a curious and almost anachronistic concept rooted in elitism, yet remarkably effective.

After all, aren’t voting and democracy hugely important? Well, yes, but have you seen some of the results lately (America, I’m looking at you especially)? The will of the people is often fickle, capricious, easily bought, and is more likely to follow a trend for a week than think about long-term needs of the country. There’s a reason they say a week is a long time in politics. So there is value in a staunchly traditional lineup of people whose job it is to keep the ship afloat and not let well-intentioned idiots put too many holes in it.

Thus we appear to end up with dynasties whose job essentially consists of duties in service of the country and a relatively quiet & apolitical presence until they’re needed. Yet when they are needed, they are present, with all the dignity of their office, centuries of tradition, providing a sense to an incoming elected politician of ‘these traditions and rules have been here long before you, and will be when you are long gone – behave‘. Provided the institution can train each generation with roughly the same results, you get this curious effect of continuity that is almost unheard of outside of rare political dynasties like the Bushes.

It’s also not a coincidence that the UK monarch is the titular head of the UK military. We’ve been doing this a while after all; our parliament, not quite the oldest (allegedly claimed by the Tynwald of the Isle of Man, clocking in at over a thousand years), still has had to cope with everything the collective idiocy of humanity can throw at it. To paraphrase a far more modern take on the subject from Naval Ravikant ‘design your systems of governance such that you would be happy to hand power to your enemies for ten years’. Humans need checks and balances. If one’s system of governance continues to lack those, trouble will be at the proverbial mill.

I’d be doing a disservice to the concept without providing the other side of the coin; the above can be thought of as the argument for conservatism, the Lindy effect, and that traditions that have survived hundreds or thousands of years probably have something to them. There are of course potential problems; we may have a monarch who is a blithering inbred idiot; we might have thousands of unelected civil servants who frustrate the will of the people because they believe they know better. No system is perfect.

That above all is the reason to have both sides of that coin; no taxation without representation etc. Winston Churchill, when he wasn’t drunk, made a comment that matches his keen political insight and ability to speak generalisations deeply offensive to everyone: ‘if you are not a liberal at 20, you lack a heart; if you are not a conservative at 40, you lack a brain‘. We need both the firebrand of youth to encourage change and the wisdom of age to temper it. Most humans will seek to preserve what they have achieved once they’ve achieved something worthy of note.

When you zoom out and look at humanity, you’d likely be forgiven for imagining you’re just looking at Brownian motion. All eight billion of us, pushing and shoving and opinionating in a relatively random direction that seems like a good idea at the time. Many, especially the young, get frustrated with this. I know I did at 20. It seems so inefficient, so slow, so… stuck in the mud.

Yet it is exactly this that prevents humanity from engaging in reckless disaster too often. Consider all the times in history where a charismatic leader swept up a nation with such fervour in a short space of time – did any of those examples go exceptionally well? No, not so much. Much as it is deeply frustrating to anyone receiving the short end of the status quo stick, the alternative is often bloody chaos. In a world where we have created methods to extinguish the entirety of humanity in one go, we perhaps need to avoid too much change too quickly for the health of the species, even as we almost certainly need change. Thus I would, with some surprise, look to systems at least similar to monarchies, if one seeks stability in increasingly trying times.

I’d change a few things, of course, if I ruled the world UK. For starters, I’d be hard pressed to name a single standout example of a King in our storied history in the public consciousness; yet we celebrate Elizabeth I, Victoria I, and Elizabeth II. How about Charles changes the rules so Katherine inherits and William is King-Consort? That’d be an interesting change for the ages; female-preference primogeniture, still invested with all the weight and dignity but with an eye towards truly mothering the nation as our recently departed Queen did for so long and so effectively. Plus it will annoy those that play Crusader Kings. Just a thought; it’d be a capstone to a stunning legacy, since we haven’t quite reached the technological point for the Futurama heads-in-jars approach.

So here’s to you, Your Majesty. May angels sing you to your rest, and from one of your subjects, thank you for all that you did for us. You embodied stability for a country reeling from the mugging of a World War, helped guide and nudge us through a Cold War, reined in the excesses of our politicians as they argued over the fundamentals of the country, and provided comfort & continuity from the Blitz to Covid. May God have saved the Queen.