A monarch and a monarchy

Ritual, continuity and grief.

Members of the public gather along the Royal Mile to watch the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, as it is driven through Edinburgh towards the Palace of Holyroodhouse, on September 11, 2022.

JAMIE WILLIAMSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II had been my monarch longer than I have been alive. She had always been there and, as Boris Johnson said in his remarks in the House of Commons, it somehow seemed she always would be.

I cried at the news of her passing, and have cried more than once since. I am experiencing grief for someone I never met but was always aware of. Monarchy puts a family at the apex of the state and so embeds the patterns of family in the state.

Including the patterns of family succession. The Queen is dead, long live the King.

The ability to produce an immediate successor has always been one of the great strengths of monarchy, and helps account for why it so dominates the history of states.

My most recent essay on Helen Dale’s Substack was on what the continuity of a state did, and did not, mean. I contrasted the continuity of the Roman state from the founding of the city (and Kingdom) of Rome in 753BC across over two-and-a-half millennia to 1453, when the last Roman Emperor disappeared in the swirling melee of the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, and the continuity of the state sequence of Wessex—>England—>Great Britain—>United Kingdom across just over one-and-a-half millennia from 519 to now with the far, far more tenuous lineage from Kievan Rus to the Russian Federation. I was contrasting Romanitas and Britishness, the two great law-giving cultures, with Russkiy Mir.

In all three cases, monarchy was central to the connecting thread (or lack of it). The continuity of a state rests on continuity of offices and officeholders, of institutions and institutional arrangements. We are seeing that continuity through monarchy being played out in front of us.

The British monarchy has gone through a series of dynasties: the House of Wessex, the House of Godwin, the House of Rollo, the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the House of Hanover, now Mountbatten-Windsor. There was a brief Interregnum, but it was an interruption, not a break.

Yet Her Majesty could trace her lineage all the way back to Cedric, founder of the Kingdom of Wessex. For Henry I married a granddaughter of the House of Wessex, who became the grandmother of Henry II, the first Plantagenet monarch.

Each subsequent dynastic succession was a dynastic succession, based on ancestry. Though the transition from Anne, last of the Stuarts, to George I, first of the Hanoverians, was based on skipping over a startling number of Catholic relatives.

Only Naruhito of Japan can claim so long a monarchial lineage. Also an island realm. Though the earliest historically attested date for the monarchs of the Imperial House of Japan is 539, so a little later perhaps. Albeit the mythical ancestry is much older.

The title of Her Majesty, now His Majesty, came (as so much of post-medieval England did) from Henry VIII. Before him, the royal title was Your Royal Highness or Your Grace. Majesty had been the honorific of emperors. Yet, in his break with Rome, Henry wanted to make clear he was entirely sovereign in his island realm, so he became Your Majesty.

But it was not a solitary sovereignty. For Henry also invented the King in Parliament, where full sovereignty in the United Kingdom (and in His Majesty’s other realms) lies.

By doing so, Henry turned the English Parliament into an instrument of government. Not merely a useful bargaining chamber for king and political nation, though it remained that, but one where the business of government itself could be prosecuted. The members of his Privy Council were members of Parliament, either as peers of the realm in the House of Lords or, if commoners, by having a seat in the House of Commons.

It was by being a practical instrument of government that the English, and later British, Parliament became the only medieval Parliament to survive into modern times. It also suffered an Interregnum interruption that was not a break but only an interruption.

My previous essay on this Substack was on the matter of ritual. We are seeing the power and function of ritual being played out in front of us, as the rituals of monarchical succession are enacted. Rituals people are participating in, even making their own.

Ritual expresses all our ways of knowing, not merely the propositional one so beloved of rationalists and theorists. Ritual encompasses all the modes of knowledge: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory; episteme, techne, noesis and gnosis. Knowledge that, how, of and in.

You feel ritual. Effective ritual is visceral, precisely because it invokes all the modes of knowing.

Putting a family at the apex of the state puts a visceral humanity at that apex. No wonder monarchy is so bound up in ritual and becomes such an effective focus of it.

I find it incredibly poignant that my two most recent Substack essays should intersect in this way at the end of a life of duty, well-lived in the public gaze.

The Queen is dead, long live the King.