The Uses of Monarchy (1958)

From the March 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quite a thing has been going on recently concerning a picture of the Princess Margaret. This is virtually a repetition of what went on over the same painter’s portraits of the Queen and her husband, and there is no need here to add comments or repeat arguments. What is of greater interest is the trend of which this tiny storm is part: that is, that the Royal Family to-day is as constant a news-feature as football or film-star gossip and is, in fact, more popular than royalty has been since the nation-state began. When you consider that fewer than ninety years ago the reigning monarch was tipped as the last, and a vigorous republican movement was being led by prominent politicians and writers, it is obvious that the British monarchy has somehow had a boost in recent times.

Kings and Queens, traditionally, are romantic figures, the subjects of an inculcated mythology from everybody’s childhood. Every fairy tale revolves round them: once upon a time there was a Beautiful Princess or a Handsome Prince or a King who was Also a Magician. Elementary-school history devolves upon them: Merry Monarch, Good Queen, Peacemaker, Bluff King (never hooligan or wife-beater). For all that, the fact is that only for the last twenty years—if as long—has the Crown been really popular in Britain, and for a large part of the time it was very unpopular. Some idea of the change in the climate of opinion was given last year by the frenzy against critics of the Royal bearing and diction: the young Queen Victoria was ridiculed by cartoonists, and George V openly disparaged in the Press on his accession.

The idea of the monarch as head of the nation is a modern one, belonging to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and depending on the Crown’s holding no political power. Mediaeval kingship was a different thing. The king was supreme overlord, apex of the pyramid of feudal owning interests; his power was actual, deriving from and integral to the feudal system. This kind of monarchy declined as feudalism declined; as rival interests grew, the king became merely head of one of the contending factions. Edward IV, Richard II, Henrys Four, Five and Six were dependent on their factions, and their successors reasserted monarchy and appeared strong kings for a time only because the factions had exhausted themselves fighting.

The struggle against the monarchy was a vital part of the struggle of the rising commercial class. For half a century it held back for the struggles against the Papacy and Spain, but the storm was gathering before Elizabeth I’s reign ended. The bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class, needing control of the powers of government: the execution of Charles I was, in fact, the decapitation of an epoch.

After the swan-sang of the Restoration and James II's short, pitiful reign, the Whigs had one political aim above all others: to keep the Stuarts, with their feudal traditions and their Papal associations, off the throne. Even William III, brought and maintained by the Whigs as mere figurehead, was never pushed too far by them for fear he should name a Stuart as his successor.

Thus, the Hanover family was imported to be the new Crown dynasty, with nothing to commend them and the populace not prepared, as the 1715 and 1745 Rebellions showed, to lift a finger to support them. Drunken, stupid George I, of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “Our customs and laws were all mysteries to him, which he neither tried to understand, nor was capable of understanding if he endeavoured it.” and Lord Chesterfield said: “The King loved pleasure, and was not delicate in his choice of it. No woman came amiss to him, if they were very willing and very fat"; George II, full of senseless cruelty; George III, shaking hands with the trees in Windsor Park. Of the whole bunch, indeed, Sir Charles Petrie wrote in his Monarchy in the Twentieth Century: “There had clearly been a streak of abnormality . . . from the beginning.” A nineteenth-century poet, Landor, expressed it more feelingly:

“When George the Fourth from earth descended.
Thank God the line of Georges ended.”

However, it was with the Georges on the throne that the modern concept of monarchy developed. Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King, published in 1749, proposed (although Bolingbroke had the Stuarts in mind) the monarchy as the embodiment of national ideals, and after the final collapse of Jacobite opposition, this became accepted as the real function of monarchy. In fact, there were no interests now that the monarch could represent other than the “national” ones—that is, those of the propertied classes as a whole. No longer an overlord, removed from control of armed forces, set up in maintenance of bourgeois interests against those of the old order, the king had become King Capital’s torch-bearer.

Whatever remained of royal power and prestige sank to rock-bottom in Victoria’s early years. Her predecessors had shown as much interest as they were permitted in government; Victoria’s acquiescence established the convention that the Crown did not take part any more. The working class had little reason for enthusiasm, and the ruling class no longer had to support this dynasty in case something worse came along. When Victoria withdrew from public life after her husband’s death, a strong movement headed by Thackeray, J. R. Green. Morley. Joseph Chamberlain, Bradlaugh and several more asked if the monarchy were necessary at all. The movement faded, principally because the Empire-builders found the Crown too useful a figurehead, but the Crown had learned that it ought to show itself in public.

For that reason, the last years of Victoria's reign had royal display in plenty, and Edward VII gained still greater benefit from pageantry. It is doubtful if the monarchy became much more popular in Edward’s time, except among the beer-swilling and odds-laying sections, but he did open an important new field for the ruling class by carrying regal display—and with it, British interests— abroad. His visit to Paris, starting with compliments to actresses and ending with cheering crowds in the streets, in 1903 prepared the ground for the Franco-British Entente. Lansdowne and Grey conducted the negotiations, but the French President spoke of the “happy impetus” given to them by Edward's window-show. Subsequent monarchs and their families have done as much and more.

There has been one other important influence in the twentieth century in securing the position of the British monarchy: the rise of rival nations with other kinds of figureheads. First the Kaiser, then Mussolini. Hitler and Stalin caused the thought that, if this kind of thing were the modem alternative, there was something to be said for the British monarchy after all. George V was never greatly popular, but in the nineteen-thirties he was almost the only national figurehead in Europe whose public utterances were not inflammatory harangues on war and encirclement.

The real reason why the King never did so. apart from whatever personal inclination he may have had, was simply that it was not his place to speak as a leader or to state foreign policy. The monarchy in modem times is devoid of political power or autonomy. The last time a British monarch expressed himself independently on a political matter was when Edward VIII showed concern over the slums of Glasgow and South Wales; few people believed that the King’s wish to marry Mrs. Simpson was the only issue in the constitutional crisis of 1936. However, many people must have been given food for thought by the fact that potentially the most popular of all British monarchs was dismissed, as summarily as a worker from a factory, when he refused to toe the line laid down by the Cabinet on behalf of the ruling class.

If there was doubt among pro-capitalist politicians in the nineteenth century of the usefulness of monarchy, there is none today. The Conservative Party has never wavered in supporting monarchy, of course; and, since the first Ministers in the first Labour Government made their low obeisances, nor has the Labour Party. Indeed, in the Abdication crisis the Labour Party was solidly behind the Conservative Cabinet, and the Daily Herald's commentary was undistinguishable from that of the Mail or the Express. And since the war there has been ample opportunity—a royal wedding, an accession, a coronation, and a great deal of subsidiary display—to see the cap-touching and sycophancy which make plain the allegiance of a party which initially gained support by big talk about the abolition of privilege.

The only Labour criticism of royalty in fairly recent times was made from the viewpoint of what was good for Capitalism. Shortly after the coronation of George VI, Mr. Attlee spoke of the need for the Crown to come down to the man in the street a bit more—and found Conservatives agreeing heartily (“For them he must be no mere king in a gilt State coach.” wrote Wilson Harris in The Spectator). That policy was pursued with a vengeance, less with George VI himself than in the preparation of his daughter for the throne. No monarch ever started off so well for popularity: a popularity favoured by youth, romance and motherhood and skilfully fostered by every newspaper in the land (most of all, incidentally, by the pro-Labour Mirror and Pictorial).

The present Royal Family comes as close as any capitalist politician could desire to the modern monarchical ideal. No interference in politics, but a worthy interest in science; admirably suited to gather prestige abroad; most of all, a continual and absorbing attraction to the working class. There have been hints recently that the publicity has been overdone, that there have been too many chambermaids’ reminiscences and news items like the Sunday Pictorial’s announcement that the Queen's bust-line had improved to maintain the essential dignity of royalty. Nevertheless, the Crown today as never before embodies the national ideals—the ideals, that is, of the national ruling class.

But does monarchy serve any interest for ordinary people, beyond giving a holiday and a pageant now and then? It may be said that if it does them no good, it does them no harm either. If it were true that to fill people’s heads with nonsense did no harm, that might be so; and most of it is nonsense. There is no reason for thinking that the Queen and her husband are not pleasant decent people. If things were otherwise, however, the truth is that they would still be presented as paragons. Some monarchs have been cruel, irresponsible and contemptibly low, but their subjects have still been asked for reverence. Within a week of Edward VIII’s abdication his shortcomings were common knowledge, and Sir Charles Petrie (in the book already quoted) hinted at a strain of abnormality in Edward from the Hanover ancestry; would those things have been said if Edward had remained the King?

It is not the monarch that is at fault in all this, but the social system which needs a shining symbol; where there is no monarchy, something else has to be held up to dazzle the dispossessed. The man with the flag and the girl admiring the pictures in her magazine have the light full in their eyes just now—but they need only look away for a moment to see who holds it up, and why.

Robert Barltrop

Puppet Kings and Labour Prudes (1937)

From the January 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The most talked-of political event of the past month was the dramatic exodus of King Edward VIII. One week he was the world’s most publicised figure, titular head of the world’s greatest Empire, moving with the authority of his position among one of the world’s wealthiest circles yet at the same time able to arouse great enthusiasm among the poorest of the poor by his visits to depressed areas and references to the poverty problem. The next week saw him spirited away under cover of darkness to a wealthy semi-exile, robbed of his royal position, and replaced by his brother. And this, says Mr. Baldwin, all occurred because the proposed marriage to a woman who bad been married twice before to men still living would have robbed the Crown of some of the lustre and respect essential to the maintenance of the bonds of Empire.

For us, as Socialists, the incident has its own significance. We aim at a system of society, Socialism, that will have complete stability because its foundation, the method by which the wealth of the community will be produced, owned and distributed, will be completely satisfying to the mass of the population. Having no privileged class, such a society will have no need of armed forces to protect the haves from the have-nots. Nor will it need those institutions which cover the naked reality of class privileges and class rule with the glamour of kingship and aristocracy, and thus prevent the working class from perceiving how they are robbed and by whom. Socialism will need no kingship, for it will have no need of an institution the main function of which now is to hide the fact that the State is an instrument used by the propertied class to enable them to exploit the propertyless.

It has always been the aim of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to point out how easily that State machine could be captured by the working class and transformed into an instrument of working class emancipation. Our propaganda has been faced with many obstacles, two of which have centred round the Crown. We have been told, on the one side, that the King “rules as well as reigns,” and that, therefore, to gain control of Parliament is useless, as the King could defy a Socialist majority controlling Parliament. On the other side, we have had to meet the argument that the Crown is not part of the capitalist machine but an independent force which might help the workers against capitalists and the capitalist class. The events of November, strikingly dispose of both contentions and thus will help to remove from workers’ minds doubts that prevented acceptance of the Socialist message.

In the first place we have witnessed how easy it was for the Party controlling Parliament to dismiss the most popular monarch of centuries because he would not accept their conditions, be a docile royal rubber stamp, and order his life as they wished. Many members of the Cabinet must have reflected that it was more easily carried out than the dismissal of organised wage-earners in their own factories. (Incidentally, those who still believe that Parliament is an unworkable machine may usefully observe how expeditiously it put through on operation of such magnitude and importance to the ruling class.)

The second point concerns the former King himself, for here we had an individual on whose behalf it has been claimed that he. interested himself in some of the problems of the working class. The extent of his understanding or the depth of his interest need not concern us here. It can, however, be said that it is impossible for anyone brought up in such surroundings to gain a correct appreciation of the working class point of view, let alone accept it. Nor would such an individual be prepared to support the only remedy, Socialism, since that involves the end of class privilege as well as the end of the monarchy. Inevitably, in essentials, the Crown must be the handmaiden of capitalism.

Nevertheless, in several directions Edward VIII interfered in social and political questions sufficiently to incur the disfavour of the ruling groups, and that was a reason why his abdication was desired in addition to the question of his marriage to Mrs. Simpson. The astonishing ease with which they accomplished that feat should prove to everyone that the notion of the modern monarchy opposing capitalism or even acting as a check on it is fantastic.

The episode is instructive, too, for the way it exposes the ruthlessness and hypocrisy of official circles. The Crown must, in the interest of the propertied class, be an untarnished symbol fitted to deceive the masses into a belief that the ruling class are a superior caste and that the country is governed by them in the interest of all, not merely of themselves. Also, the Monarch must be an apt instrument, prompt to obey capitalist orders. Edward, having some tastes and views of his own, was not willing. So Edward must go. Then, without more than an instant’s pause, the high-powered slush machines—the Press and the Pulpit— plastered the new King with all the amazing attributes with which they had been endowing his predecessor only a week before. One journal, simultaneously with the announcement of Edward’s abdication, hastened to inform its readers that the brother is a better golf player and tennis player, and better all-round athlete. Within a day or two we had learned that the new King is the only member of the Royal Family who was in action in the Great War (Edward was in France, but not in action, it seems, but we were never told so until now), that he drove a railway train, attends summer camp for boys, and takes a keen interest in social questions.

One good thing about all this is that it overreaches itself, and thousands of workers will be set on the road to useful thought through their feeling of nausea at such sycophantic utterances. The capitalists got their new King, but they have fortunately struck a blow at the institution, and through it, at their own position.

Regarding the way in which the dismissal was arranged, the full story will no doubt not be told for a long while. Sufficient is, however, apparent to show that the official Baldwin version is by no means the full story. The insistence that the King’s wish to marry Mrs. Simpson was the whole issue is hard to square with certain facts. It is an open secret that the King’s visit to South Wales, like previous excursions of his, and his awkward references to slums and poverty, were offensive and harmful to the Cabinet. And it was on this issue, not on Mrs. Simpson, that the Times and Daily Telegraph (November 24th and 25th) fired the first public shots in the conflict. They took the line that, to contrast the King’s “personal and representative concern for the well-being of a section of the people with the administrative steps of his advisers, is a constitutionally dangerous proceeding, and would threaten, if continued, to entangle the Throne in politics.” In form the attacks were directed against certain newspapers, but in substance against King Edward. It is interesting to recall also, that, at his accession, the Times evidently had their doubts about him (January 23rd, 1936), and put in a plea for him to be given "time to take the strain of his new duties.” . . . ” There is a feeling instinctive in the British race which likes to give any newcomer to any walk of life a fair chance.”

(Cynical people might say that King Edward ought to have expected trouble as soon as the organ of the British ruling class had started talking about “fairness.”)

On October 14th, The Week published a statement that a scheme was then being set on foot “for a social bomb to be exploded under the King.” This was a few days before Baldwin, according to his own statement, first broached the question of Mrs. Simpson to King Edward. The Times editorial on the South Wales visit (November 24th) coincides with the period in which, according to Mr. Baldwin (Hansard, December 10th), the suggestion had been made of a morganatic marriage. It appears that the Times at that stage was warning the King that even if he gave up Mrs. Simpson, or, alternatively, if the morganatic marriage provided a way out, he would still have to toe the line marked out for him by the Cabinet on behalf of the propertied class.

Two other aspects of the abdication deserve to be placed on record. One is the unanimity with which the Press lords agreed that there was not the slightest attempt to suppress the news about Mrs. Simpson in the months during which it was filling the columns of the foreign newspapers. Yet the New Leader reports that its printer not only refused to publish material on the matter but asserted that other printers would refuse to touch it also. Unofficial pressure by those who control industry and the Press can be as tight as any official censorship.

The other incident is the refusal of the Cabinet to allow Edward to broadcast before his abdication (Times, December 12th, 1936). The significance of this is that the British Broadcasting Corporation operates on a Royal Charter, and is thus nominally an organisation more directly under the authority of the Crown than any other. Yet he was not allowed to address his “own” subjects over his "own” B.B.C. Those who still persist in believing that the Crown has control over the armed forces or other bodies which work in the King’s name should ponder this. In fact, Parliament’s control is effective whenever those who are in a majority want to act. When a politically organised Socialist majority gains control of Parliament they will find it an effective instrument for the emancipation of the working class. Neither lords nor kings, lawyers nor financiers, will be able to stand in the way.

The conduct of the Labour Party towards the question was truly laughable. Having no policy— unless a palsied fear of Fascism can be called a policy—the Labour Party lined up behind "honest” Stanley Baldwin’s Cabinet. It shuddered at the idea of Mrs. Simpson becoming Queen —"married twice already. Both her former husbands are living" (Daily Herald, December 5th)— and echoed the capitalist plea that the Dominions would not accept her. It discovered, with the capitalist Press, that the King's acts "are the links which hold the Commonwealth together” (Daily Herald, December 3rd). The statement is absurd, whether from a capitalist’s or from a worker's standpoint. Capitalist interests hang together in the Empire from motives of mutual profit and mutual fears. The Crown is only the symbol with which the capitalists dazzle the eyes of the dispossessed populations in all the Empire countries. From a worker's standpoint—that is from the standpoint the Labour Party pretends to occupy—what binds the workers of the Empire and non-Empire countries together is their common fate as an exploited class and common interest in ending exploitation. Instead of basing its attitude on these elementary facts of the working class position, the Labour Party supported the capitalist monarchy and helped the capitalist class to sack an awkward occupant of the throne. They even sank so low as to echo the excuse that Edward had failed in his duty of sacrificing his personal affections—“The King failed to subdue the man" (Daily Herald, December 11th, 1936).

What a policy and what a Party!

Edgar Hardcastle