The resilient royals
Why is the idea of monarchy so difficult to erase? The writings of Victorian constitutional scholar (and insufferable elitist) Walter Bagehot might have the answer.
Earlier this week, Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom passed away. His death, coming after a prolonged illness at the age of 99 could hardly be called surprising, but the BBC newsreader, who interrupted their regular broadcasts to announce the news, dressed in sombre black, still became visibly emotional while making the brief announcement. And despite a record number of complaints about the endless coverage of the event, it’s quite likely that come Saturday, a substantial portion of the UK will still sit down, watch the funeral on television and get emotional about their royal family, leaving the rest of us with the question — why is the idea of monarchy so difficult to erase, sans guillotine?
The dignified and the efficient
Victorian constitutional scholar and general “man of letters”, Walter Bagehot, writing in 1867, argues that any constitution needs two elements to be successful — it must first win loyalty and confidence, and then employ that ‘homage’ in the work of government. The British monarchy, in Bagehot’s view, served the former purpose (“the dignified”) — it was to inspire loyalty and maintain confidence. The actual work of governance could then be done by competent elected authorities, who would be free to focus on everyday practicalities (“the efficient”) without worrying about being particularly inspirational. This slightly quaint idea of an inspirational but powerless sovereign for the people to rally around and a low-key, practical and powerful government is a model that has worked surprisingly well for the British. Apart from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, it difficult to think of any UK prime ministers in the last century whose personalities have inspired any sort of cult following. British election campaigns, unlike American or Indian ones tend to be low key affairs with candidates dropping in for tea with their constituents. For British newspapers, the few thousand people drawn by Jeremy Corbyn for some of his rallies in 2017 (what would really be a very modest rally size in Indian politics) were enough to spark comparisons to Churchill. Even their current, populist prime minister, Boris Johnson, is rarely seen addressing big crowds or being accorded the kind of public reverence a Bolsonaro, a Putin, a Modi or even a Trump would command from their respective followers.
As British governments have stayed, by and large, in the “efficient” space, the monarchy for the most part also does what Bagehot thinks a monarchy should do — very little. They exist, they get married, they produce babies, they refrain from interfering in politics, they parade ceremonially, they wave and, perhaps most importantly, they manage to remain popular with a large cross section of British society. Even the left leaning Guardian, which has spent the best part of the last twenty years calling for more debate on the future of the monarchy, admits that a referendum on the future of the monarchy would be electoral suicide for any party that proposes it. Over the years, support for a republic remains stubbornly low — except for a few blips, it has hovered around the 20% mark for the last 30 odd years.
In fact, the strongest challenges to the British monarchy have come not from long and perfectly well reasoned editorials about their undemocratic origins, the burden they impose on the taxpayer or their naturally unrepresentative nature, but from insiders who have rebelled against the institution — the abdication of King Edward VIII (who abdicated to marry his divorced lover, Wallis Simpson), the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and most recently, the allegations made by her son, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan. The fact that royalty only seems to be able to be taken down by, well, other royalty, is hardly encouraging news for republican movements in the UK.
The popularity of royalty
To understand this, we have look beyond the popularity of modern celebrities which typically waxes and wanes with events. The popularity of royals tends to be a very different animal. To begin with, they have to do nothing to earn it. It is bestowed on them by virtue of their birth and is remarkably resilient. All they have to do is retain it. Looking at YouGov data on the popularity of two relatively uncontroversial members of the British royal family, Prince William and his wife, Kate, their net favourability (percentage of people who approve minus the percentage who disapprove) over the last decade is as close to a flat line as possible and extraordinarily high. Despite all the recent drama surrounding the royal family, 74% of the British population have a positive opinion of Prince William and 67% have a positive opinion of Kate. To put these numbers in context only 33% of the British population approve of their prime minister, Boris Johnson and 32% approve of their leader of opposition, Keir Starmer.
In some senses, this is a sentiment akin something older and more feudal — what Bagehot would term “loyalty”. This difference between popularity and the more feudal loyalty also explains the diametrically opposing reactions demonstrated by the Americans and the British to Prince Harry and Meghan after their departure from the royal family last year and their subsequent tell all interview with Oprah. In America, where Harry and Meghan are celebrities, their interview was received with warmth and outpourings of support. In the UK, their popularity plummeted. And while some part of this is probably due to racism, that’s unlikely to be the whole story.
Interestingly, this loyalty, once lost, has proven to be almost impossible to regain. Just ask Prince Charles and his second wife, Camilla, both of whom remain comparatively unpopular, more than 20 years after the death of Diana, and almost 30 years after Charles and Diana’s acrimonious and controversial split.
This sort of inexplicable loyalty isn’t an exclusively British phenomenon. In December 2013, Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wodeyar, the only son of the last Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, passed away in Bangalore. As news spread, crowds of mourners began making their way to Mysore. Thousands queued up in the sun outside the Mysore Palace to pay their final respects. Newspapers estimated that at least 100,000 people lined the streets for the state funeral granted to him by the Karnataka government. It was attended by the then Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, former Prime Minister H D Devegowda, and the current Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa. It really was an extraordinary show of public emotion for a man who was only born in 1953, a whole six years after Mysore acceded to India, officially ending their monarchy, and who was known for very little other than the fact that he was the only son of the last Maharaja. Fact checkers were told to pipe down as local newspapers went with the headline that Mysore was bidding farewell to its last king (Wodeyar had of course never been king in any sense of the word — Indira Gandhi had abolished both the privy purse and the official recognition of titles during his father’s lifetime). Emotively speaking however, the newspapers had it right. For everyone gathered there, the man they were paying their respects to was very much the last Maharaja of Mysore.
A republic is perhaps the beginning, and not the end of the road
Modern liberal political thought tends to cast feudalism as a relic of past, and in the economic sense, perhaps it is. But human behaviour doesn’t necessarily change to immediately reflect changing economic systems. In some ways the feeling that inspires this blind loyalty for monarchy is not very different from the feeling modern authoritarians rely on to win elections. In The English Constitution, our friend Bagehot somewhat pompously writes:
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations, but it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imagination. The nature of a constitution, the action of an assembly, the play of parties, the unseen formation of a guiding opinion, are complex facts, difficult to know, and easy to mistake. But the action of a single will, the fiat of a single mind, are easy ideas; anybody can make them out, and no-one can ever forget them.
Every time we hear a variant of the phrase “Modiji ne kuch kiya hai toh kuch soch ke hi kiya hoga” (If Modiji has done something, there must be some thought behind it) to explain some truly inexplicable policy decision taken by the central government, or we hear people saying they will vote for the BJP even if petrol prices crossed Rs. 100 per litre, we’re forced to wonder if perhaps Bagehot had a point. In India this sort of need for simplicity above nuance has often led to support for authoritarians. While much is written about the opposition to the Emergency and the defeat of Indira Gandhi in the 1977 elections, we tend to ignore the fact that the same electorate swept her back into power a bare 18 months after. Her punishment for tens of thousands of detentions, forced sterilisation and all the horrors of the Emergency was, at the end of the day, just 18 months out of power. And while much has changed since Mrs. Gandhi’s times, the rather blind parochial support that Mr. Modi’s voters still demonstrate in the face of policy criticism shows us that perhaps our feudal spirit, instead of being abolished with local princes, large landholdings and titles, has merely been redirected.
The English are no strangers to republicanism. The English civil war of the 17th century established the Commonwealth of England after the execution of Charles I, but this wasn’t a revolution in the more modern sense. It was certainly a fight for power between the monarchy and parliament, but given the extraordinarily limited right to vote (prior to the 1832 reform act, less than 3% of the population of England and Wales had the right to vote), this was a lot less revolutionary than it sounds. After the death of Oliver Cromwell, parliament swiftly reinstated a monarch that would rule with the consent of parliament.
The UK has also seen very little redistribution of land and their land holding systems have remained fairly feudal — half of England is still owned by 1% of the population that are predominantly members of the aristocracy or corporations. The story of British democracy from the civil wars to the suffragettes is predominantly a story of a series of sometimes violent negotiations that have curbed the power of the monarchy or the aristocracy, and provided greater representation.
Almost paradoxically, each of these curbs on the power of the monarchy have made it more difficult to remove them — in simple terms, the monarchy just does not have the power to do anything terrible enough to force people to overcome their loyalty and inspire outright rejection. The family dramas, charges of tax evasion, or even certain members being close associates of a known pedophile and being wanted for questioning by the FBI just doesn’t seem to rise to the level required to mount a serious challenge.
Conclusion
For the British, it is unlikely that their monarchy is going anywhere anytime soon, and in the larger scheme of things, perhaps their republicans shouldn’t worry about it too much. It is, after all, rather touching that in this era of populist strongmen, the only political figure in the UK who can consistently command hundreds of thousands of flag waving supporters is a little old lady wearing a hat and gloves with absolutely no real political power. Consciously or unconsciously, their monarchy seems to act as a sort of lightening rod to conduct away the more intense nationalist emotions that can course through electorates and spark the rise of militant nationalism. And with the exception of Brexit, it has worked fairly well. After all, if all the energy of militant nationalists world over could be directed into waving flags at weddings, betting on royal babies and pitting over-privileged white men in largely imaginary tabloid conflicts against each other, that would be no very bad thing.